Lasting Connections is a content management and development tool that provides a streamlined process for tracking an organization’s members, cataloging the assets they create, and developing multimedia materials using these assets. It is designed to minimize the effort and complication involved in generating promotional materials while fostering extended organizational communities in which members can share their creative excitement with one another.

The project employs metadata not just to preserve assets for easy retrieval and repurposing but to facilitate design with automated layout capabilities that anticipate the intentions of developers. This allows for expandable publications that encourage members of an organization to contribute to shared multimedia databases in order to convey a group narrative over time while preserving a record of individual endeavors.

To demonstrate effective methods for implementing design tools that create flexible collaborative publications, I developed a prototype for Lasting Connections that describes my experiences and those of my classmates while studying for our Master’s Degrees in Information Design and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology during the years 2000-2002. The prototype I designed facilitates a process comprised of three stages. These are collection of multimedia assets, design of promotional materials, and preview of the finished publication.

The prototype for Lasting Connections uses Director and the V12 database extra to catalogue and make assets accessible for design purposes.

My design rationale further explains how Lasting Connections was implemented and expands on the project's goals. Download the design rationale as a pdf.