Colophon

Credits | Design | Technical

Colophon noun [Latin, from Greek kolophon summit, finishing touch, perhaps akin to Latin culmen top] an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts relative to its production  (from Webster's 11th ed.)

Credits

Homepage Images

Work by the following MFA candidates was used on the homepage:

Jennifer Krantz
J. Thomas Pallas
Joseph Miller
Brett Tracy
Clay Smith

Design

Studio Blue of Chicago provided graphic design for the Division of the Humanities site in August-October 2006. Principal members of the design team were Cheryl Towler Weese, Partner; Maggie Lewis, Associate and Project and Strategy Director; and Tammy Baird, Senior Designer. Seth Hill, Developer, Mathematic Arts of Milwaukee, created the site's code. Additional code revisions were provided by Michael Erlewine, University of Chicago.

Site Structure. The conceptual framework for the site was created from November 2005-October 2006 by an ad hoc Humanities committee that was led by Joanne M. Berens, Director of Communications.  The committee included Arno Bosse, Director of Technology; Kristian Kerr, Editorial Assistant and English doctoral student; Miranda Swanson, Assistant Dean of Students; and David M. Thompson, Associate Dean for Planning & Programs.  The "Web Group" relied upon the clear and forthright suggestions of the divisional staff, departmental chairs, and faculty during this period. Omissions and errors are our own. The site was launched in December 2006.

Calendars. The site's live calendars were built using software from Trumba, customized by Arno Bosse, Steven Lund, former Director of Events, and Manan Ahmed, Assistant Director for Administrative Computing. They depended on the knowledge and enthusiasm of a pilot group of fourteen staff members who volunteered to test the program in autumn 2006. They are Stephanie Brooks, Philosophy; Juanita Denson, Romance Languages and Literatures; Mike Figueroa, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; Branden Grams, MA Program in the Humanities; Melody Harter, Jennifer Maxwell, and Jess Cullinan, Music;  Jennifer Hoddinott and Eddie Bennett, Art History; Julia Klein, Poetry and Poetics and Creative Writing; Sonja Rusnak and Tamika Steward, East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Miranda Swanson and Sarah Tuohey, Dean of Students office.

Typography. Matthew Carter (1937- ) designed the two typefaces selected for use on the Humanities' site. Georgia (1993) and Verdana (1996) were designed specifically for viewing on a computer screen. Georgia is a serif typeface similar to but lighter than Times New Roman and the sans-serif Verdana has been called "the elegant gatekeeper of a huge proportion of [electronic] information." A relatively large corpus size (the height of a lowercase letter, such as "e") and the regularity of spacing between letters gives Georgia and Verdana clarity even at smaller point sizes.

Wordmark. The Division of the Humanities wordmark was designed by University Publications in 2003, using Adobe Garamond and the University's coat of arms (also known as the shield), which was adopted in 1910. An expert in medieval heraldry was consulted, who specified the arrangement of the shield's images, the pose of the phoenix, and the colors to be used. The original versions were drawn by hand and colored with watercolors in six colors (including blue for the tongue of the phoenix).

Technical

Infrastructure. Among the most pressing challenges facing the site's designers was how to build a flexible and sustainable contemporary website on a legacy foundation - every page had to be a static file. The solution devised by Mathematic Arts was to structure the site using conventional static HTML files, but utilize JavaScript to load them into floating layers on the page. Although these load behaviors are supported only by modern browsers, the site remains fully readable and navigable in the absence of JavaScript or with text browsers such as Lynx.

Web Standards. In order to make the site as accessible, flexible and sustainable as possible, its pages have been coded to validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS 1.2 and be in substantial compliance with WAI Level 1, Priority 1-3 and Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

Search. The search mechanism on the Humanities Division site was built using Google Coop, which allowed us to customize content inclusion criteria and direct users to more relevant search refinements.

Workflow. Nearly all of the text on the site was first written in the Division of the Humanities wiki and subsequently exported as HTML. This in turn was processed by a set of perl scripts written by Michael Erlewine which imported them into a set of predefined templates provided by Studio Blue and Mathematic Arts. This process allowed us to automatically convert the entire site content into near final XHTML.