I’m guest blogging for College Web Editor this weekend from Baltimore.

Besides the “free” drinks which weren’t really free, the opening day went well. I attended Life on the Hill: The True Story of Student Blogs at Cornell presented by Lisa Cameron-Norfleet.

You can read an official version of how the project transpired at Cornell’s Chronical Online:
Student bloggers share their Cornell experience online

Appreciated was Lisa’s candor about getting the project off the ground. At length she talked about the initial stages of finding students, training them to use the blogging tool (wordpress) and informing them of all the rules involved:

Rule #1: If you won’t say it in front of your mother, don’t say it on your blog.

Rule #… there are no other rules.

She wrapped up the presentation with 5 key points to keep in mind, for other institutions considering incorporating student blogs.

• Have your compensation figured out.
• Choose your bloggers wisely.
• It’s ok to trust students – they get it.
• Weather the storm of bad PR.
• If your senior administration balk, tell them “Cornell’s doing it”.

One aspect in particular that Lisa stressed, was the importance of establishing a rapport and sense of community between your group of bloggers. That way they can help each other out and find support when it’s needed. Cornell’s bloggers had thier own listserv that enabled issues got worked out and discussed among the group via email.

You can find Cornell’s student blogs here:

• Alex Payne ’09: http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/alex/
• Ben Crovella ’07: http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/ben/
• Caroline Dias ’08: http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/caroline/
• Jennifer Lin ’09: http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/jennifer/
• Jenna Bromberg ’08: http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/jenna/
• Nikki Gusz ’08: http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/nikki/

Our university held a press conference today to kick off an urban renewal project. The event received good coverage from local tv, but we also had our own campus video journalist on hand. The press conference lasted from 10:30 – 11:30, and I had a mini-dv tape in my hands at 11:45. By 4:30 I had uploaded a finished video to our campus website.

I imagine there are tv/newsroom editors who do this kind of thing every day. They get last-minute footage and edit it with the pressure of a looming 5:00 news deadline. To those people, my little video editing accomplishment today is nothing special. But for a novice, running iMovie, its pretty cool to breathe life into a video project over the course of an afternoon. Even if it’s only a minute and a half long.

Ask me in six months and I’ll tell you it sucks. But today I’m proud of it.

Add this to the “bane of my existence” category.

Color profiles, specifically color profiles in Photoshop have periodically kicked dirt in my eye, and resulted in many a long pause of confusion.

And yes, I know there are thousands of web designers out there who haven’t the slightest knowledge of CMYK/process color for print, and no, I’m not one of those people. I had to slug it out with old men operating 19th century printing presses to get my Art/Design Degree and I proudly wear those scars, …speaking two languages proficiently: English, and Pantone.

So how could this color profile management stuff possibly be so frustrating? We’re talking RGB for crying out loud.

The Screen Capture

Screenshots, or screen captures will fan the flames of color profile confusion; especially if you’re working on a mac. I’m an APPLE-SHIFT-4 addict, and although I can’t speak for the majority of web designers, I rely on screenshots.

Instead of going back to source files, often I’ll use a screen capture as a starting place for a design. In many cases there AREN’T source files, so you’ve got no other alternative.

So, you take a screen capture. And you open it in Photoshop. (Who uses Fireworks anyway, right?) And you are immediately faced with this prompt:

This decision the has feel of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

You have three options. Choose wisely, and the colors of your web graphic will display correctly in all browsers. Choose poorly, and, not so much. Your story is over. Start again.

Lucky for us all, there are people like Dave Shea to offer guidance during these uncertain times.

Dave had a recent post called Shifting Back, in which he addresses many of my color profile quandaries.

“The key lies in conversion. Photoshop has the ability to convert between profiles, and keep colour levels relatively intact when doing so. What we need is to take the now properly-profiled sRGB file and convert it back to raw RGB values. Under Edit > Convert to Profile, you get a “Destination Space” dropdown that will allow you to choose between various profiles. What you want is your monitor’s working RGB profile (which is effectively the same as saying “no colour management at all”). On my iMac, the option I select is called “Working RGB – iMac”. If you don’t see an equivalent for your monitor, you could select “Generic RGB Profile”, but it’s probably best to first load up Photoshop’s global colour settings (Edit > Color Settings) and make sure your default RGB space is set to “Monitor RGB”. If it’s set as your default, your monitor’s profile ought to show up in the destination space dropdown.”

Did you get all that?

It’s also worth mentioning how Dave starts out his post:

Colour profiles in imaging applications are a sticky issue at best. The path of least resistance when producing web graphics is turning them off entirely and ignoring the whole mess, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing for years.

He references an earlier post about Mac Gamma and Screenshots in which a commenter provides a golden key:

Brian Warren points out that Cmd + Ctrl + Shift + 4 copies the screen shot to the clipboard instead of dumping it to a file. Pasting that into an open document seems to alleviate any profile matching problems with screen shots. Excellent!

So, there you have it. Screen captures on a mac can lead to problematic, amateur, color shifts. Personally, when a fellow web developer has to point those errors out to me, …he might as well be at my dinner party, pointing out a cockroach in his salad. Embarrasing.

