While you were relaxing at the beach last week, The Quad was busy making some changes.

We have widened the text block where you are reading this post. This should allow our articles to be clearly read and allow for the insertion of more images to capture your attention. At the same time, we have also redesigned the watermark images in the background of the header and footer of the site. If you scroll down the page, you will see a new feature in the right column called “Top Tags.” using this feature will allow you to quickly find any articles related to the most used topics. Also, we have added a new tab at the top of the page called “Categories.” This button will open a drop-down menu and allow you to view the articles separated by categories. We hope these changes will create an easier way to find the articles you are looking for.

Thanks again for following The Quad and we want you to know that we are continuously making improvements just for you, our valued readers. Feel free to leave comments or suggestions at anytime for further improvements.

The School of Art and Design is hosting a design competition using recycled electronics. Participants are encouraged to enroll in the Sustainable E-Waste course ARTD 391/591 and register for the competition online at http://ewaste.illinois.edu .

There will be a community drive this Saturday to collect old electronics. “Old computers, monitors, keyboards, printers, keyboards, mice, scanners and cell phones can be dropped off any time between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. this Saturday at Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright St., U. One carload of waste is allowed per donor. Televisions will not be accepted. Hard drives will be erased.”

Electronic waste, or “e-waste,” generated by computers, TVs, cameras, printers, and cell phones is a new and growing global issue.Through the Sustainable E-waste Design Competition participants will explore solutions to this problem on the local level and beyond.The spirit of this competition is to invigorate the academic and industry dialogue about product designs for environmentally responsible green computing. With your participation and through this design competition, we hope to begin a new dialogue, refresh awareness, and explore new directions in sustainable, environmentally responsible product designs for computing.

Clean your room and help the environment. Bring those old electronics to the drive.

Check out all the details here: Sustainable E-Waste Design Competition

DesignMatters is one of the best campus lecture series. It combines art, business, technology, and engineering to explore the “synergistic interrelationships” that exist between those fields.

Some of the upcoming talks will be from Natalie Jeremijenko (this Tuesday), Bryce Rutter, Donald Norman, and Cameron Sinclair. The talks are held in a variety of locations across campus – from Siebel Center to the Art Museum to the Alice Campbell Alumni Center. I highly encourage you to attend some of these presentations.

Find the schedule, videos of past lectures, and more at designmatters.art.uiuc.edu

The new design is finally live. You’ve followed the Illinois.edu website redesign here for ten months, and now it has come to fruition.

Looking much like the initial designs, the new Illinois website has an orange-based design with accents of light-blue. A new search bar adorns the top of the site, with links to the most commonly used campus resources – CITES email, maps, calendars, and (a newly requested feature) weather. The popular “A minute with …” series is featured prominently in the center of the homepage.

For current students, there are now links to Illinois Compass and the UI Enterprise system (where we pay bills, see our grades, and register for classes). Something curiously missing is a link to the UIUC Courses (courses.uiuc.edu) page under the “Current Students” menu, although there is a direct link under “Featured Resources.”

One of the most interesting and innovative promised parts of the website, the “Here and Now: Images of Illinois” section where anyone (students, faculty, friends) can submit images to be posted on the home page of Illinois.edu, is not yet working. It should be working by the first day of the fall semester, August 25.

A surprisingly good section of the new design is under About Us > Overview. This section of the website gives access to new Illinois facts, rankings, computer wallpaper, mobile-device wallpaper, ringtones, and the popular Quad Cam.

Congratulations to Val Turner, Joel Steinfeldt, and their entire team at Illinois Creative Services on a successful launch. Remember that they will be tweaking the website design for the next few weeks, so if you have great ideas, send them using the feedback form.

If you navigate to http://istart.uiuc.edu, you get a blank white page that says “ODOSISTARTWEB.” The “www.” is required in the web address. This also happens for the OAR website at http://oar.uiuc.edu. Isn’t it a fairly accepted web standard that three-part internet addresses in the form http://xxxxx.uiuc.edu should work with or without the “www.”? I always thought so.

Google is once again offering the “International Model Your Campus Competition” this year. The contest involves using Google SketchUp, a 3-D modeling software, to model your university campus. The intention is to model the buildings in SketchUp, reference them in Google Earth, and upload them to the Google Warehouse so others can download your model. This is part of Google’s campaign to create 3-D buildings for interactive use in Google Earth.

From the official Google blog:
The Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition is now live! Here’s another opportunity for you to show off your 3D modeling skills, and this time students around the world can compete. You can team up with other students, or take the project on yourself. Just model your school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth and submit them by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. You may enter this competition if you’re a student at a higher education institution almost anywhere in the world.

