Inspired agency in design, teaching and leadership, arranged fifteen ways.
Barton "Bart" James Christner has spent a career making things that had to work in public: magazines and annual reports, exhibits and interfaces, packaging and campaigns, and the courses that taught other people to make them. This site is that career. It is organised as one biography seen through fifteen categories rather than as a portfolio of selected highlights.
Each tile below opens a category. Together they answer four questions.
- What was made: publish, photo, piece, package
- How it was made: practice, process, project
- Who it was made with: people, partner, professor
- How it was received: progress, publicity, profession
- And simply the person: personal and play
Start with whichever one matches the question you arrived with.
package
partner
people
personal
photo
piece
play
practice
process
profession
professor
progress
project
publicitypublishFifteen categories, one life: how this site is arranged.
This is the working life of Barton "Bart" James Christner, laid out as one biography told through fifteen doors rather than one long page. Each tile above is a category, and every category is a component of the same story: not fifteen separate sites, but fifteen supporting views of one career in design, teaching and leadership. Enter through whichever one matches the question you arrived with, and you are still reading the same life.
The categories divide the work by the kind of question it answers. What was made: publish for the issued work, photo for the pictures, piece for the personal art, package for things that ship as a bundle. How it was made: practice for the disciplines themselves, process for method, project for the jobs where a client, a budget and a deadline met. Who it was made with: people, partner, professor. How it was received: progress for recognition and awards, publicity for press coverage, profession for tenure and standing. And two that are simply the person: personal and play.
Because one project can answer more than one of those questions, it appears under more than one category. A magazine feature is a published work, a photographic assignment, a client project and, if it won something, a piece of recognition. That is deliberate: the categories are facets of one archive rather than folders in a filing cabinet, and following a project sideways from one to another usually tells you more than reading any single category from top to bottom.
Every category opens the same way. Behind it sit chapters, and behind each chapter sit the individual cards: one page and one image for each piece of work, roughly fifteen hundred in all. The menu at the top of every page reaches any of the three levels directly and shows how many cards a chapter holds before you open it. Wherever you land, the breadcrumb gives the full path back, and every card belongs to a sequence you can walk with < prev | next >, with the arrows at either edge of the screen, or by swiping left and right.
The fastest way in is often the site map, which lists every card on one page for searching. Otherwise, start anywhere in the tiles above. The work is the same work whichever way you come at it.
A note on how this reads: I intend higher information density where it improves comprehension. Where tightening the spacing makes a page easier to take in at a glance, it is tightened; where it would make it harder, it is not. That preference runs through the whole site, not just this page.