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There’s a reflective quality to the Holidays that makes me think its as good a time as ever to give myself a well-deserved pat on the back, or at least a sizable swipe of sweat from my brow, for some of the work I’ve been involved with producing over this past year. 2006 was a good year for me personally, as I started to get the hang of the whole parenting thing, but also professionally, as I had the privilege to work on some highly visible projects.

This September, Rite Aid launched a redesign of their entire website, which I was intimately involved with from its embryonic beginnings. The goal to redesign the company’s entire web presence was no small order either. It involved not only cosmetic changes to the entire site’s look and feel, but a systematic reprogramming of 100% of the code from PHP to Java Servers Faces–a double shot of technical ambition that’s nearly unheard of in the industry. Add to that a growing concern by way of recent lawsuits to support better accessibility, along with a desperate need to address years of information architecture that had long since started to rot, and the project was indeed daunting.

Thankfully, a handful of colleagues in the industry were more than willing to help see the project through to fruition, albeit not without some minor bumps in the road. I can only take credit for shepherding, guiding, and directing the project along at times, while it took shape in the hands of others (although I did program the XHTML/CSS prototype). Just as the build phase was reaching its apex, I left the project to pursue an opportunity with another company. It was a difficult decision to leave, especially given the amount of knowledge I was able to pick up at Rite Aid, but I’m confident now that I did what I should have.

I left Rite Aid to work for PHEAA, a Pennsylvania state agency with ambitions to be recognized nationally as American Education Services, or more frequently, AES. You could say I went straight out of the frying pan and into the fire, because AES was just coming to terms with a new brand identity as I was getting my feet wet with another project. The next thing I knew, my team was feverishly putting together a plan to redesign our entire web presence, applying logos, color swatches, and taglines as soon as they came in from the brand agency. Time was of the essence once again and the project looked to be just as ambitious, if not more, then the one I had just left, after the extremely short time frame and lack of direction for branding vision was all tallied in.

Thankfully, brand clarity ultimately came and I never had to work or make decisions alone. Instead, I relied heavily on the expertise of a qualified team who was always close by, which made for an extremely expedient work flow. And more so than at my previous job, the design began to take shape with more of my hand in it, while simultaneously and ironically, it probably contained more elements from other team members than any design with which I’ve ever been involved. It was truly a group effort.

So, rather than belabor the details of each and every project I’ve worked on recently, I think I’ll leave it here and simply say that if this past year was any kind of foreshadowing into future events, there should be plenty of design talk coming down the pike.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 10:40 am and is filed under brand identity, design, journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.