Today sees a new homepage for the University of Texas School of Law. This iteration is more of a realign than a redesign as the decision was made to keep our interior pages intact while we continue a long-term look at our branding and online presence. The biggest design challenge was creating something cleaner and more useful for our visitors while retaining most of the same content and enough of the previous design to tie it in comfortably with our current site’s look-and-feel.
Realignment
The new version emphasizes our communication pieces, changing the rotating banner graphic into something more dynamic: the accompanying text is now HTML-based and will link to richer features similar to our Clinical Education stories. Our previous 75×75 pixel highlight buttons (which themselves were reduced from the intricate 200×140 highlight graphics of two years ago) have been folded into our general News list to help simplify the page. The navigational links were dramatically reorganized to make the hierarchy clearer and more contextual. Everything’s still there, it’s just been reshuffled.
Make it pretty
The goal aesthetically was to reduce the homepage’s clutter and to make the information presented more visually balanced. I designed the old homepage, so I’m to blame! To accommodate the larger banner graphic I increased the width of the site to 840 pixels, and then subdivided that width into a five-column layout. The typography is much more consistent, and care was taken to align the text vertically on a baseline grid. The colors are lifted from the previous version but greatly toned down — far less orange, no more crazy orange-stripe-gradient thing, and a nice white background with some subtle color at the top. Still feels like UT, but doesn’t scream it, and the new design continues to match our internal pages.
Behind the scenes
I’ve shifted the site from Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict and have made greater use of XML for the maintenance of the feature stories and news items. The layout and typography are all still handled with plain CSS: if you strip away the stylesheet, you’ll find that the homepage is semantic, streamlined, and very navigable with screenreaders or other assistive technologies. Text can be adjusted in the browser to just about any size without breaking the layout. We’re also sporting a bit of hCard markup so that folks can easily scrape our contact and location info into more useful formats.
Hopefully the refresh is just what we need to help carry us along until the sitewide redesign. I think the updated technology and cleaner look will do a lot for us, and it should help increase our visibility as one of the top-ranked law schools. If you have any comments about the design or about site refreshes, I’d love to hear them.
Looking for an image for last week’s entry on shadows I turned to art history databases JSTOR/ArtSTOR, ECCO, and the WGA (academic database people seem to have a penchant for initialism). After getting badgered with various login options, access restrictions, rules for use, off-campus policies and so on, I turned to the hoi polloi: between Google Images and Flickr’s Creative Commons search I quickly turned up a worthwhile painting, free to use. Three news items from today confirmed that I’m not alone in thinking that keeping academic publishing behind university paywalls is a bit counterproductive.
The New York Times ran a piece detailing a proposal presented today to the faculty at Harvard. Their scholars’ academic work could soon be automatically published online, publicly available, on a surprisingly opt-out basis. While many professors already publish their work online at one journal repository or another, this could become a compelling centralized resource. This kind of no-cost open access has the journal and database publishers a bit worried, and for good reason. I haven’t been able to turn up any info yet on whether the proposal passed or not, or when exactly it’s up for vote (if that’s the way it works). Will developments like this kill niche journals that rely on their sibling publications’ high subscription fees? Will this change the business model of scholarly journals?
Next, Professor Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame writes that the “Legal Commons” project has seen their first release of case data, available as CCØ-licensed XML. This organization seeks to bring 1.8 million pages of federal case law into the public domain before the year is out, available for free for any use or purpose. It’s an ambitious goal, especially considering the clout of the expensive subscription-based alternatives, but a worthy one. After all, shouldn’t the word of the law be in the hands of the public?
Finally, I came across a post on the O’Reilly Radar blog about a newly announced non-profit service called CK-12. Their system provides a UI that will allow educators, students, and the public to assemble their own textbooks using open data and resources. Right now it sounds like it’s mostly limited to flat text, but in the future they plan to incorporate more dynamic items like RSS feeds, videos, and widgets. A bit of Web 2.0 for the classroom. I hope that it catches on with a least a few tech-savvy teachers. I’ll have to browse through the other news coming out of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference to see what else is going on along these lines in the publishing world.
UPDATE: Looks like Harvard’s faculty overwhelmingly accepted the proposal. There are more open law projects cropping up (like The Public Library of Law, which includes some commercial links) and public.resource.org’s archive is being picked up on legal information sites like Justia.
I’ve been surrounded by stories of shadows lately, especially stories of people separated from their shadows. It hasn’t been intentional. I’m midway through Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I recently found the Faust-like tale of Peter Schlemihl, and shortly before that, His Dark Materials (I guess “Peter Pan” will have to be added to the list eventually). Figuring that there must be something to this, I checked out a copy of Victor Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow for a bit of enlightenment. The writing is at times trying, full of academic language and awkward phrasing (just like my writing!), but that can be forgiven as it’s a translation. The meat of the book is worth the effort.
A Short History presents a compelling look at the development of the Western art tradition, a series of essays framed around artists’ use of shadow and simulacra as allegorical devices. Stoichita wanders from Pliny and Quintilian’s early explications of painting’s history (departing loved ones captured by silhouette traced on the wall) to the optical and philosophical experiments of the Renaissance to the modern investigative works by Kazimir Malevich, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol.
The common threads of these stories are fascinating: shadow as a powerful double of the human form; specular reflection as a evanescent ‘other’; shadows bearing the indication of a man’s true nature; the emptiness of a person bereft of their shadow. All themes I’ve been encountering in other writing lately. Shadows have always been much more than devices for the simple rendering of volumes, and this book is loaded with examples.
A fairly recent interview with Stoichita conducted by Cabinet Magazine is available on their site, summarizing many of these essays.