Volunteers: Become an Earth Chronicle Web Designer!

Main Points

• Feedback Opportunities Easy ways to put your professional opinion to good use.
• Sink your Creative Teeth into Something Or get involved in a more exciting project.

Webpages have a goal, websites have a purpose. However, there are many highly functional websites that are... Ugly. There are also a lot of ugly websites which don't work properly or are confusing because they're not designed well. Webpages are as much an artistic endeavor as a technical challenge. Are you a usability designer who streamlines websites, a website designer who crafts webpages in cutting-edge XHTML and CSS, or a graphic designer with a great artistic eye? We can use your talents!

Feedback Opportunities

First of all, we need feedback about our website. We're always interested in your suggestions to make our site better. Anything you find on Earth Chronicle that you would change or think can be done better, contact us and let us know what you think. We're always completing new projects and looking for the next big thing to tackle.

If you'd like to be even more involved, check out our Beta site. Before anything major changes on our site, we let you test the next generation of Earth Chronicle designs. Tell us what works, what doesn't, and what needs to be tweaked before we let anyone else see it. In addition, new pages serve an "apprenticeship" on the Beta site before they graduate to Earth Chronicle. Hopefully, you can catch any glitches before the rest of the world sees them. In exchange, for testing our new designs and previewing our new pages, Earth Chronicle Beta gives you get dibs on the latest information coming into Earth Chronicle as well as the chance to shape what our website will look like for years to come.

Sink your Creative Teeth into Something

We need web designers who can help with the design challenges presented by new sections. We need UI designers who can help craft interfaces for new applications. We need usability designers who can streamline the look and function of existing pages, and conduct usability tests. On one hand, uniformity is important to create a site identity and to make navigation simple and easy. Everyone should be able to navigate simply on every page; do you have ideas how to improve the way we do it? On the other hand, some topics lend themselves to a more creative approach. You don't need to know anything about the internet, or programming to revamp the graphic design of a page so that it's form better complements it's function. You don't need to know anything about computer science to fix something that just looks ugly. If you have web design experience that's fantastic, but graphic designers are equally welcome to chime in and work with us. Help us make Earth Chronicle work beautifully!

We've also located the first public domain fonts, though they are primarily geared for extended Unicode ranges. We'd love to get a group of font designers to create a range of public domain fonts, and hopefully even write up best practices on designing fonts. If you're interested in designing or submitting public domain fonts, contact us!

Check out our Beta site to see what we're working on and the different projects you can jump into.