A few weeks ago, I got a Twitter direct message from Jay Rosen.

Lauren: got a question for you; would you email me?

DMing with Jay isn’t part of my everyday life. So, naturally, I was intrigued. I responded. And the three-week saga of redesigning PressThink began.

I sat in a dark corner of Michelle Minkoff‘s going away party at a bar across from the LA Times excitedly IMing with Jay about his vision for the new blog design. This was just the first of many late nights of IMing with Jay after his kids went to sleep.

A few things were certain:

• PressThink needed a modern look and feel. (As Jay described it– “to express where web design and readability knowledge are now.”) The blog hadn’t been redesigned since 2003.
• The color scheme needed to be new and bold — we mimicked a palette similar to his Tumblr.
• It needed some of the old and some of the new — which manifested in keeping the blurry PressThink in the background of the header to symbolize the “ghost of democracy”
• The design had to be focused around long-form reading — which is why we included paragraph-level permalinks (shoutout to Chris Amico).

We had a lot of work to do.

Before

After

A few of my favorite design elements:

• Jay’s glasses in the header image. It’s very signature “Jay.” (We’re also throwing his glasses at the end of each post to signify that *this* marks the end of Jay’s thoughts).
• Paragraph-level permalinks — which are a necessity for such long posts
• “Talks” page, which is a chronological documentation of Jay’s talks, interviews, etc.
• The “bio” page which allows anyone to grab the HTML version of Jay’s biography for republishing!
• The blog is now on WordPress! Open source FTW!

The twitter response has been very positive so far:

I’m glad to have been a part of the new life of PressThink. Happy blogging, Jay! Happy reading, j-world!

Design of her campaign included:

• Website with new branding and social media integration
• Uniform branding across social media platforms
• Online donations with social media integration
• Mail flyers
• Lawn signs
• Email newsletter
• Print advertisements
• Web advertisements

General branding

Social media integration

Donation system with social media

Email newsletter

Print advertisements

Web advertisements

In addition to creating the new homepage, I created all the static marketing pages on the website:

Because the agency is located in Southern California and its founders have New Mexico roots, they wanted the California and New Mexico flags incorporated into the logo design. The following is the logo I designed for California Zia Photography to both match the site and capture the founders’ heritage (with a fun, modern spin):

As online editor for the Mustang Daily at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, I helped the site transition from proprietary to open-source software. Working off a base template from Woo Themes, I redesigned the site with a fresh, clean design that is more modern and intuitive to our readers.

The site is run on WordPress blogging software, but used as a content management system more than a blog. Along with the entire site redesign came a restucturing of the staff workflow to allow reporters, editors and photographers to all participate in posting content online.

This project was designed as a specialty site for a dentistry institute in San Diego, California. The agency specializes in porcelain veneers and wanted more traffic for the service, so I designed a site and helped increase their SEO. The site includes before/after photo galleries, videos and a “Dear Judy” blog.

As the multimedia chair for the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts for a few quarters at Cal Poly, I was in charge of revamping the site. Working off an existing web site, I updated a few stylistic elements to keep the site up-to-date. The site was designed in Dreamweaver.