Carl Roose

The concept for AFSC’s campaign was simple: raise $1.9 million — the same amount that the U.S. spends on military purposes every minute. I took a minimalist design approach, stripping all the usual frills and seeing that every pixel served an essential purpose. Not only was the resulting site among the clearest and most usable I’d ever created, but the straightforward look also reinforced the campaign’s themes: objectivity, information, and ultimately, the stark facts about budget priorities.

Simple can still be fun, though; I had a great time creating custom interface elements like a database-driven progress meter, military tax calculators and counters, a promotional video, and in a first for me, an animated logo. Best of all, the site was a measurable success, helping raise over $60,000 in the campaign’s first month alone.

We on the AFSC Web Team wanted a blog to help inspire our co-workers, offer them ideas on how to use the web, and have some fun ourselves.

The cake theme inspired my idea of periodically changing the “icing” on Free Cake using different stylesheets. Another reason I appreciated the opportunity to build the site from scratch was the chance it offered to create a more standards-compliant template than we’d ever had before, with better accessibility as a result.

The American Friends Service Committee began as a Quaker volunteer organization during World War I, and ever since then they’ve continued to work for peace and human needs around the world. As a result, they’ve also accumulated almost a century of personal stories and archival photographs.

To share some of the gems from this treasure trove, I created the Friendly Reflections website. It was a rare treat to have so much good photography and content, and it was also my first chance to experiment with a fluid grid, which keeps the photos and overall page in pleasant proportions even when the browser window is resized.

The day after the Obama administration was officially in power, the American Friends Service Committee launched a campaign to count down the 16 months he had cited during his campaign as a timeline for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq.

I also created a custom Flash widget that counts down the days, which can be embedded in any website to help spread the word, and a dynamic chart to track the number of U.S. troops and contractors deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

International development agency World Learning recruited my services to help design a booklet of photos and writing as a keepsake for its visiting international scholars as they returned to their home countries.

The clean, elegant layout I developed allowed the beauty of the language and the faces to speak for themselves, while remaining simple enough to be printed on-site in small batches. It far surpassed the original expectations, and it has become one of the organization’s premier publicity materials, even distributed to foreign embassies, funders like USAID, and other partner organizations.

I was the first web designer ever hired at the American Friends Service Committee — an international Quaker nonprofit organization — and in my first several months on the job I had the formidable task of revising the site design to be cleaner, clearer, and more consistent among the thousands of pages comprising the web site.