David Little: Nomads in Oman

Nomads in Oman provides an online archive of photos taken of the Harasiis tribe in the Jiddat-il-Harasiis. The photos were taken between 1978 to 1994, mainly by Dr Dawn Chatty of Oxford University who lived and worked with the Harasiis.

I worked on the project as the principal designer, working on the site's information architecture, interaction design and implementation via wireframes, visual design through to the HTML templates and integration file for the back-end Plone-based CMS.

It was the first time I'd worked as part of a remote team -- Fry developed the back-end and pretty much all of my communication with them was via email but this caused no problems at all. I used Balsamiq to communicate the site's interaction design to the development team -- using the interactive PDF output and making my first protocast. 

It was also the first time I used rules-based theming with XDV (soon to be known as Diazo) in Plone. This allows for the mapping of parts of the originating Plone-based output to your own template using an XML file and CSS mapping syntax. It wasn't without its problems and frustrations but is a big improvement on the traditional Plone 3 theming model. I've worked with Plone for a while now which gave me a head start on understanding some of the issues that were bound to come up, including Plone's complex CSS stack which makes integrating its editing interface into an external template a challenge to say the least.