About this Site
The Auburn University Graphic Design program web site is a collaboration between Professor Wei Wang and student Greg Leuch. Over the course of several months, they worked on developing an interactive design community focusing on professional and educational development for the purpose of increasing communication, collaboration, and creativity between students, faculty, and alumni.
Many, many lines of code were written and rewritten as the scope of the project changed, but patience prevailed. The design community is now composed of over one hundred seventy-seven community members incorporating over seven hundred twenty-one photos since its launch two years ago.
Awards & Citations
2008 UCDA Design Award, Silver Award
2008 Horizon International Interactive Award, Silver Award
2008 Interactive Media Awards, Best in Class, Interactive Media Council
2008 ADDY® Award, Montgomery Advertising Federation
2008 Juror Award, 3rd Annual MS State AIGA Design Show
Best Web Site Designs, CoolHomepages.com
Featured Identity, logolounge.com
Notes from Professor Wei Wang
In the Summer of 2007, three months before the Graphic Design program joined the College of Architecture, Design and Construction (CADC), all seven Graphic Design faculty saw the need of creating a new identity for the program.
Because students are the most important part of our program, I decided to let them involve in the project as much as possible. The project was then given to 15 students in my Graphic Design I class, as their first corporate identity project. I wrote a design brief for the project and challenged the students to create a strong, attractive, inviting, and unique visual identity for the program, which include name, logo, stationery suite, identity manual, program brochure, promotional posters, press release, post cards, web site interface, online newsletters, environmental graphics, signages and T-shirts.
We talked about the audience and the past and future of our program. We decided that our desired perceptions are 1. A well established, strong graphic design program with a new structure, new name, new identity and bright future; 2. A group of creative, professional, collaborative, dedicated, passionate, energetic and active designers; 3. A strong, open design community which all members (including design students, faculties and alumni) are proud of and actively take from and give back to;
The key words and personalities include professionalism, creativity, collaboration, unity, community, open, strong, bright, dynamic, motivated, optimistic, positive.
15 students were put into 5 groups with 3 students in each group. Their names are:
Group 1: Ali Conn, Wayne Davis, Josh LaFayette
Group 2: Maggie Suttle, Wesley Morris, Alana Baldwin
Group 3: Karen Gathany, Tim Kortman, Mollie Blackwood
Group 4: Max Woodruff, Elizabeth Wilbourne, Katie Brown
Group 5: Katherine Cronin, Amy Smith, Shaun Hall
We worked together intensively on the fourth floor of Dudley Hall for three weeks and gave a presentation to all graphic design faculty, on Monday Jun 11, 2007. After reviewed the designs from all 5 groups, the graphic design faculty chose to further develop the design from Group 1, yet keeping many design elements and ideas from the other four groups.
After the students contributed their parts to the identity project, our faculty members took the task to complete it and make everything happen. In the next few weeks, Professor Bryant finalized the logo and applied it to posters, and graphics in the hallway, outside of design studios and faculty offices.
I took on another major job of the identity project, which is the design and development of the new web site. From the beginning, I didn't want it to be another informational web site, I wanted to create a communication platform for our design community, so that all of our students, alumni and faculty members can share their resources and inspire each other and work on creative collaboration projects.
Big thanks to my Independent Study student, Greg Leuch for his hard work for several months on the programing and development of the site. We are very proud of the new site and I encourage each of you to join us and be part of our design community.
Notes from Greg Leuch
The core of this website actually came from an idea to develop an open-source portfolio management application built on PHP and MySQL. During the course of study with Professor Wei Wang, the Graphic Design program moved to the College of Architecture, Design, and Construction (CADC), and required a new identity for the program. Professor Wang and I adapted the early ideas of a portfolio management system and turn it into a community network for students, faculty, and alumni of the program.
To meet the demands of the project, I had to develop a hybrid content management and user management application which laid on top of the existing framework for dynamic sections of the web site. In order to make this work, I wrote a highly-adaptable gateway processing script that would evaluate the requested URL and determine if it was a dynamic section or a content-managed page. Much like the Convention over Configuration philosophy of Ruby on Rails, the path structure mimics a simplistic approach to framework orientation, allowing for user-friendly URLs as well as a simplified way to evaluate requests.
One of the difficulties of the project required two separate but united areas of the web site (the public side and the community side) that utilized the resources of the other area to function. Adding to the difficulty was the timeline in which the website was to launch. Instead of creating a complete application and then opening the site to everyone, the site was built in pieces to allow for the public section to work while adding new features to the community section.
The entire application was hand-coded over several months without any assisted external libraries or packaged code during an independent study with Professor Wang. It was built using PHP 5 and MySQL on a Microsoft IIS 6 platform. Specific interest was taken in image manipulation with the GD2 functions in PHP to allow for image altering, resizing, web-optimization.
Working on this project gave me the opportunity to develop a highly efficient, dynamic web site while expanding my knowledge and experience in web development. Although my career in new media design/development began before I entered college, this was the first large-scale web application I have the honor of saying I created from scratch. Knowing that I can work at this level has empowered me to look into a career in creating new web interfaces and applications for larger companies. I appreciate the patience and guidance of Professor Wang, the graphic design faculty, and the rest of the graphic design department in affording me this wonderful opportunity to expand my ambitions of new media design/development.