UpTime Online, Network Associates (formerly Network General Corporation) (Original location: www.nai.com/about/news/uptime/). UpTime Online was an electronic version of a quarterly 16+ page publication.

Timeline: 5 quarterly issues, 1997-1998.

When the editor first approached me about designing an electronic version, she had very specific goals for the online publication: she wanted it to resemble, as closely as possible, the layout of the paper copy. More importantly, she wanted the online version to simulate the "sensation" of reading a paper magazine -- you flip pages, there are multiple articles on a page, and yet you can always just read one specific article. One feature she was insistent upon having -- a separate scroll bar for each story. Another tie to print that remains: all paragraphs are indented.

The editor had been working with vendors attempting to implement the multiple scroll bars via Java. The layout she wanted, however, is easily handled by multiple frames. As a result, UpTime Online utilizes several frames so that the stories can be individually scrolled, and there is always a link to the full article on a single page in case a reader feels cramped.

Each department was separately indexed, however, for "bookmarkability."

For each issue, I also worked with the navigation and the department headers -- the goal being to work as closely with the paper version as possible. The vertical left-margin navigation takes up little screen real estate, and given the amount of space needed for the multiple article layout in the "body" of the page, we needed unobtrusive, but functional, navigation. The buttons were streamlined for this reason.

For each issue, I created and/or modified all graphics used in the online version (copies of the print files are provided), and modifed all screenshots from the paper versions so that they were web-friendly.

Issues:

• Winter 1998
  
• Fall 1997
  
• Summer 1997
  
• Spring 1997
  
• Winter 1997