Working well with others.
I joined the team of 5 other student developers after several months of work had already gone into redesigning the website for Swarthmore College’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. This was a somewhat complex project. Because each language in the department operates as an autonomous section, each section needed their own section of the site that reflected their autonomous identity — but the various sections also needed to fit together into a unified whole.
At the time, there were six languages in the department. Since no work had been done on the Chinese section, I was assigned that part of the site. The Chinese section wanted a light, friendly feel for their pages, and they particularly wanted to draw attention to some comments they had collected from several alumni. To fulfill these goals, I helped the section settle on a vibrant color palette, and I further suggested that we sprinkle quotes from the alumni responses in a number of small boxes located throughout the site. The result was very possibly the most effective language section site in the project — but you can look around the department site and decide that for yourself.
the previous version of the department home pageI was the only developer on the team to meet my initial deadline for my part of the project. At that point, I also took on the task of designing the home page for the entire department. Since most resources on the site are associated with a particular language section, that page’s primary purpose was to get people to their preferred language’s page. We anticipated that pleasing all the language sections on a particular design would be difficult, so I worked with many of the same design elements that had served the department well on their previous site. That helped to speed the project toward completion without sacrificing quality.
