UXR Consulting
UXR Consulting is a small consulting firm, which supports user experience research and user-centered design practices for institutions and projects of all shapes and sizes. UXR retained my services to develop a web presence, which would be the primary marketing and communication mechanism for the firm. In stark contrast to the SpeakerCraft website, uxrconsulting.com was intended to be information driven rather than image driven. All of the content was created before the site was developed to allow information design to take precedence over more traditional graphic design elements.
WYSIWYM inspired style in the CMS editor.
The client specifically wanted a site that had a clean and simple aesthetic, unobtrusive design elements, and that really capitalized on the site’s content. The site needed to be easily updatable on the backend without the aid of in-house tech support. In addition, as the company’s primary service was user experience research, it was important that the site pass federal standards for website accessibility.
This project was an opportunity to perfect my process of building sites using, and modifying, Joomla!. It was a chance to implement best practices and design philosophies that I had accumulated through my personal research and prior experiences. I created elements to be functionally independent to enable easy modifications and content creation on the client-side without affecting other areas of the site. Because the layout of the back-end was imperative to the client’s needs, I researched What you See is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) editors. Rather than a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor like Microsoft Office, the user does not attempt to style or design within the editor, but rather marks up the content based on its structure or significance within the document. For example, the client can mark text as a heading but she does not increase the font size or make it bold – this is a preset style that I build into the Joomla! administration area for the site.
UXR branded business cards with a focus on elegant clean typography.
I particularly enjoyed working on the overall typography of the site. I paid careful attention to ensure that the text was readable in an on-screen format (as opposed to fonts that are developed for print publication). At the same time I also wanted the typography to translate to print media in order to support the overall branding of UXR through business cards and letterhead. As a result, I increased the font size, used a dark grey rather than black to make it look cleaner and smoother on a backlit screen, increased the line height, and shortened the measure of the font (number of characters per line). The UXR font is a very simple yet unique sans serif, which works well for the logo, navigation elements, and the large headings on pages as well the firm’s print communication.
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