Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Design
I’m an inveterately curious person. There’s little I enjoy more than learning to do something new. Over the past decade, I’ve developed an amateur interest in design, and tried to cultivate my skills through making things.
Websites
I designed and built several websites for friends before joining Pressbooks. Most of the sites I built have gone defunct in the intervening years, but the following remain online in some capacity:
- Project1808, a nonprofit which develops community livelihood and technical capacity in Sierra Leone.
- Council for Wisconsin Writers, a nonprofit volunteer organization supporting writers and the literary arts in Wisconsin.
- Joshua Calhoun, professor of English at UW-Madison.
- Lynn Keller, my dissertation director.
- Rita Mae Reese, a poet and teacher.
- Teaching with Technology, a public website to accompany an online workshop series I facilitated while working at UW-Madison’s Learning Support Services.
- The Writers in Prisons Project, a volunteer collaborative my wife Laurel founded to benefit incarcerated men at Oakhill Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
- The website for Laurel & my wedding (in April 2012).
Letterpress Printing
When Laurel and I got married, I designed and printed save the date postcards, and took a letterpress printing class which allowed me to design and make wedding invites, RSVPs, envelopes, and a poetry booklet that we gave to guests as a wedding favor. You can see a gallery of these projects below:
You can read more about the process for these projects in the Wedding Planning Series on my blog.
Graphic Design
I occasionally designed posters and other print media for my jobs at DesignLab and Learning Support Services.
I occasionally made posters to announce classes and important events for the Writers in Prisons Project at Oakhill Correctional Institution, where I used to facilitate a poetry class and train and coordinate other volunteers.
I got my start as a ‘designer’ making posters for the FELIX poetry reading series I helped organize while in graduate school. My amateurism is on full display here, but everybody’s gotta learn sometime!
Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons