Jacob Carstens>Work
Work| studies| skills| jamsynth
Tabla.dk are three interactive designers, all educated at Roskilde university. As you might have guessed, I'm one of them. Together we've been doing a lot of web-design, e-learning and graphical design. The most interesting tabla-projects are in the list below.
This major Danish e-venture gave me a huge experience with leading edge Microsoft web-technology, as well as designing award winning usability and graphical front-end for a major e-commerce site. We were on the project from the very start, drawing sketches and doing the first prototypes. The whole site was built in half a year and consists of a 2500 page law-encyclopedia, an integrated news-section, a shop selling 40 interactive documents and forms, as well as letterbox and debate functionality.
In march 2001 netvokat.dk won the Danish e-commerce price (e-handelsprisen) in the category business-to-consumer.
The site is build on a MS-SQL7.0 Database. Data goes via ASP into XML-documents that are parsed on the server using XSLT stylesheets and the Microsoft XSL-ISAPI server extension to provide standard HTML documents. This provide a unique way of separating content from style, and customizing page structures and making custom page-elements. F.ex. we made a standard iframe element that on a netscape client would be parsed as an ilayer maintaining compatibility. Doing the site today, with the SQL2000 out of the beta-stage would have been easier: SQL2000 outputs XML directly, without costly ASP-processing and multiple connections / recordsets. Looking forward to trying that someday.
For this company, dealing with mobile-solutions, I'm working with server-components for image and sound conversions to make the midi and gif formats fit in to a phone. For that I'm using a combination of com+ and java technology.
With the others from tabla.dk I made a graphical redesign of the web-portal studenterhjaelpen.dk. We designed a new logo and made a design manual and html-samples of a new layout using close-up photos of books, and wide-format portraits.
We (tabla) have been assisting on the back-end management of this promising new internet-project providing streaming media for the masses. The superchannel is built on powerful open-source technology: the Zope-system running on the apache/ linux combination. The experience made me take a month out of my life to learn linux, apache, mysql and php4, now It's my favorite development platform at home (as most companies still prefer MS).
At the moment (May 2001) I'm doing some usability tune-ups as well as some browser-compatibility adjustments for this site, dealing with restaurants and the art of cooking. I'll also be doing the data-migration to SQL-server when they grow out of their MS-acces (soon).