Last night I was struggling to transform a mediocre t-shirt design into a website. This is my third year helping the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority with their Big Man On Campus fundraiser. I consider it my yearly philanthropic contribution back to the community. I start my development process by asking for their t-shirt design they have a printing company make up and base the color palette and theme of the site off of it. This year’s logo was somewhat disappointing in my opinion so creating a cool site based on it was quite the challenge.

 

Original Logo

Original Logo

 

 

Maybe it’s me, but lots of grey and navy blue doesn’t scream, “Let’s beat this cancer thing!” I also didn’t understand only having two small pink ribbons and no pink anywhere else. I’ve had a few t-shirts made in my time and they usually charge you by how many different colors you use so if you’re already paying for white, blue, and pink you might as well get the most for your money. That’s just my opinion. I changed “Zeta Tau Alpha” from white to pink on the site in designer defiance.

 So with a dull color palette and an unexciting logo, I had quite the challenge on my hand. How do I make this site pop and actually enjoyable to visit? (And all the while in the back of my head I’m thinking that this will be my most recent portfolio piece for the career fair and job hunting that starts in 6 weeks.) I struggled most of Sunday and Monday night trying to conceptualize something intriguing then last night after finishing the first season of Burn Notice, I just got in a groove and this is what came out:

http://www.indiana.edu/~zeta/bmoc08

From what I’ve been able to see so far, it looks consistent in Safari, Firefox 3, and IE6 (it’s what’s at work, don’t ask). At the time of writing this, it isn’t completely finished. I have some tweaking to do and still need some assets from Zeta to consider it in full working condition. The “Big Men” won’t be added until September I’m guessing. For the most part it was a straight forward XHTML + CSS design, but I did do a little Photoshop work and created a small Flash object to add a little something extra to the site.

In the end, I think it was my best BMOC design yet. The first  year was just a couple of hours one night throwing everything into Flash since it was easiest. Last year, I don’t think they really cared because no one ever gave me any of the contestants or noticed it was only half done. Molly Shaffer, who is heading it up this year, seems to be motivated and on top of her stuff so hopefully as school gets started back up we can complete it and add some new features never seen before to the BMOC site visitors. More on that later, but I have to run to my last meeting of my internship. Woohoo!