Brandon Passley » Design

Parrish Hanna

Brandon Passley — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:56:12 +0000

Parrish required a personal website that created a stage for him to discuss and highlight his professional theories, thought processes and general experiences. Working with the brilliant Daniel Sauter (UIC Art & Architecture) again, the direction came out of a need to make, what would typically be a very boring and “wordy” site, into something much more interesting and innovative.

Therefore, we focused on typography and movement. The UI consists of a plane and a grid of every page laying flat on it. Any internal link the user follows does not load a new page, but rather moves the entire plane and grid to the appropriate “slide”. This movement is not only intriguing, but begins to create interesting layouts since a portion of each adjacent “slide” peaks into the browser window.

Development Notes
Because of the nature of the site, I built a custom content management system (CMS) with PHP/MySQL to work specifically with the difficult front-end layouts. One of the most interesting features no one would see is that Parrish only has to update the basic content in the CMS and the front-end will determine which of the three layouts it should use based on images, text, files, etc. The very cool sliding feature uses the MooTools JavaScript library. This would have gotten a little hairy without it.

Final Thoughts
A text-based website does not have to be boring.

[ Visit the Parrish Hanna site ]

Design for Democracy

Brandon Passley — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 02:05:00 +0000

The events of September 11, 2001 have highlighted the importance of having good emergency and evacuation systems as part of Homeland Security. According to a RAND report, “Security and Safety in Los Angeles High Rise Buildings after 9/11,” ninety-nine percent of the World Trade Center occupants below the impact floors were able to safely evacuate the building (Archibald et.al. 2002).

This project was produced in 2007 at UIC for Design for Democracy under the direction of Elizabeth Tunstal and Marcia Lausen

[ more information ]

Rottone

Brandon Passley — Fri, 12 May 2006 15:41:39 +0000

Rottone was an experiment with natural color. Four colors were used (strawberry, orange, banana, grape). These four fruits were allowed to rot and images were taken of the process. Each stage produced hues of each color. This process was then documented in the form of a printers Pantone color swatch book. Each color has the correct CMYK color palette underneath, and a unique “Rottone” color coding.

This was produced at UIC in 2006 under the direction of Professor John Greiner.