BARRY AMUNDSON

You can’t get any more simple than a navigation-less one page scrolling website. While learning about the dangerous gas extraction process, there is lots of wonderful animation experienced scrolling downward into the earth at Dangers of Fracking website, which I think is an advocacy extension of project of Gasland, the movie and designed by Linda Dong.

I wonder if there is a certain psychology behind scrolling websites when the usability and delight-level is high? When the user is invested in a tiny way to scroll down and experiences great design and animation, do they become empowered to take further action?

The site is dangersoffracking.com. Take a look!

I recently completed a new website for Rural Organizing Project, otherwise known as ROP to the many rural Oregon groups and individuals who support their mission. In recent years I have also done print work pro-bono for their rural voter guide, STAND.

There was a technical twist in this one—it included moving the content from an neglected Drupal installation into a WordPress based site. Let’s just say moving 4 years of content from one CMS to another involves some serious palm-to-forehead moments, but with some Drupal-to-Wordpress database import scripts out there in the WordPress community, the broken link checker plugin and the search and replace kung-fu of the search regex plugin I got all the content, links and categories to show up in the new WordPress site.

The site runs on the Suffusion theme, which is a very underrated but powerful theme that includes many features that you may find on a premium theme. The folks at ROP wanted a minimal amount of design on their site, but I think they benefitted from the magazine-like presentation of their front page with a slideshow, and visual representation of categories. It was a blast working on this project.

I recently designed a simple resume website for a friend, and since he is very into social media as a communications professional, using flavors.me site made sense. We could store all aspects of his career info in sites that were best to do it in with: LinkedIn for a resume, Behance for a portfolio and even Instagram for his personal photography obsession. Plus it meant he could update it all himself. As far as the designs from flavor.me we loved the simple, egocentric aesthetic quality and pared down UI – as a self-promotional vehicle it gets right down to business with none of the cruft that comes along with using a blog.

While being limited to the flavor.me layout templates and an automatically resizing background, it became a nice exercise in playing with flat color & type with a bold image. Although he determined that this direction below might have been just too wild for his field (He’s a corporate communications manager), I had alot of fun with these designs along the way:

I just finished working with the folks at Ground Productions on their new website for Play Again, a documentary film which asks “What are the consequences of a childhood removed from nature?”

Thay wanted a new site quickly so I got their volunteers started with WordPress, the Big Feature premium theme, and the WP events manager plugin for the screenings page. Later I came in and did a bit of the front page coding and implementation of the events, and the video—the trailer use the JW Player Plugin to present a nice skin and thumbnail image even though it’s streaming from an HD YouTube video

http://www.playagainfilm.com