Web Designer Says Job Is “Ongoing History Lesson”

Imagine having a job that, some days, lets you relive many of Minnesota’s most riveting moments in history and, on other days, lets you relive your childhood.

That’s the kind of job 2001 University of Minnesota, Crookston (UMC) graduate Garrick Willhite has as a web designer for the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul. Some examples of the history lessons that Willhite has been taught through his work include sites he’s designed on the Chinese-American experience in Minnesota (www.mnhs.org/events/ChineseAmerican), the notorious Duluth lynchings of 1920 (collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings), and Minneapolis’ boom time as the “Flour Milling Capital of the World” from 1880 to 1930 (www.millcitymuseum.org).

“It’s true, this job is, a lot of the time, an ongoing history lesson for me, which is kind of a bonus, really,” Willhite said. “I learn so much through the different projects I do, like I never knew before that Minneapolis was ‘The Mill City,’ the center of the universe when it came to flour milling.”

The Duluth lynchings site won a silver Muse Award from the American Association of Museums (AAM) in 2003. Here’s what the judges had to say about the site:

"Excellent, comprehensive access point for source materials. A minimum of interpretation is presented, but rather full-text versions of primary documents. The oral histories and the timeline are terrific! The site is easy to navigate and accessible to both general audiences and scholars alike. The content/topic is very serious and the site is designed to address the nature of the content, while at the same time providing engaging audio clips accompanied by appropriate images from the collection.… Even though I know very little about the subject matter, once I was searching, I was going after all sorts of arcane details of incarceration, and enjoying immensely looking at the original documents. I can see where this would be a real asset for a historian and/or researcher interested in the field, or in what Minnesota has to offer in that regard. It's a nice digital library sort of initiative."

The Duluth lynching site, like others Willhite has designed, was launched as part of a Minnesota Historical Society collection. Other sites he’s designed, such as the Mill City Museum, are launched prior to the exhibit opening at the Minnesota History Center. As for the Muse Award, Willhite explained that the AAM has a category for collections, and the Duluth lynchings site won the silver.

 “It’s a pretty big award for a museum collection,” he said. “It’s definitely a feather in the old cap.”

So that’s the history part. As for reliving his childhood, one site he’s designed on an exhibit depicting the history of baseball in Minnesota (www.mnhs.org/places/historycenter/exhibits/playball/) combines both history and memories of playing baseball as a kid. Another site he’s working on for an upcoming exhibit on the history of action figures has really stirred memories of playtime in his childhood.

“That one is a lot of fun; it’s like being a kid again,” Willhite said. “A lot of times people think of history, and ‘fun’ isn’t the first word that comes to mind. But in this case, for me anyway, it’s fun.”

Years of Grooming

Although only a year out of college when hired by the Historical Society in July of 2002, Willhite had years of web design experience under his belt. In 1995, as a high school junior in Crookston, UMC technology instructor Bruce Brorson steered Willhite to what was then known as the Red River Trade Corridor, located at Valley Technology Park, just north of the UMC campus. Led by Jerry Nagel and Brorson, Willhite learned on the job how to design websites. Willhite worked there throughout his four years at UMC, as the original corridor transformed into the Red River Trade Council and then the Northern Great Plains Initiative.

“The Web was just starting to get big in 1995, and Bruce knew I was a painter and drawer, so he offered me a position doing graphic arts,” Willhite recalled. “I hadn’t done any web designing at the time, but Bruce figured the technology was pretty basic at the time and I’d be able to translate the artistic stuff into the web pretty easily. I learned from others, and taught myself.”

After graduating from UMC, Willhite did some freelance web designing. He was drawn to the Twin Cities, but didn’t want to “jump into” anything corporate because most of those types of websites are so similar.

 “I wanted to be able to do some different things, and the Minnesota Historical Society was, and is, a real good fit,” Willhite said. “Each project is different from the one before, and presents new challenges.”

While there are 12-15 people on the Society’s Information Technology staff, he’s the only web designer.

Willhite wouldn’t mind someday moving into a position that manages various websites, but right now he’s content at the Historical Society. St. Paul is a little too much of a “ghost town,” however, unless something is going on at the Excel Energy Center, six blocks from his apartment, so a move to Minneapolis isn’t out of the question. Fresh off a recent visit to a friend’s place in Chicago, Willhite wouldn’t mind ending up in the Windy City one of these years, either.

UMC Role

 “UMC is small, and yet it was one of the most technologically advanced universities I could have gone to,” Willhite said. “I think that’s saying a lot. Other schools say they have the technology, but it’s not integrated into everything like it is at UMC.”

He also liked the way he could integrate his artistic and creative skills with the technical expertise he was learning in his classes. “You can’t do these things if you don’t know how computers work and how the web works, and I learned both of those things,” he said, adding that marketing and buyer behavior classes he took at UMC also help him when he considers what would make people visit the sites he designs.

“As a web designer, I’m always dealing with usability issues, asking myself if people will be able to use the site, and why they would even want to visit it in the first place. That drives how I lay out the site,” Willhite explained. “Bruce (Brorson) and the Information Technology department at UMC were a huge influence on me in that area.”

Written by:
Mike Christopherson, Assistant Director of Service Learning, UMC