Nine weeks later, SOA Senior Producers Jonathan Adams, Christina Baird, Corey Michalek, and Brandon Flayler celebrate the launch of the 2010 version of Soul of Athens.

It all started on June 1, 2009. Soul of Athens 2009 had just been released for the world to see. Superb reviews from some of the most respected multimedia producers and agencies in the world were coming in left and right. The new site was a success and it was time for everyone who had a hand in the project to sit back, relax, and enjoy it. We had a short Friday meeting that included speeches from our Senior producers, a quick overview of the numbers that the site was generating, and we ended by celebrating with a massive cake. That was it, though. In matter of minutes, the celebration was over and a year of planning, preparation, and production for Soul of Athens 2010 began.

While I didn’t hold a major role in the design of last year’s site, I used the time with the group to get familiar with the processes that must be run in order to get a massive multimedia website designed, developed, and live for the world to see in less that 10 weeks. It is an intense process that must be planned down to the very last detail to ensure the highest level of success. The experience that I gained from being a part of that 2009 site propelled me into being the Senior Web Designer this year and I would like to share a little bit of what it took for our team to be the first one to ever launch their version of Soul of Athens on time.

Soul of Athens 2010 was designed with one goal in mind: accessibility. We have had some amazing looking sites in the past with outstanding Flash work, but we decided this year that we were going to do everything in our power to stay away from that technology so that people using devices such as the iPhone and iPad had the same access to everything on the site as visitors browsing on their computers at home.

One of the biggest changes that we did this year was decide to launch the site in five separate editions. Each edition would have it’s own theme and content related to that theme would be packaged together so that it would make for an easier browsing experience for visitors. This, however, brought about a new challenge the designers that previous Soul of Athens sites didn’t have. While content had been separated into categories before, never had it been released at separate times and had so much attention focused on how it was divided up.

It was up to the design team to come up with a design that was easy to navigate, be accessible to all forms of devices that were trying to access the site, and one that would visually identify what edition the visitor was on. In the end, we decided that color and texture would be the most effective way to accomplish this and we dove in and did our best to create unique color schemes for each group of content. Hierarchy wise, each edition was given the same general layout in order to keep the person browsing the site comfortable and seamlessly transition from edition to edition.

Another aspect of the site that we really made sure that we paid attention to detail on this year were the inner pages. We wanted to make sure that we gave the user the maximum amount of information possible about each story and we allowed them to comment on and share individual pieces of content through Facebook for the first time ever this year. There was a conscious effort to not cut any corners on any of the pages and I believe that as a whole, this year’s site has so much to offer to the user and it is really catered towards making large amounts of information easy to find and easy to digest.

The overall design of the site took the better part 7 weeks during Spring quarter and it was completed undertaken by 6 extremely talented students from start to finish. We worked together as a team throughout the process doing our best to get each design reviewed by some of the most-respected designers in the business in order to come up with the best possible final product. After countless revisions and way too many all-nighters, the beautiful pages of Soul of Athens 2010 that you navigate through the site on now were dreamed up and signed off on to release for the world to enjoy.

I just want to take a moment really to quickly thank everyone for their hard work to make this site so successful year in and year out. The fact that EVERY single piece of this site is 100% designed, developed, and produced by Ohio University students is absolutely remarkable. The content that was handed over to the web team to display is absolutely phenomenal and it made our jobs as designers so much more enjoyable to produce this year’s interface because it challenged us to equal the level of professionalism exhibited in the content. The deadlines were way too short and the bar was set oh so high from each previous year, yet each group continually rose to the occasion and 5 batches of content were produced that stack up with, and even top, some of the best in the industry. I am incredibly proud to have my name on what we have to offer this year.

Now, with June 1, 2010 in the rearview mirror and another celebration cake devoured, planning for Soul of Athens 2011 is already in the back of everyone’s minds and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for this wonderful project. Good luck next year, team. You’re an amazingly talented group of individuals…

Proudly signing off,
Corey Michalek
SOA 2010 Web Design Senior Producer