Cristine (Beckley) Baumgarten is a designer and developer. This site contains links to past work; developed websites, interface designs, and Flash art and interactive applications.


History

I began working with the web in 1998 while in Graduate School at Rochester Institute of Technology.It was there that I minored in Information Technology while getting my Masters of Fine Art and found my love of building websites. So, I've been working with html and design for the web for about ten years.

Websites

The past 3 years I have worked for Chase. The website links shown to the right were, for the most part created for the bank and were all created conservatively with the use of tables. In the past, this was the way to be sure the site would work on the most browsers and before css was fully incorporated into the web world. This site was created using no tables. While new additions to CSS3 provide a stronger, more robust layout feature-set, CSS is still very much rooted as a styling language, not a layout language. There are still a few bugs with the new way of doing things but most can now be overcome. For example, having at least one<link> element in the head of the page keeps IE from displaying the page without the styles yet imported thus creating a flash of plain text. This problem does not occur when the styles are embedded in the source, but since best practice is the goal, external css is the preferred method.

Interface Designs

I have always liked 'Systems Thinking' in development and design. There's something about creating an entity where everything seems to go together. It's like putting together a good outfit ;) the fun is in the details. Attention to every detail is what separates a great product from a mediocre one. Balancing the letter spacing of text inside buttons, being sure there is adequate white space, checking for consistency such as verbiage in labels, these small details go along way for creating good interfaces.

While working at Chase, I was able to create Web Application interfaces. As part of the Enterprise Web Architecture team, I served as the lead designer and also front-end developer. I found I really enjoyed working as part of a complete team of talented front & back-end developers, a Business Analyst, QA Specialist... a complete team, with everyone having a specialty. These Interfaces were some of what I created created while with that team.

Interactive

ActionScript coding conventions are very important for Flash designers and developers to ensure that code is structured in a way that is intuitive to themselves as well as other people working on the same project. ActionScript is an Object oriented scripting language. Working in Flash, I always label movie clips, buttons and other elements with the same camelCase notations, e.g. "numUsers" and keep everything well organized in the Library.

In 2004 I worked at a place appropriately called Wacky World. While there, I was able to learn Action Scripting for Flash. The animation of the Wacky wackles was a fun piece to work on. Later at Chase, we developed an interactive Gift Card Designer for our Product Department. Customers could actually design and accuratley proof custom gift cards with this application.

Goals

Recently married and now living in Colorado Springs, I am continuing to work as a front-end developer and interface designer. Visual systems design, Usability Testing, OOP, ActionScripting, are all paths of continued growth that I am pursuing.