My first design gig

Last week marked a milestone for me ... my first official design gig.  The project was to give a facelift to chicagochessleague.org, which was generally agreed as needing some improvement in the look and feel department.

The requirements were that they needed to maintain lots of links to pdf documents and for certain captain functions for tracking scores.  They also wanted to keep the Chicago skyline in there somehow if possible.

Here are some screenshots of the original site (images are clickable):

Homepage

History

Ratings

The tool I used to create the hifi mockups is called Macaw.  It's an interesting tool that generates html and css, it also started out as a Kickstarter project.

Here are some of the designs produced that were not picked:

And here are the designs that were picked including sample content page:

Being a developer first and an aspiring designer second, I consider this to be a good first start. This line of work is definitely interesting to me and I can see myself wanting to do more of it. Having a lot of front-end coding experience definitely helps.

The code that is put out by Macaw is pretty decent but could use a little TLC to get it up to my usual standards of coding but you cannot beat the productivity gains of Macaw.