Ivy Tan

My latest blog design created in October 2008 for my blog nanyate?! The illustrations were inspired by the gates to Japanese temples called Torii. It’s one of the fastest designs I’ve ever made. I took less than an hour for the illustrations, and less than a day to code the site. I doesn’t quite showcase my skills but it’s something that isn’t too shabby given my time constraints.

It works on all modern browsers. I’m currently developing a mobile version for this design.

I was playing around with unconventional ways of designing a web log and decided on a horizontal scroll, instead of the traditional vertical scroll. In terms of search engine listings and global accessibility, such a layout will fare very badly because bots and browsers aren’t able to surf the site well.

In terms of design, this site was quite a success! It was featured on various CSS galleries and popular design magazines; the most notable being Smashing Magazine and Design Meltdown.

The site was designed in 2006 in Adobe Photoshop. The HTML and CSS was hand-coded on Notepad. The site took around 20 hours to complete.

I designed four layouts for Leave the Pack Behind during my 1.5 years there.

#1: 2006 Layout

This is the first layout I created for LTPB. As I was still quite new to the organization and was unsure of their expectations, I designed a very basic layout putting usability first before aesthetics. Everything, except the logo was created by me. Coding was handcoded on Notepad.

#2: Contest Layout

Every year, Leave the Pack Behind holds a quit smoking contest. The theme we decided in 2006 was inspired by Survivor, the reality tv series, where the last quitter survives and wins $1000 from the organization. From that theme, I designed the logo, which is essentially a non-smoking logo jazzed up to look like the Survivor logo.

#3: Summer Layout

Since Leave the Pack Behind is a campus program, they do not operate during the summer. Nevertheless, the organization wanted to maintain the site so that potential smokers may continue to find information on the site.

#4: 2007 Layout

Using the organization’s official colors, I designed a new layout for 2007. This layout is the first time I’ve attempted to use AJAX and Javascript; I used the famed Accordion script for the site’s menu - all in hopes that a little animation would excite our visitors!

These flyers are designed to promote an carbon monoxide testing event for Leave the Pack Behind. They are aimed at university students in Toronto. It is fully designed on Photoshop in 2007.

There are business cards I designed for Leave the Pack Behind. The colors green and orange are the flagship colors for the organization. The design took roughly 1 hour for both cards and was fully designed on Adobe Photohop. Year of design: 2006.