College and University websites usually feature a smattering of news items on their homepage, with an additional link that takes visitors to a page dedicated entirely to news. A future project of our web services team will be to radically improve our campus news page.

As a web designer at a University, I’m housed in the Office of Communications. While I’m tasked with maintaining and creating design patterns as well as look and feel for web, a newsroom atmosphere exists in a communications office that inevitably keeps me involved with publishing/formatting campus news and events.

Content management tools have made a much simpler job of posting news items and articles, and soon I won’t be required to assist in this process at all. Nonetheless, sometimes I feel more like a web designer for a news organization, as apposed to a college. It’s interesting work though, news, …so its ok. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll be a rockstar news designer like Khoi Vinh.

There are several challenges to creating a dedicated news page. And I won’t pretend to be an expert. If I run across a great news page at a college website, I’ll bookmark it, and take notes. It also helps me to examine design trends at other news organizations.

Three GREAT articles about design for online news have come my way recently, and I’d like to share them.

Granted, larger news organizations have a great deal more content to offer, which makes decisions about design even more difficult. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t valuable lessons to be I can learn from the big guys.

New Media Meets Old: A Look at Redesigned Mainstream News Sites

…a great article that takes an in depth look at trends in online news design.

“I thought it might be interesting to compare three big media sites that have launched new versions of their web news properties in 2007: CNN (redesigned this weekend), USA Today (redesigned in March), and AOL News (redesigned last week). I’ll look at the different approaches each news outlet took, and what cues they took from web 2.0.”

Quiet Structure

…from Andy Rutledge is another great read.

“One of the basic, overriding elements featured in CNN’s new website design and layout is something I like to call quiet structure. Quiet structure is achieved when you de–emphasize the structural elements; the containing boxes, structural lines, bullets, structural color elements, etc… and bring a rhythmical consistency to the layout. The result is that the content becomes more conspicuous and the overall clarity of presentation is greatly enhanced.”

“For example, USA Today chooses to mix and match image/text pairs’ orientation. Some are paired horizontally while others are paired vertically. This might not be a problem, except that there are many image/text pairs in any given section of the page, so the issue is exacerbated. Furthermore, there are spatial issues that detract from the presentation’s clarity, as in the image below.”

Quiet Structure

“In order to help you get a better sense of the overall visual volume of the structures of our two example sites, compare the structural layouts of the sites in the images below – without content.”

as compared to:

“Notice how USA Today’s high–contrast, textured, varied–width structure is far more conspicuous than CNN’s low–contrast, greatly reduced, consistently spaced structure. USA Today’s structure begins to compete with the content while CNN’s just pretty much gets out of the way of the content.”

Behind the scenes at the CNN.com relaunch

…is an interesting short article that picks the brains of the developers behind the curtain.

“CNN.com unveiled its redesign over the weekend, incorporating a cleaner look, a better way of linking different media on the same story, and some slick Web 2.0 goodness (including in-page video and user commenting).”

“It’s a radical do-over for one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the Web. We asked the production teams (in London, Atlanta and Hong Kong) how they approached the project.”

All three articles are a great place to start for anyone considering a news page redesign. I’ll be referring back to them a great deal in the coming weeks.

I’d also like to share a few campus news sites that can be appreciated for their design:

University of Florida News
Biola University News
Cornell Chronicle Online
Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters: News
Stanford News Service

This video doesn’t really need introduction. It isn’t a revelation to anyone that campus email systems generally only serve to be sources student/faculty frustration, while at the same time resource hogs requiring significant hardware investment and multiple staffers for upkeep and support.

“Google Apps is helping Arizona State University become a highly flexible university that can provide extraordinary technology experiences for its students. Google’s integration of webmail, instant messaging and calendaring is second to none.”

– Kari Barlow, Assistant Vice President, University Technology Office, Arizona State University

Read the Arizona State Case Study

Recently, members of the University Technology Office at Arizona State University asked themselves some important questions: “Why is our talented IT staff spending so much time patching, upgrading and maintaining software and hardware systems that don’t keep up with the pace of innovation in consumer technology? And how do we get those staff members to focus on creative applications of technology specific to our university?”

…Students were already using it: From mail logs, ASU could see that approximately 3,500 students were already forwarding their student email to Gmail; this gave ASU confidence that the solution would be well received, and that students would know how to use it thus eliminating any training costs. “I enjoy using Gmail because it lets me keep a lot of my emails, especially those with attachments, without going over my quota,” said David Aniuk, ASU Student. “I really like the layout too; it’s not very overwhelming to look at so it doesn’t strain my eyes. And I have not received a single spam email in my Gmail account,” he added.

…ASU will migrate all 65,000 ASU students to Google Apps by the end of school year 2007, and eventually bring the service to the entire community, including faculty, staff and alumni.

More customer experiences here. In fact, Google has a specific section dedicated to Apps for Education.

This seems like a no-brainer to me. It’s a matter of resources. A good many universities could be spending money on more important projects, and sourcing critical tools to organizations that simply do them, ..better. Much, much, better.