The Reef Project
Challange
Winner of the 2015 Best Seminar Project
PBDS 740 Seminar is the capstone course of the University of Baltimore’s Publications Design M.A. program. This course tests and stretches all knowledge and skills students have been learning up to this point. Students conceive a non-profit organization that fills a need in the community (local or international) and then work in teams to analyze its audience, develop a plan for making it public via print and/or other media, and design and write working prototypes.
I conceived The Reef Project after I was lucky enough to see the gorgeous coral reefs of the Caribbean and the Maldives in person. I fell in love with the beauty of coral reefs and all the exotic marine life you can find there. This inspired me to think of ways that anyone, whether they lived near a coral reef or not, could help save this precious natural resource.
As team leader of The Reef Project, I…
- Created audience profiles
- Determined the organization’s mission and wrote the vision statement
- Developed guidelines for measuring the success of initiatives
- Collaborated on the logo design with team member Becky Ohlhaver
- Created and designed the Coral Reef Activity Packet (PDF) and Answer Key
- Created and designed the Coral Reef Campaign Starter Kit (PDF)
- Designed and developed The Reef Project’s website and wrote all the web content
- Wrote the Final Project Document (PDF)
- Presented the completed project, first to classmates and then to judges
- Oversaw and enforced schedules, process documentation and other managerial duties
University of Baltimore
The Publications Design graduate degree program.
Programs & Tools
Adobe Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop; Power Point; WordPress CMS
Result
The Seminar class of 2015 started with seven teams. After presentations to the class and faculty at the end of the semester, four teams, including The Reef Project, moved on to present their work to a panel of judges from the professional community.
Those judges selected The Reef Project as the winner of the 2015 Kvedar Award for Best Seminar Project.
National Student Clearinghouse
Challange
User Experience & Interface Design for Web Applications
The National Student Clearinghouse (a nonprofit formed in 1993) is the trusted source for and leading provider of higher education verifications and electronic education record exchanges, handling more than 700 million verification requests and over 250 million education record exchanges annually. The Clearinghouse serves as a single point of contact for the collection and timely exchange of accurate and comprehensive enrollment, degree, and certificate records on behalf of its more than 3,600 participating higher education institutions, which represent 98 percent of all students in public and private U.S. institutions. The Clearinghouse also provides thousands of high schools and districts with continuing collegiate enrollment, progression, and completion statistics on their alumni.
I provided User Experience (UX) & User Interface (UI) Design consultation services for the National Student Clearinghouse on two projects — StudentTracker for Colleges & Universities and the Student Academic Portal.
As part of the UX/UI design process, I created the following deliverables:
- Served as the sole UX Designer consultant.
- Researched, wrote and designed layout for a competitive analysis report.
- Conducted user interviews and created user personas.
- Developed and designed case studies, workflows and process flows.
- Created paper prototypes and multiple decks of wireframes in Balsamiq.
- Designed UI mock ups in Photoshop and shared on InVision.
Programs & Tools
Balsamiq; Adobe Acrobat, InDesign, Photoshop; InVision, Microsoft Word