I teamed up with Alec Schierenbeck out of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office to create the New York City Taxpayer Receipt. The receipt took a lot of inspiration from the wonderful White House version.

I used the metaphor of depth and lots of sliding effects to make the vast amount of information contained within the receipt approachable. The detailed information is there for those who need it but positioned so that it won’t overwhelm the casual user.

One of my favorite touches in the code of the receipt is that even though the percentages are displayed rounded to the second decimal, the multipliers (and through them the dollar totals) are actually much more exact than that. By using javascript to round the displayed multiplier I was again able to balance both approachability and detail in the design.

I am a big believer in government transparency and the important role design has to play in facilitating that transparency. It was great to be able to participate in that process. The receipt was launched to a great deal of interest including write-ups in the New York Times blog and Gothamist (who were nice enough to mention me!).

I got out the construction paper and x-acto knives (and later the JavaScript) for this custom tumblr theme for my friends’ collaborative feminist music blog. Make sure to check out the actual site to get the full effect of the header animation.

The hand-made elements in the theme are in part a nod to the DIY values that run through punk and riot-grrrl culture. Now that it’s so easy to start a website (which is great!), they also signal that there is a real personal investment here – something that also comes through in many of the posts.

To keep the hand-crafted feel of the header going throughout the blog, I made the tags out of construction paper and string, and used tumblr’s tags-as-classes feature to assign different colors to different types of posts. I like to imagine the threads from the sidebar tag categories continue behind the screen until they pop back out at the relevant posts.

I made the events listing site I Was Going to Go to this Thing for mainly selfish reasons. I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails and I wanted to get people to go to events with me. The site is constantly in progress and not without its bugs, but it’s been a great way to learn and something I look forward to continuing to refine.

While I began web design on the graphic side, I quickly realized I was never going to be satisfied only putting the finishing touches on websites. I Was Going was a chance for me to design a project all the way through. I put a lot of thought into what information I wanted from an events listing site and how to make it approachable and fun to use. I dug into the details of setting up the form – making it more conversational and researching date and time-picking best practices. I also adapted when people complained about having to go through another sign-up process by allowing them to log-in through Twitter and other services. It’s been a great experience and I’m looking forward to continuing to work on providing the best user experience in this and other projects.

One of the great things about going to a college with a fair amount of international students (and a fair amount of people who go on to do impressive things) is that sometimes they ask you to be involved in their projects. My former classmate Smita Sharma contacted me about putting together this site for the Malaysian feminist organization Fiesta Feminista.

The website needed to be simple, updateable and fast-loading. It also needed to link up with the other parts of the organization’s web presence. I built a Wordpress custom theme using the organization’s butterfly logo and colors. With Smita’s agreement I also built a custom tumblr theme for the blog. We believed that having the organization on tumblr would allow for greater interaction with other people and groups. I used plugins to connect the site to FF’s blog and Twitter. I also got my first experience making a multi-lingual site – as soon as the translations are finished the site will be available in both English and Bahasa Malaysia.

Vote Kids Nebraska was created to empower Nebraskan voters to affect their local elections. I designed the site to have an informal yet authoritative feel that puts visitors at ease as they browse the information on local politics.

I built the site using the Thesis theme for Wordpress. Building the site on Wordpress allowed all members of Voices for Children’s staff to post content. By harnessing the power of Wordpress’s category feature, I was also able to make sure that those posts were displayed in the proper area.

Throughout the site, I focused on features that would draw in the potential voter. The navigation sidebar features the three levels of elections that the site focuses on. Clicking on two of those options (the Governor’s race is statewide) brings you to a Flash map that allows you to select a district by pointing at its location. Additionally, if a viewer would like to select by district number or candidate, a navigation bar is provided at the top. Both features are intended to make it as easy as possible for users to access candidate information about their district.

It’s been a couple of years since I built Vote Kids, and I don’t think I would do anything that photoshop and gradient heavy today, but I’m still very proud of the organization and thought that went into the site’s structure.

Ralph Savarese’s website ties together the many different projects he is involved in. The main page uses a “bookshelf” to highlight his involvement in four publications. Selecting a publication takes the user to a page focused on that specific project.

I am proud of the way the main page responds to the needs of different viewers. A first-time visitor can read Ralph’s bio and look at his selected writings, while someone who is returning to the site can look to the sidebar for the latest posts made from across the site. The four different publications are also easily accessible.

The site was built on Wordpress and makes extensive use of the category function and custom templates.