Website Design

While a graduate student at Clemson, I worked on a wide variety of information design projects. I've listed a few of my web-based projects below. In completing these projects, I was actively involved in developing and incorporating rich media, optimizing according to 508 standards, executing heuristic analyses, and improving search engine optimization.

• Clemson College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities - Upon starting the MA program, I assisted our college communication director in migrating/developing a number of pages in Clemson’s new content management system (Cascade). Much of my work was done at the upper levels of the college site, and I helped to create audio/visual media content for various departmental pages. I also helped to rework some of the college’s information hierarchies for ease of navigation.
• Clemson Bioengineering - I assisted the bioengineering department with their site organization, built a news portal, consulted with engineering professors on various research initiatives, and resolved SEO-related problems within the site. These projects involved working a great deal with the Adobe CS4 suite and writing custom xhtml/css code.
• MAPCUX - This admittedly whimsical page (standing for MAPC “User Experience”) was constructed in a user experience seminar. A common complaint among incoming MAPC students is the dearth of information pertaining to “graduate student life” available, so our seminar professor had the class work to put together an electronic experience to help address these concerns. As a class, we chose to develop an MAPC apartment metaphor. (This way, potential students could step into the shoes of a Masters student and likewise "snoop" around their apartment!) My responsibilities here involved lo-fi prototyping and brainstorming, technological problem solving, and continuous usability testing (mainly talk-aloud protocols) with students and faculty. I was the teammate largely responsible for constructing the site.
• www.michaelhovan.com - the site you're lookin' at!

While at Clemson, I also developed new sites for the English Department's Literary Festival, the Library's development office, and the international studies department. A corporate powerpoint presentation I created for Clemson's Brussels Center was chosen by the media production company DiscMakers to become a part of their own production portfolio. I've also developed/launched several personal satire sites, none of which I kept online for longer than a few years.

Pen and Ink

I throroughly enjoy drawing lines and angles. I love op-art in general! Hence, a few of my pen/ink drawings below. This time-consuming, highly iterative drawing style is extremely satisfying to me. I used Illustrator, Logic Audio, and Flash to turn one of these into a piece of interactive digital art. (at right)

Other Media

I have worked in some fairly esoteric media, including chalk, hot steel, and tropical hardwoods.