Newdea.com

I was brought onto the in-house team at Newdea in 2008, a company that specializes in developing software tools to track activities (and monitor the "Impact") of philanthropic groups&emdash;nonprofits, foundations, donors, etc.

One of the first jobs was redesigning Newdea's corporate website. In conjunction with the art director, we developed an image-heavy, colorful redesign focused on taking the concept of "grid" to the next level.

We had three basic templates:

• Landing Page: These pages would consist of three images and a navigation box on the left-hand "grid." We designed these to draw people's attention to the areas through which they could navigate in this category.
• Subpage: The left-hand "grid" was reduced to three areas&emdash;one large image, the navigation, and a text box indicating what section the user was in. This way, peoples' attention would instead be drawn to the content of the page on the right-hand side of the page.
• Content-Heavy Page (Our News): There were certain sections where content would simply not fit into the somewhat small grey box on the right. Namely, we had a few pages with iterative content that would continually be updated, such as news pages and otherwise. In this case, we reduced the grid to a one-column way of doingit. With CSS, this could be done by simply reducing the width of the left-hand side and the contents would bump down on their own.