D-A-S-H
This long-term project, funded by several German government institutions and the European Union, is targeted at pedagogic professionals. The d-a-s-h.org website offers a huge amount of essays and services concerning the problem of right wing extremism among the youth.
From 2003 to 2006 my task was to structure the vast text scape, develop a design and implement a custom tailored Content Management System. The website had to be usable on old computers and slow internet connections, as many schools, especially in the east of Germany, are not very well equipped. Very long texts with many footnotes had to be meaningfully laid out for screen-reading and printing. W3C accessibilty guidelines had to be met.
The design is extremely simple, transparent and easy to use. There are almost no graphical elements. Color coding is used to distinguish the streaming media archive and the project support section from the main essay space. Even the longest essays are placed on a single page to ease navigation and printing. A "fluid" layout makes best use of the available space on screen or paper while keeping text lines to a readable length. Footnotes are put on the right side of the text to avoid unnecessary scrolling.
There was also a youth version of the site that presented some of the content in another way and called out for action against racism. Its outstanding feature is the eclectic mix of different web styles while still meeting all accessibility guidelines. Especially the map of anti-fascist groups is a nice demo of CSS, working completely without a graphical display if neccessary.
Design ideas for the youth site were co-developed with students from the New Media Pathway of Merz Akademie. I single-handedly implemented the complete site plus a specialized content management system.
Since the funding ran out in 2007, no new content is added to D-A-S-H. Some functions like the custom search engine or web directory were stopped soon after.
