As a graduate student, I worked as an Assistant to the Technical Editor at the William Blake Archive. The William Blake Archive is a free digital resource that provides the public with access to the works of English artist and poet William Blake. All images that appear in the archive are annotated by the editors and their assistants using the archive’s own controlled vocabulary. This allows users to search for a work not only using the title of the image, but also by the actual content appearing inside the image. Users can view works at various resolutions and click inside designated regions of the works to read annotations.
Part of my duties included creating mock-ups for a the eventual redesign of the archive website. While the redesign did not occur during the extent of my time as a student, my contributions did provide the archive with a starting point for further future development.
Creating the mock-ups involved listening to the editors describe their goals for the website. They wanted easy access to information, a clear, consistent navigation scheme and minimal design elements interior pages to emphasize the primary content (Blake’s works).
My solution
- In the front page, common pages are grouped together under large, clear headlines. Archive news and updates, and the names of individuals involved in the project are provided at-a-glance. The search box is given prominence near the very top left-hand corner of the screen.
- In the interior page mock-up, the navigation becomes a bar across the top, with the active page’s menu item clearly highlighted. This leaves ample room in the central viewing area for content, be it text, images or a combination of both.
- The colors were extracted from William Blake’s paintings.
- The mock-ups were drawn in Photoshop and then implemented with XHTML, CSS and JavaScript
Following the creation of the mock-up was a series of critiques and suggestions for further expansion and development by the archive’s editors, project managers and university web designers.
