About Me
I’m Erik Kallevig, a freelance web designer specializing in usable, accessible, and attractive websites.
My Services
- Site design (Photoshop)
- Template design (XHTML & CSS)
- Script design—databases to interfaces (PHP, MySQL & JavaScript)
- Technology needs assessment
- Domain and hosting setup
- Offline-to-online content translation
- Content management system installation and customization
- Copywriting
- View all services ›
Design Philosophy
My work is founded on the belief that good interface design empowers users to quickly and intuitively achieve objectives regardless of platform, disability or familiarity.
Let’s Talk!
Have a question or comment? Send me a note with my contact form or call me at 617-306-3943.
From the Blog
The new site is live, finally
After hunkering down for many hours the new site is officially live. The design process took a few extreme detours before I settled on a good compromise. My first plan was a very basic three-column layout with a primary left column for the portfolio and two narrower, secondary right columns for my services list and biographical information. I appreciated its simplicity but I eventually soured on the muted, brown earth tones that seemed drab compared to other more engaging sites.
Then I moved into a minimalism phase with Apple as my model. One of Apple’s defining strengths is its ability to destroy the unnecessary. By removing all distractions, the user can direct its focus to the task at hand. Minimizing visual noise requires identifying what is truly necessary, down to minor details like borders and background colors.
So with this goal I scrapped my first attempt and tried to focus the user on one thing: my portfolio. I had a fairly good concept in place before I realized that the ideal I was hoping to espouse was not entirely applicable to my situation. Apple is an established brand with a devoted user base already familiar with many of its products and using the home page to focus almost completely on a new or updated product is a logical approach.
I still wanted focus and simplicity, but I had to make room for basic pieces of information like an ‘About’ section and a list of services. I also decided on a bold, engaging color scheme that attempts to remain readable. I took navigation usability a little further by removing links to the page you’re on (with WordPress conditionals and some tricky CSS). WordPress’ heavy use of includes can lead to inappropriate markup so I spent some time adding conditionals to make sure the H1 tag on every page was actually describing that page’s content. I’m still unsatisfied with a few minor elements, but I have what I hope is a usable, accessible, and attractive design!
Let’s try this again
A fresh install and a fresh start. Wordpress 2.5 is growing on me. The WYSIWYG and HTML is seamless (so far). I haven’t gotten into terribly complicated markup yet, but so far it’s been beautiful. The new UI is also a great improvement, most notably by creating primary and secondary navigation regions almost exactly like 37 Signals’ Basecamp/Backpack. The only problem I’ve seen so far was getting uploads working in the new ‘Add Media’ modal dialog, a problem several users have run into—the fix required an .htaccess addition mentioned in the aforelinked forum entry. Now it’s just down to converting my new design to css and we’ll be up and running.