NSF NCAR Visualization Gallery

I designed and developed this website for the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025. Serving as a relaunch for an old website that was previously published with Wordpress, my goal was to completely reinvent the design and create a gallery that any non-developer staff could easily upload posts to.

In December 2024, I earned an end-of-year special recognition award from NSF NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Lab for exemplary performance on this project.

Before the design phase, I studied the interfaces of over 30 platforms - including other scientific visualization studios, museums, art galleries, and developer portfolios - to brainstorm ideas on how to approach a design for a climate data visualization gallery that would feel modern, approachable, and professional. I then held user experience workshops with other members of NSF NCAR's Visualization Services and Research team to identify our user goals and tasks.

All interface design was completed in Figma, which I used to produce interactive prototypes to share with team members in order to gather feedback.

In the development phase, I chose to use the Astro web framework, which is optimal for modern content-driven websites like this kind of visualization gallery. I also chose this framework because it works closely with native HTML, CSS, and Javascript, improving the maintainability of the site in the future, and because it has a simple content management system functionality.

In order for someone to create a new post, they only need to upload a markdown file with some fields filled out, and the site will automatically generate a new page with the correct layout. This meant that new posts could be added in less than 15 minutes, a marked improvement from the previous Wordpress site, which took 1-2 hours to create a new post - and which also had issues with maintainability due to having to frequently update Wordpress plugins.