Screenshots of gvsu.edu/gvmagazine

Grand Valley Magazine

I recently finished up a fun project at work and thought I would share it, you can see it live now at https://www.gvsu.edu/gvmagazine. GVMagazine is the quarterly magazine that gets sent out from the university to keep alumni up to speed on what’s happening around campus,

It was fun for a few reasons: 

Designers are awesome

I was working off of design specifications from some of our very talented graphic designers. Most of my projects tend to lean heavily on the CSS framework we built into our CMS, as opposed to totally custom design. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is fun to work with something new that is so well thought out. I used the foundation framework for some of the basics, but most of the design is custom. I am an adequate designer when I need to be, but they are on another level and I think that is shows in the end product. There also is now a really great continuity from the print piece to the online version that wasn’t there before.

React for the win

The public design was fun to implement, but the really fun part of this was creating the custom admin/CMS. I was developing this project solo so I got a little more leeway and decided to use react for the content editor. It was the biggest project I’d used it for so far, so I got to learn a bit and the end result was great. It was a little complicated because the design called for a lot of features in the articles: images, video embeds, pull quotes in multiple styles, and “featurettes” throughout the page. In the end, the users creating content have loved it and it really gave me a lot of flexibility.  I was able to use the same styles for the admin and the public side so that it truly became a WYSIWYG editor, something I have been chasing for a while. It was a little tricky tying into the back-end system that we use, but it ended up not being as I thought it was going to be.

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