We have an excellent rural library system but like many public services in rural areas funding is always hard to come by these days. A year ago I started volunteering shelving books and doing a bit of tech support for a few patrons that occasionally showed up when I was there. After a few months when shelving help was less needed I began helping out with graphic design and then a few months back when a new website design was needed I offered that as well. I thought I’d share a few of those projects here.

A few notes. As usual, all work was done using the iPad. For the design documents Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer was used. For the website, Textastic for coding.

Regarding the new website, as is almost always the case I started with one of my templates based on the Skeleton framework. I forget now the CMS that was used on their original site but the page code was a nightmare to look at. Each page was 3 to 4 mb due to scripts and graphics. It was not a responsive design. Not surprisingly the pages took forever to load which is made worse by slow internet speeds in this rural area. The new site loads nearly instantly even on slower connections. Pages are more like 500kb. Web fonts are probably the main bottleneck now.

Flyers are typically printed at 8.5 x 11, occasionally larger and also posted on social media. Here are a few recent designs.

First up is the most recent advertising an upcoming presentation about growing up in Okinawa. I really enjoyed making this one.

The reason for the next is pretty obvious! As is usually the case, I really enjoyed this one too.

This was a quick job! A more simple design largely due to time constraints.

I had a lot of fun making these little sushi characters.