I took on the role of designer for this class project my senior year at MCAD. Garrick, who runs the Minneapolis based weblog for the interactive community, gave the class a mission: redesign my blog. As a team, the class needed to present a more effective layout for the blog that improved the overall visual appearance and organization of information. I took on the role of information architect, designer and developer. MNteractive currently had no obvious navigation and a bunch of tag data displayed in a long list on the left of the page. We proposed this design as a more compact and cleaner, clearer presentation of information. The top image is a first round design file I created. The bottom is a html/css file. I used the posts from MNteractive at the date of this project for this layout. This design was not applied to the actual blog, it was only a proposal.

As the designer for this project, my teammates and I researched similar blogs and looked at a few popular blogs (like boingboing,net and laughingsquid.com) and agreed on a clean, minimal, main-content-left-aligned design. The tags in this redesign are organized into tag clouds to promote relevance through hierarchy. This design keeps the majority of the site's information above the break. With the apparent navigation and sidebar, the user knows where s/he can go on the site and what they can find when visiting.