Bryan Connor - Young and Freelancing

Collected Writings of Torrence Harder

Torrence Harder – Reflections houses the writings of Torrence Harder, Cornell Grad and founder of Harder Management Group. The site represents three years of inspirational writing with more to come.

Description

Torrence wanted a compendium of his written pieces that would look professional and be flexible enough to house many years worth of articles.

Goals

The site needed to be exceedingly easy to browse with text that would be highly readable. Articles were to be accompanied by an image and navigation to the oldest article was to be simple and straightforward. The content needed to be easy to update but have none of the trappings of a traditional blog. Visually there needed to be a professional and scholarly quality while presenting the articles in an engaging way.

Concept

Visually I wanted to draw metaphors from the print world in order to achieve some of the literary and scholarly tones. The layout is a representation of a table of contents and is exceeding easy to browse. Adding some interactivity to the page makes it less static and draws more interest to the articles. I also employed wordpress with a custom theme to make adding and editing easy and straightforward.

Solution

The site makes good use of javascript to house all the articles on one page with expanding sections that mimic a table of contents. Images enlarge over the article and relate to the pieces of content. Each article is intuitively expanded and the text within is readable and well formatted. The site is simple in terms of design and functionality but collectively does a lot of work to present the collected writings effectively and clearly.