161 Faces of Cornell

Client

Kelly Yang, Cornell Daily Sun
Email: <kgy3@cornell.edu>

The client is in charge of running the Cornell Daily Sun's photography project 161 Faces of Cornell.

Student contact

Nick De Tullio <nrd24@cornell.edu> is setting up a team for this project. If you are interested in joining the team, please contact him.

Background

"161 Faces of Cornell" is a street photography project originally created by Cornell students in the fall of 2010. Because it is inspired by street photography, all the pictures in the project are taken at entirely randomly times and locations, capturing a unique and spontaneous snapshot of the large population on campus. Since its original launch, over 1,000 members of the Cornell community have been featured (including Bill Nye!) and it is currently one of the Daily Sun’s most visible projects, with guaranteed publication every semester.

Project Requirements

We need the front end of our site to be redesigned in order to provide a better user experience for visitors to the site, as well as a back end content management system that will allow us to upload and maintain the images. We want a robust site that is scalable and designed to handle thousands of images (without slow load times). Ideally, the final product is very polished and can be reused for at least the next few years.

Informally, the site would be like a yearbook that only grows each year. Currently we have about 1,500 images and would add at least ~300 images each semester. Additionally, sometimes an individual in a gallery has more than one image, which adds some complexity since not all groups of images are structured the same way. Each image also has the caption information embedded in the metadata (names, activities, etc.) and that is currently how the captions are being read. Because of the way the original site was coded, whenever we need to make a correction to any image (like a name misspelling), we need to wait for one member of the web team to take down the entire site and re-upload all the images, resulting in downtime as well as a single point of failure.

Therefore, we would like to be able to independently edit the text, upload, sort (alphabetically), delete, and resize the images, which would also allow anyone with the admin login to make changes. We would also like to be able to preview what the site will look like with the new semester's photos before it goes public. We would expect at least a minimal amount of user testing on the design to try and find the best interface that will entice people to look through the images for the front end, and an intuitive design for maintaining the site on the back end.

While the scope of this project is relatively contained, our goal is to achieve a fully functioning site that looks slick and feels professional, without any bugs or frantic calls to a web developer the night before a launch. As an added bonus, if there is enough time, we would be thrilled if the site had a responsive design that also looks good on tablets and mobile devices. If all of this can be accomplished, we would probably like to incorporate some kind of social media or sharing component.

Reward

If this project is successfully implemented in a polished product, we will definitely use it and the team will be credited on the site, which will probably be used for many years to come. Each new gallery of images currently attracts about 10,000 hits a semester and with a strong web presence, we will probably get more traffic and you will get to see your creation being used by the people around you.

This project first began because it was inspired by a professional street photographer. We hope to grow the project with the use of a self-maintained web site and hopefully inspire other colleges to start a similar project, which a great web site would help us do. We hope this project is interesting, challenging, and also a rewarding experience for the team that builds it (which has definitely been the case for the photographers who have participated) and we’re excited to see what you come up with!