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It’s my task to finish the T / MC website. All of the groundwork has been laid out thanks to Jake; I just have to design within the system.

I’ve not posted here in some time — the Tutor/Mentor Connection Project took over my workdays with increasing determination, right up until the end. Although the site development is still up in the air, I’m quite proud of how the project has turned out. The site looks great, if I say so myself, and is certainly the most stylish, navigable, and unambiguous nonprofit site I’ve seen throughout this process. What an upgrade from the current version of tutormentorconnection.org! It’s fantastic that (eventually) my work will actually be used by real people to satisfy their needs. That the site aims to improve the lives of impoverished children only adds another level of reward to this project.

Perhaps it would be helpful to post some of the current, near-finalized mockups. (To see these images at full resolution, right-click them and “Open Link in New Window”.) The best examples will be the first pages that any user will see when they start to use the site, “Get Involved” and its subpages, “Give Help” and “Get Help”. Here is the first of the three:

Notice how we have simplified the user path into an extremely easy dichotomy: either you need help or have help to give. No more obscure “Hot Links” full of ambiguous, offsite tools. If you fall into the first category, you’ll see a page like this:

This simplified program list is filterable and offers convenient links to T/MC’s excellent mapping tool. On the other side of getting involved, we have Give Help:

With a solid grid, clean, hierarchical typography, and helpful icons, the site’s many resources become transparent. Their multitude of purposes is no longer confusing.

Finally, here is the Resources section of the site, a landing page from which visitors may pick from T/MC’s vast databases of articles and links:

That’s where this project currently rests. Once again, I’m very proud of the progress, and I genuinely enjoyed working on developing this design. The icons in particular were fun to do— make sure not to miss the “T/MC Times”.

I’ve also been lightly working on a logo for Kyle McCarthy’s father-in-law, who owns a company that sells table pads. Concepts I tried to express were the product’s old-fashioned nature, the idea of quality and tradition, and the product’s structure of layers of protection. Here are some of the various stages of development of this identity.

So that is what I have been up to. Now I have only fifteen minutes left, and I must say that my time in the Royal Order has lived up to the promise that the firm’s name provides. I had as much fun as a king, or at least a prince, and I must have learned at least what I do in the course of a semester. Web design, it turns out, isn’t so bad after all. Yes, there is a lot of wrangling with the technology, and yes, clients will erode the quality of a designer’s work, but for all its hassles, the challenge of designing an interactive page is fun and fulfilling to take on. With the considerations of information architecture, user paths, fold lines, search engine optimization, and interactivity, it’s sure a step up from posters and book covers.

So to the Royal Order: thank you for taking me under your crown and making me one of your own for the past two months. Regal metaphors aside, I can’t imagine a better thing to do at this particular moment in my career, and I certainly can’t think of a better environment to work in. As I make the transition from the admin of this blog to just a lowly reader, I know I’ll recall this internship with nothing but fondness. All I ask is a little reciprocation: never forget Roy Mendelsohn.

The real kicker is to see Leo in the Hong Kong press. There’s also a  thumbnail of the book, which I am awaiting a copy of.

-TH

I’m Jake, the new intern. Tim asked me to throw this blog together today so that the Order has something to write on beyond BaseCamp. It seems that social networking is increasingly a part of everything, everywhere, so here we are, following suit.

About me: I’m going to be here all summer, but normally I live in Milwaukee. When I’m not there I go to school at RISD, where I study graphic design. The first project I’ll be working on is for Cabrini Connections/Tutor-Mentor Connection, a nonprofit group headed by Dan Bassill. The groups’ missions, as I understand them so far, are to prevent impoverished Chicago kids from making criminal choices by showing them the value of education. Currently, this is done through a Gordian knot of webpages, maps, and flowcharts. Careful information design will be the sword here.

I look forward to meeting you all! I’ll add everyone else as authors soon so that I’m not the only one who can post here.

And now, an animated .gif:

Happy Monday,

Jake