Featured are a few logos (give the first one a few seconds to load) that I've created over the years. Taking brand identity seriously is always a priority. Logos are the most frequently used graphics for every organization, and customers remember these marks more than any other.
Storyboarding has become so important in organizing my ideas that I thought it was best to include them here (how else would anyone see them?). I use storyboards mostly to demonstrate ideas, or I'll use them to quickly vet a concept through a quick user test. They're still the best way to get an idea down and in front of a user for feedback within the hour.
Planning ahead for an application that would allow users to put advertising to work for them. By earning rewards and sharing ads with friends around calendar events, we sought to create a value exchange around advertising, hoping to prove that advertising didn't have to annoying after all.
In the early stages of ideation, our team creates physical prototypes to pass around the office. It's a great way to get quick feedback on the feasibility and usability of our ideas without using up a lot of effort or resources.
Starbucks wanted to create a buzz around their new(at the time) sparkling drinks and asked us to come up with a unit that users could navigate through by tilting their phone. We made a fun, animated gallery that users tilted through to see all of the drinks. This drawing and the brainstorms around it won our company a quick $150,000.
This advertisement would allow the user to take a picture of themselves, then overlay that picture with a Starbucks drink. They could then share the new image to Facebook to generate conversation around the featured drink. Starbucks media buyers appreciated the thought put into the idea, and rewarded us with $100K in advertising revenue.
Sometimes, my team and I will sit around and brainstorm all the ways that our project can animate during a user's navigation path. We'll start by listing 10 ideas (most of them bad, some of them good, a few of them great) and quickly drawing them to share with each other. Its a great way to come up with new animations and micro-interactions that you wouldn't have thought of...and its fun!
Our CEO was envisioning a market niche that moviefone could position itself into. My team envisioned an app called Nerdtown, which would be curated lists of the best property-related videos on the web, which would get voted up or down by users, acting as a 'sort-through-all-the-filler' app for videos on any topic. Basically, users choose the best videos to nerd-out with for any show, movie or hobby.
Good web design describes everything about how a company represents itself. It's the first interaction many customers will have with your brand, so its best to take the time to get it right. Clean designs, even and open spacing with sensible typography are just the start of a good site. Navigation, content hierarchy, SEO optimization, responsiveness and clear direction are just as important.
Of course, everything must be based on user feedback. Websites exist to solve problems and deliver important information for the user while clarifying the client's identity.
There's no need to tell users everything about your business, that is unless they've specifically asked for that. Let's find out what your users are using your site for, and build a solid experience around that. Anything else just serves to overwhelm (or worse, confuse) your customers.
In my last position, big-name brands would come to my team to learn how they could advertise on mobile (back then, it was a brand-new thing). Over the course of 4 years, my team and I made branded games, galleries, interfaces and animations that took advantage of the mobile phone's native functionalities (camera, accelerometer, etc.).
Our biggest challenge wasn't what to include, but deciding what to take out. How could we strip the experience to its bare bones, but still create something fun? Our experiences had to be lean but engaging. Through testing and plenty of trial and error, we learned so much about what it took to create a successful interface and user experience across mobile and tablet devices.
GrubHub wanted to change it's unit based on the location it was delivered in. They had created location-specific assets to get customers in that city excited about food home delivery. I sat with their agency team on conference calls to fit their assets into something that made sense for the brand on mobile. In the end, the animation won them over and we collected $300K in advertising revenue.
Leinenkugel had no assets to create a bag-toss game, but we came up with the idea in a brainstorm and they loved it. I set off to create everything related to the game, and created a fun experience. the user tilts their mobile phone to aim and shakes their device to throw a beanbag into the hole. Leinenkugel loved the ad and complimented us on our simplified UI.
Jagermiester wanted to take their most recent desktop experience and recreate it for mobile. We used lazy-loading and a lot of other 2D tricks to pull it off the animations in a sensible way. This ended up being one of the most fun units to build, and I still joke about it with coworkers.
Station Digital came to us needing a full rebrand, in hopes to drive app downloads from the Apple Store and Google Play. We worked with them to make their old logo less confusing and more appropriate for use on mobile devices. We also created a streamlined user interface for their app. To sweeten the pot, we threw in a mobile ad to help them visualize where their brand was going.
Quarterhouse Tavern came to us needing a full branding package for their newly renovated neighborhood bar. We worked with them until we settled on something classic and clean, but still modern.
Over the past two years, rapid prototyping has become essential to the design of any product that I've worked on.
The principles laid out by Tom Chi at his talk at Mind The Product last year has had such a huge impact on the way my current team designs product, that it would be against good faith not to include a link: https://vimeo.com/131447795.
Iterative prototyping, combined with user testing cycles in between each round, has allowed myself and teammates to become a better designers. It's allowed us to quickly find out what works and instantly destroys any assumptions on our part.
We've learned that conjecture is just that, and that the only thing that counts are actuals learned from watching our users' behaviors while listening to their concerns.
Our team set out to create a product that would provide a value exchange for users to collect and watch ads. Basically, users would be rewarded for looking at advertising. They'd be able to save their advertisements to their own calendar events, and share them with friends for points towards merchandise and data rewards.
Our team had the idea of enriching our audience data by creating a widget that would follow users across our O&O properties, allowing them to give feedback about the advertisements they were being shown. They also had the option of choosing interests, creating a profile that would determine what ads they would and wouldn't receive in the future. We tested many variations of the design, which can be seen in the following images. Overall, the product improved our engagement rates from around 0.5% to 1.5%, a huge gain in online advertising.
Coming in late in the development on a product, I set out to create a design flow that was easier for users to digest. Users needed to understand that our ad was going to use their Verizon account information and credit card to make an automatic purchase from Adidas. During testing, we found that our biggest challenge was going to maintaining brand continuity throughout the experience to keep users' trust. Users weren't willing to buy from a third-party shopping cart, so we had to clean up the design to imitate our client's brand identity. As soon as we did this, users felt relaxed about using their Verizon account information to purchase items from retailers.
Here is featured a collection of work that I’ve created while volunteering. Most of this work was done pro bono for family or friends, but some of it was created while I was at the helm of my church’s graphics department, a position that I held for about a year.
During that time, I created quite a few images fitted for various platforms like social sharing, email newsletters, posters, physical products (like T-shirts and mugs), etc. Gathered here are my favorite works from that time, each of them representing a campaign promotion for an event held within the church or for community outreach.
While I volunteer in other ways now, I still feel that its important to dedicate my professional skills to organizations that that I feel do the most good. I don’t always have the time necessary to do this work, but when I do, I make every effort to treat these projects with the same level of critical thought and analysis as I would in my professional career.
