US Tour Of Duty is a dot-org providing support for authors and speakers on the political left that oppose the Bush administration’s military adventurism in the Middle East. I was asked by their communication’s director, Jeff Norman, to consolidate two of their existing sites, USTourOfDuty.org and RealIntelligence.org, then, incorporating the same design, link in a new site, ScottRitter.us, devoted to the writing and appearances by Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and author of several books on geopolitics.
Real Intelligence aggregates articles from other sources, including Scott Ritter’s site, ScottRitter.us. Using Wordpress custom fields, I gave Jeff the ability to post both “local” and “global” articles—which appear with their original bylines, publishing dates and permalinks.
This is also a rare case where the finished project reflects my visual design. The orginal site’s styles and graphics had little in common other than projecting a sense of patriotic investigative journalism. My client had no solid feelings on how the site should look and liked every choice I presented. I employed a red-white-and-blue color scheme with crisp lines and open fonts and reused the existing graphics as best as I could. I put in a lot more Photoshop hours on this project than I typically do.
