I (and a whole lot of other designers) don’t find reversed out type effective–and with good reason. It’s difficult to read. (Yes, some sighted-impaired visitors will benefit, although they might find a 75% gray even better.) To make reversed out work, the type needs to be enlarged and tracked. Often this is difficult in site in which there is a lot of text. You simply run out of room.

You worked on the home page for your project, but it is one page in a very large, text-heavy site. Think about how difficult reading all the reversed out text would be on the “About” page. You can be edgy without reversing out text. CSS Zen Garden is great, but it is also high concept design–designers strutting their stuff. (The Garden designs use a lot of position:absolute, but that doesn’t mean we should all run out and use absolute positioning in our sites.) But that’s not to say that reversed out type can’t work. Most designers recommend moderation.

As for design as personal opinion. Nope. There are visual arguments that are successful, and there are visual arguments that are not.

One of your many areas of expertise is organization, I think. With CHNM, you’ve demonstrated that–it’s a huge organizational jungle to bring under control–and you’ve put it in a cutting edge format. No question. I particularly like the Projects Section–the use of graphics to emphasize the content. I can quickly see what’s there and the individual graphics give me a sense of the individuality of each project.

Here’s what would make it easier for me, I think. More touches of color–highlights to quickly draw my eye where you’d like it to go and to differentiate categories of links–just as you have with the Projects section.

Give me a more obvious introduction to CHNM–I don’t see that introductory paragraph amid the many things to look at on the page, and if I am not going to that site deliberately, I might like the intro paragraph to be more obvious. Also, in some ways, it’s a marketing tool for the University, so I’d want to be sure the rationale was clear–brief, but clear. Maybe it just needs a header itself?

The masthead makes me think we’re a third world site–maybe just ditch the impossible task of summarizing world history and focus on the new media imagery or program imagery?

This doesn’t seem as if you fell short at all, especially for the first outing…it seems as if you tackled a gigantic project and one of the hardest kind to do, and brought a new perspective to it–that’s what makes it such a good one.