henryjenkins.org

One of the niftiest projects I had while a graduate student at MIT was designing Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the official weblog of then-CMS co-director (and my thesis advisor) Henry Jenkins.

Henry's website is one of my favorite designs because, much like the GAMBIT design, there are layers to unpack within it. For starters, the jumbled "slips of paper" design is meant to reflect the messiness of Henry's office, and the kind of erratic notes a scholar like Henry might scribble down while doing research. The purple and teal colors of the site were lifted from Henry's outfit in his headshot (which was taken by the very talented Dan Bersak). The brain at the top of the page was an image from Henry's old MIT website, a hat-tip to his previous online presence. A list of his books was added to the side, a collection of funny Henry images (ranging from Henry playing the Incredible Hulk to his Wii avatar) were built into the sidebar, a Movable Type install was set up for the backend and the site was done. One design decision that proved eerily prescient: an MIT logo graphic was orginally built into the upper right hand corner of the design, but was designed to be removable. I suppose a USC logo will appear in its place eventually.

Henryjenkins.org was built using HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Movable Type and Adobe Photoshop.