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:
Detail from wedding announcement
Detail from wedding announcement #2
Detail from wedding announcement
Wedding invitation detail
RSVP card detail
Detail from front cover of wedding poems pamphlet
Detail from front cover of wedding poems pamphlet #2
Wedding poems pamphlet interior
Wedding poems pamphlet back cover
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!
Poster for Rebecca Wolff and Laura Sims reading
Poster for Carla Harryman reading
Poster for Myung Mi Kim reading
Poster for Dana Ward and Tyrone Williams reading
Poster for Patrick Durgin and Kent Johnson reading