Cal Rotaract is an international service club for ages 18-30 and an affiliate of the prestigious Rotary International. The organization holds weekly events spanning multiple facets–professional development, international service, local service, and fellowship.

As a university-based Rotary organization, Cal Rotaract wanted a website that would be both user-friendly to students, as well as to the older community members that the Rotary name might attract. The website needed to provide instant event coverage of past events, as well as make appealing upcoming ones. The organization wanted the website to give users an immediate idea of what kind of activities it held upon first glance.

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I woke up at 5 am to capture this gorgeous delight–early morning tide at easily one of the world’s most beautiful, iconic beaches.

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Rotaract Big West Conference is a $10,000 regional, multi-day conference for 200+ Rotaractors in California, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington. The conference includes professional workshops; meals; an SF Bay cruise with live DJ, dessert buffet, and bar; and a nighttime mixer featuring a panoramic view of the Bay.

As this conference was the first of its kind on the West Coast, the group needed a dynamic logo design to be used on printed letterheads, posters, “Save the Date” business cards, postcards, and its website. To coincide with the conference’s mission and to attract an audience of ages 18-30, the group wanted a look that was both fun and professional.

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If George W. wants to know about something, he knows exactly where to look: Wikipedia.

An online encyclopedia with a twist, Wikipedia is free to view and edit.

“It’s a great way to burn time, and it’s surprisingly good for research,” says George, a high school senior from San Jose, Calif., who views the site almost daily.

And it’s growing in both popularity and in content. The site has 3.1 million articles and receives roughly 2.5 billion page views per month, says its parent company, Wikimedia.

“I’ll use it to look up one thing but find myself surfing for hours because I’ll keep getting side-tracked by the article’s links,” says San Jose senior Marcus T.

Wikimedia publicist Elisabeth Bauer attributes Wikipedia’s success to its evolving nature. Anyone can view the site and make changes. Anyone with a free account can create new articles.

These changes are instantaneous, allowing events to appear in Wikipedia as they happen. The history of changes also can be viewed, allowing anyone to see how an article has been changed over time.

But educators warn that Wikipedia’s “anyone-can-edit” policy can be risky.

“I don’t think students should trust Wikipedia alone,” says Bridget Kowalczyk, an information literary specialist at San Jose State University Library. “Students … need to verify all their sources with a scholarly source.”

A Wikipedia hoax last year is one reason to be cautious: In May, false statements in the biography of journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. tied him to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

Wikimedia deals with these issues as they come up, a company official says, and in some cases, an error also is removed from the article’s “history.”

Not a problem for George W. “I agree with definitely taking everything there with a grain of salt,” he says. “But really, that should be done with any source.”

There’s always been that unique quality to San Francisco that I’ve never been able to quite describe: the antiquity of the entire city that rings with authenticity. That antiquity–a city that has seen so much, bore through so much–is what I tried to capture in this shot, taken from the Carnelia Room of the Bank of America building, one of San Francisco’s tallest buildings.

San Francisco, CA. March 2009.

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Act for Sight is a student initiative founded by Cal Rotaract & Foresight Pre-Optometry Group to tackle vision problems in developing countries. The group has raised over 500 glasses in donations, and will ship them to Guatemala on service missions.

The initiative needed a dynamic logo design to be used on printed letterheads, in flyers, and on its website. The website needed to help further promote the initiative on an already bustling campus by establishing an online presence. It also needed to be accessible to a wide audience, as the group worked with optometric and ophthalmic professionals, professors, community members and students.

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BARD (Bay Area Rotary Districts) Retreat is a February retreat for 300 Interactors and Rotaractors from throughout the Greater San Francisco Bay Area and parts of Northern California. They needed a website, complete with downloadable information, to publicize the event and provide information to retreat attendees and parents of participating minors.

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The world as I see it:

I think someone once said something about moments in time dictating the invisible path of your life, like a greater plan waiting for its silent initiation before it unfolds itself. It’s only if you believe in that stuff. I don’t.

But maybe it was that moment hidden away in the Santa Cruz mountains, smelling of evergreen and salt water. Or that moment in a deserted, outdoor cafe at 3 AM, with the smoke and cold sinking into our skins. Maybe it was both.

These, of course, are the coincidences of my life.

April 2009. Road to Stinson Beach, CA.

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The Berkeley Project is a university-based student group that plans one day of service for 1,800-2,000 students and community members in Berkeley.

They were looking for a website and registration portal that could handle the 2,000-person capacity and allow registered volunteers to create teams, invite friends, and sign up for project work sites. They also asked that the portal could allow back-end administration. It was important that the website be dynamic, informative, and equally user-friendly to a wide audience, including students, older community members, and the press.

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This is my personal online journal–an informal blog, if you will, to sort my thoughts and creative ambitions. The design features a Wordpress theme I created specifically for the website.

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