Last week at Haring Center
Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to work as a designer for some amazing organizations. My favorites include the Pacific Science Center, Seattle Art Museum and most recently, the Haring Center. Each these organizations provided me with the opportunity to do creative, meaningful work. I’ve loved working for each of these organizations.
Three years ago, I became a graphic designer on Project iBESTT, an educational research project at the UW’s Haring Center for Research and Training in Inclusive Education. My design work included creating the brand identity, presentation materials, informational graphics and illustrations for use in web-based training and marketing materials.
Shortly after, Haring Center hired me to rebuild their website. The website had been recently redesigned but they wanted the functionality of the site to be more user-friendly. While this was initially a temporary position, I was asked to stay on to manage the website, create new websites and to help with their marketing efforts. Some of the projects that I worked on included websites for Haring Center, Project DATA, Jump: A Haring Center Experience and various marketing campaigns.
This week is my last week working for Haring Center. I’ve been working remotely for Haring Center since my move to Portland and I am now training co-workers to take over the management of Haring Center’s websites.
I am constantly impressed by the work done at Haring Center. Everyone at Haring Center is doing amazing work to improve the lives of all children with and without disabilities. I will miss being a part of the University of Washington’s Haring Center.
Jump: A Haring Center Experience
This spring, Haring Center began to offer JUMP: A Haring Center Experience, a series of School Break and Summer camps.
To promote this new program, a campaign was designed to reflect the excitement and energy of Haring Center’s new camps. A logo, website and an email campaign were created to introduce the camps and within the first month, most of the available camps for Spring Break were filled.
Jump’s Summer camps are proving to be popular and new School Break camps are being developed for the fall.
Checking color contrast for web accessibility
Last Thursday was Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) — a day where everyone who creates digital content is encouraged to learn more about web accessibility. As part of this year’s GAAD celebration, I decided to test a website’s color contrast to see if the colors used had sufficient color contrast to meet web accessibility standards.
Color contrast plays a big role in how legible text is on websites. Bright, bold colors might seem like a great way to highlight headers and make links stand out on a webpage. But, unless there is enough contrast between the color of the text and it’s background, the use of color might be making the “highlighted” content less legible for people with certain vision impairments.
For this test, I’ll be looking at the color contrast used on my own site. Currently the green color that I use on my website’s headers and links is a bright green color that is mostly used against a white background. However, I suspected that my color choice did not meet the color contrast standards set by the Section 508 web standards for web accessibility.
WebAIM Color Contrast Checker is a great, free online tool that is used to test the color contrast on your site. This tool allows you to enter the hex colors for your foreground (ie. your highlighted text color) and the background color. WebAIM will calculate the contrast ratio between the two colors to see if the color combination meets web accessibility standards.
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