Kaisho.org - Web Design

This is an index featuring some of my best and most recent work. For a full list of the sites that I've worked on, please contact me with inquiries.

Lymba Corporation: Date: Fall 2006; Technology: HTML, CSS; Lymba is a software company in the Dallas area that specializes in natural language processing (NLP). In short, they develop question-answering systems that can take input from the user in natural English and return an intelligent answer to the question. Lymba itself is very new, though it is a commercial spin-off of a more established research company.

Lymba is full of smart, young professionals, and their office has a remarkable positive energy to it. I wanted to express that vibrance in their design, so I chose bold, solid colors with crisp edges and utilitarian lines. The "ray of light" motif in the banner images ties in to the logo design and also appears throughout their print collateral. I think it turned out to be very evocative of the kind of energy that can be seen in their headquarters every day.

Also shown here is the styling of the demo of their flagship product, PowerAnswer. PowerAnswer is a very powerful search engine capable of taking input in the form of a naturally phrased question. My primary goal was to make the results as clear and easy-to-read as possible.; See it live at http://www.lymba.com/.; See also: Logo Design for Lymba

Zarathustra: A Pied Piper Translation: Date: Created Spring 2005, redesigned Fall 2006; Technology: HTML, CSS; Xenosaga: Pied Piper is one installment in a series of science fiction role-playing games (RPGs) created in Japan. The major installments of the series were naturalized and distributed in North America, but the side story of Pied Piper never was. While I was in college, I took it upon myself to translate the script from Japanese to English, because it's an interesting and deep story that I wanted to share with English-speaking fans.

I created this site as a fan tribute to the game as well as a home for the English script. It sees regular traffic and I recently redesigned the site to make it more visually appealing. Because the bulk of the content is the text of the script itself, I endeavored to make the site's interface intuitive and easy to navigate, as well as easy to read.; See it live at http://zarathustra.kaisho.org/.

UTD Galaxy: Date: Spring 2006; Technology: XML, XSLT, HTML, CSS; Galaxy is the intranet portal for faculty, students, and staff at The University of Texas at Dallas. My design is actually a skin for the underlying software, the Sungard SCT Luminis Platform.

What was unique about this project was that I was working with HTML generated by the product. The original layout relied on tables, so I retooled it to use semantic markup wherever possible. The end result was very rewarding. We went from a cludgy, very out-of-date looking interface to something that I believe people will enjoy working with.; See also: Logo Design for Galaxy; See also: Icon Design for Galaxy

Blog Template: Painterly: Date: Spring 2006; Technology: XHTML, CSS; This is a blog template that I designed for The Style Contest for Movable Type, Typepad, and LiveJournal. The challenge was to design a style for certain themes (this particular design was for the Hobbies and Crafts theme) that could be easily skinned on top of a set of sample blog pages. It seemed like a fun challenge, so I decided to submit a design of my own.; See a live preview of Painterly in the Style Contest Style Browser.

UTD Career Center: Date: Winter 2005; Technology: PHP, XML, XSLT, XHTML, CSS; This was the first major redesign I worked on at UTD. The Career Center's website had originally been designed by a student, but as time went on it had become clear that the design could not accommodate the growth of the site.

My goal in the design was to accommodate three tiers of navigation to support both their current body of content as well as any future growth. Pictured at right you'll see the design they chose (the top two images) as well as an alternate design I presented to them (the bottom image).

With large sites, I've found that managing navigation and keeping it consistent as the site grows can be a challenge, especially with multiple authors. So for this site I developed a system that uses XSLT to process an XML file that contains the navigation structure of the site. To move a page from one place to another in the navigation is as simple as moving a node in navigation.xml - the change will be populated instantly across the site, correcting all the navigation links and even the breadcrumbs and title of the page.; See it live at http://www.utdallas.edu/career/.; See also: Logo Design for CareerWorks

Lavina Jadhwani: Date: Spring 2005; Technology: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript; Lavina is a director, a designer, an award-winning dramaturg, and a longtime friend of mine. When she approached me to design her portfolio website, I was overwhelmed and honored to be given the opportunity to showcase some of her amazing work. My primary goal was to keep the design of the site understated so that it wouldn't overshadow her work. I chose a dark theme that was reminiscent of a dark theater, and accented it with purple (a very Lavina color to those that know her). She liked the design so much that she even used elements from it on her business cards, which are a very striking black on purple.

I'm actually in the process of refactoring the markup behind this site. I've learned a lot about proper HTML and CSS since then, and I want to patch up the backend to be more compatible across platforms and standards-compliant.; See it live at http://www.lavinajadhwani.com/.

Anne Katherine Halsall