Mudstone

Work

I work in web design and production for Cengage, a publishing company with a local office in Belmont, CA. I am part of a group that develops and maintains web sites that provide a diverse set of text book companion resources and products for instructors and students.

When I first arrived about 3 years ago, the company’s web pages were table-based designs. Through extensive collaboration with Marketing and the UI Designer, I’ve helped us move to modern, dynamically driven, modular, CSS-based designs.

Here are examples of my current work at Cengage.

Work
My mission is building CSS-based pages that look good, are easily maintained and are usable across systems and browsers. I want the page to not break for that professor stuck with a 600×800 screen res and needs to bump up the font, or for that student viewing it with Firefox on a cinema display. As part of that mission, I am determined to clean up bad coding and implement best coding practices across the site. I want clean, simple, flexible code that is easy to maintain.
My specialty at work has become taking a comp and building a working site, evolving the design significantly in the process. Along the way I’ve also learned enough to become dangerous in our data base and on our UNIX server.