Last Monday I included in my to do list a resolution to finish up the design work for the newsletter that my IT organization is scheduled to publish in mid-August. Friday morning I met with Valeria, the newsletters editor, and Mike Schmidt, our multimedia guru, to duscuss the publication's progress and what changes we needed to make to my layout. I don't want to go into the details of that meeting here, but suffice it to say that it went swimmingly and I didn't have to alter much. Now all that's left is to take all of the stories, images, etc., that Valeria has collected and edited and publish them within the template I've built.

Here's a mock-up of the page populated with "Lorem Ipsum" Latin nonsense and a neat picture I pulled from another online newszine. Try hitting the REFRESH button on your browser -- there are about 20 different images that are randomly chosen and written into the page's banner. All of these scenes are photographs I took on and around UNC campus. The code for this is a simple Javascript function which I pulled from another site and modified to suit my design. Note: This is the only active page right now -- none of the links on the right works.

The process I think I enjoyed most, however, was brainstorming and creating sketches prior to working in Photoshop. I saved all of my crude pencilings (actually I used a ballpoint pen) and thought it would be nice to digitize them and publish them here.

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Turns out the magainze is going to be published every month.

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Here are a couple of page layouts I thought about using. I think I ended up sort of "hybridizing" the second and third one here.

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Decided against a row of buttons below the banner and threw our the idea of using Flash once I found the Javascript code.

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Another collection of page layouts. Actually, looking at this page, I think my final design most closely resembles the one here in the lower righthand corner. I absolutely wanted to have the OZONE logo going down the page vertically for some reason.

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What follows are some of my original logo designs. The first one, as you can see, reminds me of a Foster's beer can, so I scrapped it in a hurry.

Not one of my favorites.

I kept working with the "O" and trying to figure out how to somehow work in the fact that ozone's chemical symbol (someone else tell me what the appropriate nomenclature is for this) is o³. I like most of these concepts, but nothing came of them.

More of the same.

One thing I still have to work on is a "cover page" for the site. Kind of nice that I still have some design work to do.

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This is me visually organizing how I expect the site folders will be laid out on the web (the part you don't see behind the scenes -- unless the index.html file is missing from the target folder.)

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Final logo. Had a revelation that the symbol on practically every power button in the world is basically an incomplete "O" with a vertical line crossing through the break at the top. Since we're an Information Technology group and everything we do is computer/technology related, this seems appropriate.