Entries are due by June 1st, 2008. Check out what last year’s winners modeled to get inspired, then visit the competition site to register. Good luck and happy modeling.

When this contest was offered last year, I fell right into it. I thought it would be easy to model the campus and I figured I could get it done in my free time and win first place. Needless to say, I got as far as a full model of Foellinger and a partial version of Engineering Hall and Assembly Hall. The process is more time consuming than expected. Besides the actual structure of the building, you have to decorate the wall surface of each of the buildings. I tried this by taking a picture of each outer wall face and overlaying the image onto the 3-D model. The problem with this method is that in order for the building to look like just a building, you have to remove anything that is not part of it from the picture. This took a lot of photo editing to remove a lot of trees. This is not to say that the job in impossible, it just takes a lot of time.

I encourage any of you who are interested in design, especially 3-D, to attempt this feat. Be sure to find some friends to help, at least with the dirty work. The fact is, as one of the nation’s premier academic institutions, there is no reason that the University of Illinois cannot create a 3-D model of our campus. For the sake of Illini pride, let’s win this contest!

We broke the news back in September 2007 that the University of Illinois website (www.uiuc.edu, or in the future www.illinois.edu) is undergoing a redesign. A preview of the new design has been posted.

This is really exciting for the Illinois community. The current design is in need of a change, and I think the new design is a nice improvement. From the “Younger, fresher, brighter colors – all within an elegant format” to the new customizable Illinois Search Bar (reminds me of the Blogger search bar that graces the top of this website), it all looks smashing.

I’m also really excited about “Here & Now: Images of Illinois.” This is a section of the website where images submitted by students, faculty, and staff are displayed. This is an exciting feature that I think will make the campus website much more exciting and informative. Parsing through all the potential news on this campus is a hard thing to do, and this is a great solution to get other perspectives of the campus published.

Don’t forget to take the survey when you’re finished viewing the new design. Your opinions will shape the UIUC website design for years to come!

The UIUC Library Gateway has just launched there new website. The re-design was done by the Gateway Conversion Team, is “tremendously easier to use, and 100% code & FAE compliant.”

The re-designed Gateway Web site delivers many features that make it more convenient for you to identify Library resources. The Easy Search box provides powerful one-stop searching across dozens of Library digital and print resources, including journal databases, newspapers, books, media. Information is organized by subject and by College major as well. Further, considerable effort has been put into accessibility, allowing users who use screen readers to more easily navigate library web pages. Many more new features await your exploration and discovery on this site. In the coming months we will continue to add and update the content on the site, and we appreciate your suggestions, feedback, and understanding as we transform this valuable university resource.

UIUC Library Gateway

Did you know the University of Illinois website front page is getting redesigned? Last year the Chancellor and Provost requested that the current website, which is plagued with over 130 links, be redesigned to be more accessible, more user friendly, and to represent the essence of the University. This will be an extensive undertaking, which is headed by Joel Steinfeldt and Val Turner of UIUC Creative Services.

I attended a meeting about this redesign initiative on Wednesday. At the meeting, they shared some interesting data on the traffic of the current website. Some of the interesting facts were:

• Most users use the website to get to the CITES express email page. This is the most popular reason that users visit the site.
• 75% of the current website traffic comes from on campus.
• After US-English, Korean is the most popular viewing language.
• More people go to the UIUC website using Windows 2000 than Windows Vista (although Windows XP is the operating system of choice for the overwhelming majority of visitors)

The first step of the redesign process is to collect research from current users. The team at Creative Services has formulated over nine categories of individuals that they plan to interview, including students, faculty, staff, alumni, corporate partners, parents and the general public. After all this information is collected and analyzed, the design process will begin.

The first revision of the website redesign will be complete by mid-October. At this time, the design will be approved by the Chancellor and Provost, and a preview of the design will be released to the public. From there, further coding is done, and then a site freeze and user testing will happen. Hopefully the final revision will be finished some time after that.

One of the cool ideas that the Creative Services team is thinking of implementing is a “This week in photos” section, where anyone on campus can submit a photo to be featured. This will bring greater diversity and information about campus life to the front page. Another odd request of the website is for weather. Apparently people like to see U of I’s weather on the website; so that will be included in the new design as well.

Joel, Val, and their team at Creative Services have a lot of work to do on the redesign, but judging from what I heard at the meeting today, the design is in very capable hands.

For more information on the website redesign, or to sign up to be a volunteer user interface tester, visit the project website at www.uiuc.edu/goto/webteam

Image: UIUC Website, March 1997