Dr. Brian Hopkinson Lab, UGA Marine Sciences

Dr. Brian Hopkinson from the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia requested a site for his research lab. Based on his research on phytoplankton, I created design elements around the unique and facscinating geometric shapes inherent in these small undersea lifeforms. The colors were chosen to reflect the idea of the marine environment, and as a background, I chose to have the site content "float" on waves and to represent depth, I had the color of the undersea area darken as it went down. This was done primarily with graphics, but I have considered trying a similar design using CSS3 gradients, instead, to allow for more subtle color changes.

For the research page, I used a jQuery lightbox plugin to allow users to get the full experience of the images, with a small icon floating on top to let users know that they can zoom the thumbnails. I kept the personnel page simple and easy to maintain, and added a splash of phytoplankton imagery to enhance the content on the front page.