Behind the Scenes with Cary Walski

by Hannah Crawford

If you are reading this, you’ve probably noticed that you’re not just looking at black and white words on a screen. What about all that pretty graphic design? One of the people you have to thank for that is Cary Walski, who had a very big part in our recent website redesign. We talked to her for Behind the Scenes this month, and learned just how much work (and fun!) website designing can be.

What kinds of things have you worked on for Rainbow Rumpus? When did you start? 

Get in the way-back machine! October 2006 was the very first issue of Rainbow Rumpus that I brought online. With me on board as Rainbow Rumpus’ first webmaster, it marked the exciting beginning of the magazine publishing on a monthly basis. The web team started with just me, but we brought on other talented web team members as our content grew, including Michael French, Jake MacDonald, Sarah Musgrave, and Karl Smith. 

Thanks to the very talented Drupal expert Melissa Avery and the generous support of the board, I was able to cap off my time volunteering by overseeing the redesign of the Rainbow Rumpus website, and the creation of Rainbow Riot. In addition to managing the project, I also did the graphic design for much of it, with the addition of Jackie Urbanovic’s fabulous Flo and Mo characters. 

What was your favorite part of redesigning the Rainbow Rumpus website? 

Working with the redesign team was a lot of fun. It was great to learn from Laura Matanah and Beth Wallace during the process. Both of them had great insights on how to make the development process inclusive, a word which [would make] many project-hardened web developers cringe. 

How long did it take to redesign the website?

A lot longer than anticipated! It took a little over a year when we finally completed the project. I’ve learned since then that we are in good company with late web launches, especially with a website that’s as large and sophisticated in terms of page types, as these two are. 

What sorts of skills do you have to have to do a website design? 

I think the best developers and designers are really good listeners. You have to be able to put your preconceptions and your own hubris aside in order to distill and then deliver what your audience, and, by proxy, your clients are looking for. 

Tell us a little bit about your life outside Rainbow Rumpus. What other things do you like to do? 

I enjoy writing, both fiction and non, taking my newly adopted dog Lela on walks, biking, and eating at the great restaurants we have here in northeast Minneapolis, where I live. 

What’s a good way to help kids interested in computers and designing get started? 

Let them play! Encourage your kids to be creative using the computer and praise the results. Not all screen time is wasted time, and if you give your children positive reinforcement for being active creators rather than passive receptacles, you will see great results. 

If your child is a girl, encourage her to do things like programming that don’t typically seem “girlie.” There are great careers in computer science, and women bring a very valuable, and frankly lucrative, perspective to the field, and employers are starting to understand that. To get inspired check out this great Ignite video presentation, called “I’m a Barbie girl in a CS World” by Pamela Fox, a computer engineer who works for Google.