I’ve posted several new items in the portfolio pages, including a CMS theme design for a grassroots political organization, promotional banners for e-commerce and very fresh (hot out of the oven!) examples in e-learning.

That last item (pictured, in part, at right) was something of a retro treat — a project to create content for a learning platform that I designed and helped to develop several years ago. At the time, I handed off the completed system to the production teams and never personally generated much actual course content for it. While I did create concept demos and some initial coursework to shake out the platform and the production process, I never had a chance to personally do full-bore, real-life content development with material that could show off its stuff in the way I originally envisioned. Now, years later, I had my chance.

The platform was intended to be something of a blank slate, capable of handling any type of content, from text layouts to video, animation and interactive pieces. It’s most common usage, though, was indicated by its name — “Magazine.” The intent was to create pages that mixed the layout conventions of that print medium, leveraging its rich and widely-understood information architecture, with the interactivity and dynamic nature of the web.

The result, as sampled here, is a grid-based layout carried throughout the magazine-style course. It features typographically varied headlines, integrated interactivity that provides content depth and supplementary breadth, and a dynamic on-screen build that both reinforces the information hierarchy and demonstrates the usage of certain features such as the tabs that segregate optional information off-screen.