I started out volunteering for this organization taking care of kids, but after browsing their site to check the event calendar I realized that I also wanted to redesign their site. The manpower to maintain the site was barely there, so a normal redesign was out of the question. I approached them and offered to redesign and maintain their site for free.

I reworked their logo, vectorized it and redesigned their site. Graphics were created in a mix of Illustrator and Photoshop, then sliced by hand and converted to XHTML/CSS. One of the main design goals was to simply make their promotional materials feel memorable and build a strong identity.

(Note: It appears they have reverted to their old design, with which they were capable of updating themselves via Word. I have updated the link to point to an archived version of the design, this is a link to the actual Organization of Special Needs Families website)

This was one of my first experiences developing a website that actually saw heavy use. A friend started the site, and asked that I help with the initial launch. (It was an unfunded hobbyist site at the time). OMGN would initially focus on the Browser-Based Gaming genre, and has widened to become a general game-focused community since I left.

My original involvement was to supply a few design comps, along with other interested friends. The founder rejected the designs, opting to use a design he had created himself. I provided a few skeleton HTML/CSS templates, and helped to move parts of the layout to rely on CSS for styling.

The site was launched with just news posting features, and I argued that it was beneficial to allow site visitors to comment and submit content in order to help build a sense of attachment and community. I prototyped and then integrated a comment database so that registered users could comment on articles. It was a relatively simple system, integrating the existing user and article data, and allowing simple BB code style markup for formatting. Amusingly, the icons I designed for the features have remained in use on the site for three years, surviving a complete rewrite of the codebase, and at least two redesigns.