chrlie

AOL

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AOL

AOL

From an ISP to content design and everything in between

Collage of AOL screens laid out in an isometric grid

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Designing everything, browsers, a CMS, led a complete content redesign, and created a set of new international portals.

Senior Designer – August 1999 – July 2007

I joined AOL as a web designer to work on Netscape, but really worked mostly on AOL projects. As a senior designer in a small team, I got to work on a lot of amazing projects. The industry was still young, so we had the freedom to design and develop projects as you saw fit.

In 1999, the dotcom bubble began to burst, and the hangover of the huge merger with Time Warner in 2000 was changing everything. Working at AOL UK and EU during this time was an incredible experience.
For a while AOL was the crest of the wave that was the Web 1.0. and helped shape many features of Web 2.0, like chat rooms, moderators, and AIM, which marked the beginning of social media.
The design team was young, and pretty crazy, and I have a lot of funny memories from that time.

Case studies

  • Homepage 3.0 detail

    AOL HomePage 3.0

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    Using ‘agile’ working methods to produce a prototype homepage that incorporated a wide range of AOL products. User stories were developed for each module on the screen, and wireframes were designed to meet those stories. From these wireframes a working prototype was developed.

  • Thumbnail of games page redesign

    AOL Redesign – Project Trinity

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    Complete redesign of AOL.co.uk, which at the time was made up of 15 channels, and hundreds of pages of content. To speed up the design process standard modules were created, which could be combined to produce a range of page templates. Each template layout was dynamic. Modules in the right hand side of the screen […]

  • Project-restart-content-management-system-thumbnail

    Project Restart

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    Project Restart, was a WYSIWG content management tool for the AOL Welcome screen. It allowed the editors to preview the content before publishing. Edit and control each element of the screen.

  • Topology of AOL illustration

    Topology of AOL

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    I have been told that AOL can be seen as an experience. Are there other ways of thinking of AOL? Could it be thought of as an island in a sea of html? I’d like to explore its topography.