Indiana State University's Virtual Tour

Working as a web designer for the Communications and Marketing department at ISU has been a huge adjustment for me, but also a really great opportunity as well. For any project I design, I have to think about how my design fits within the university's branding standards, which I didn't have to think about before when I was designing for myself or a school project. So when I was given the task of designing the virtual tour I had to think, "Okay, how can I make this fit within our template, but still look a little different than our website"? After doing a lot of research, I knew that I had a little more freedom to design the tour. I figured for my mock up, I would throw everything on the table to show to the directors and than if needed I could scale back.

I knew that I wanted to use photographs of the campus as our map instead of a 3-D campus map. I wanted to illustrate the beauty of our campus as well as showcasing our campus photographers' work. I was in luck, because our campus photography department had taken many ariel photographs of the campus, it was just a matter of finding one that had most of the buildings. So after finding one, I began to build my design in Flash. It took me about a good solid month and a half to come up with a functioning mock up to show the directors. After presenting, I really didn't have to change too much of the design. The project took me about 6 months to complete 10 buildings. We are hoping to be finished with the project in about a year or two.