I volunteered to design the college’s first website. Fortunately, I was able to finagle 3 credit hours of independent study out the the deal.

At the time it was quite advanced in design and built for speed as much as to tell a story. This was still Web 1.0.

Being the College of Fine and Applied Arts, it seemed necessary to focus on visual aspects. I was comfortable with the typography, and I was given access to the university public relations office archive of photos. That took to a while to sift through.

I chose nine photos that seemed to provide an academic narrative quite well I thought, showing a taste of action and diversity of college life.

Apparently the university did as well.

One day sometime after I had finished my degree I was driving through downtown Akron, and I noticed in a store/office display window blowups of all nine photos the university was using as promotion. I had to smile, not only because was proud of my choices, but also because I knew someone had to go back through hundreds of photos to find the originals.

Ultimately, the project was instrumental in landing me the job of Time Warner Entertainment’s first online editor for the newly created high-speed, fiber-optic network covering all of Northeast Ohio. I was in the college public relations office and I asked if I could call Road Runner to see if they wanted to collaborate on creating content.

The executive on asked if I needed a job. What do you think I said?

As a note to my future, memory-lagging self, two things:

  • this was key to getting the job with Time Warner Entertainment, Road Runner
  • as a really unique way of marking of what I had done and how it affected people so quickly, when I visited the offices of the Antheneum after publishing the site, I was looking at something online with a young student and he complained about how slowly web pages with image map links would load (talkin’ AOL Free Trial CD city days).

I said, “Not mine” and showed him. His response is still on loop in my head. He looked at me and said, “You’re the one?”

I mean shit!

A few years later in Jacksonville, I was showing the site to someone in the art department, and another person looked at it and said he remembered his wife visited it when she was researching colleges. That was cool too.