A fun little side project
I needed to apply to a flight scholarship, which had 'the most unusual submission' as its judging criteria. Previous winners had submitted songs and poems and a board game. I've been meaning to design a new flight bag for myself anyway, and so I did, but then was at a loss for how to actually submit the bag to an e-mail address. A quick and dirty static HTML site was the answer.
I feel the need...the need for speed
I had about a month between the time the scholarship was announced, and its submission deadline. In that time I had to design and physically prototype a flight bag -- but I also needed to put together its supporting website, which I envisioned as multiple pages and a fair amount of content. This also all needed to happen in my spare time! So instead of spending cycles designing a UI from scratch, I went back to my old faithful: the US Web Design System. USWDS is flexible enough to let me get online quickly, without sacrificing too much in terms of aesthetics or usability. The entire site went up in about twenty hours over my winter break, and most of that time was spent considering the information architecture, taking pictures and writing.
What comes next?
I'm going to keep the Aura site up and continue developing not only the bag itself, but the site that supports it. The current audience is a scholarship selection panel, but eventually I'd like it to be for makers. This means I need to improve the information architecture, add search, and refine the instructions layout (not to mention the instructions themselves).