Code

(2012) - I started building iPhoneception as a test to see if I could mimic the iPhone interface with HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Once I was done, it was just too obvious to do some wacky things to the buttons.

It's meant to be used as a prank on an unsuspecting iPhone owner. If you can get access to your victim's iPhone, it takes less than a minute to plant iPhoneception on it. When they pick up their phone and try to open an app, they're met with explosions, gravity-drop, kittens, or a really scary zombie (this one comes with a warning).

Prank your friend. Prank your family. And if you're not careful, you might even prank yourself.
Visit iPhoneception >

(2011) - Cisco Security Invaders was a quick game I put together as an example of what could be done with HTML5, which could be served as a full screen interactive ad on an iPad. It's a rough demo with just a few bells and whistles, serving as a basic proof of concept. You can try it out with the button below, which works on both iPad and modern browsers (though not extensively tested on every browser).
Play Game >

(2011) - Motorlogs is a website fully designed and built by myself as a cleaner and simpler alternative to the big player in the space, CarDomain. Where CarDomain feels very much like the old MySpace, littered with ads and promotions and arming the user with the full WYSYWIG to make their pages look like web circa 1995, I designed for pure simplicity and focus on content with a clean template that makes for easy browsing.

I built it on the Drupal platform which helped jumpstart the build with its vast selection of open source modules, though the learning curve of Drupal was no minor task in itself. I also learned how to manage a VPS server in the process with some performance tweaks and newfound command-line knowledge.

The design went through several iterations, one of them including a fully illustrated badging system, and a few custom wallpapers were Photochopped, the Mad Max Camaro in particular being fully composited (aside from the Camaro) from screenshots of the film.
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(2008) - I designed the UX and IA of the initial redesign of the TakePart website with a final wireframe document spanning 107 pages. Several months of research and discovery took place with three HTML/Javascript prototypes I built put through testing to determine the best interface.

The premise of the interface consisted of a single-column of rows of content, each row essentially just displaying a headline. Clicking a headline expanded the row to reveal the entire article or video without leaving the page. Thus, the user could browse through the articles without the disorientation that can occur from page to page reloads. This was particularly helpful since each article was related to one another, and the likelihood of wanting to read more than one of them was greater, with the alternative having to click back and forth between traditional pages.

The premise of the interface came with a lot of questions marks, but was one I firmly believed in. After a few months live, it was eventually scrapped for a more formal and common layout, yet I feel vindication in the fact that this form of interaction has since been used in popular sites around the web. A demo can be viewed with the button below, and examples of this interaction can be seen here and here.
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(2006) - NYSee was a 5 year side project that began long before Google Maps launched Street View. In fact, it was publicly displayed just one year before Google pretty much made this project irrelevant. But the body of work remains, and the entirety of it was done solely on my own.

The crazy idea back in the year 2001 was to videotape every single street in Manhattan, and construct a program to allow a user to turn at any intersection within each video. Underestimation occured at practically every step, but at each point, I'd just gone too far to quit.

Planning a meticulous route that would take me through every single street of Manhattan and building a custom camera mount that I could rig up to whatever rental car I got took me a year to complete. It all paid off in the actual filming part which surprisingly took me only 10 days. That's 10 days where I covered the whole city, every street, in every legal direction, including all highway on and off ramps and every bridge and tunnel in and out of Manhattan save the Cross Bronx Expressway which I scrapped dues to its complexity and exhaustion from 10 days of 8 hour non-stop driving.

Over 4000 hours of video then had to be transferred to hard drive, all through a single mini-dv deck, one tape at a time. The biggest task actually came next, and that was to edit the frames of every single street so that playing it would move down the street at a continous pace, no slowing down for lights or acceleration from stops. This took me 3 entire years, all in spare time. No fancy editing environment. Just Quicktime Pro, copying and pasting frames like stop-motion. Without a ShuttlePro, this probably would've taken me twice as long.

Once I had all the final edited video, I pulled it all together in Macromedia Director with a custom database, embedded map built in Flash which communicated with the core Director program to follow along with the video, and various audio clips matched with the level of traffic in each frame to enhance the experience.

The design left something to be desired, but I was happy just to get it working, and I barely got it finished in time to be accepted into Ars Electronica 2006, the annual festival of art and technology held in Linz, Austria.

(2011) - Ogilvy's LA office has television screens spread around hallways, kitchens and the entrance area, all smartly connected with Mac minis. Utilizing my renewed javascript/Jquery capabilities, I built a fully programmable application with the ability to include and order any video, website, templated announcement, twitter feed and even live stream.

Every video is faded in and out of black via code to make for smoother transitions, with the audio also being faded in and out. A hairline timeline above the ticker at the bottom indicates the video's progress.

The twitter feed is a custom theme built on top of the freely available Convowall, with the additional kludgy-but-working tweak to have the tweet rows animate and fade for a softer feel.

Templated announcements appear on screen at customizable intervals as well as in the rolling ticker always displayed at the bottom.

And any website or live stream can be inserted into the program with a customizable time for it to display before fading out and continuing to the next program item.

You can view a demo with the button below, which I've tested in Safari, Chrome and Firefox, and it's best viewed in a browser's fullscreen mode.
View Demo >

(2011) - This website built for McKesson basically took on the same interface as the Cisco Together site with boxes expanding within the page to reveal video and text content.

I built this working demo as an alternate version of the interface with more transitions and an auto-scroll effect, though we decided in the end to stick with the basic version.
View Demo >

(2010) - Just a few prototypes I designed and built for an Amgen pitch targeting the iPad platform, built in HTML/Javascript. With emerging platforms such as the iPad and Chromebooks, we wanted to explore the budding experimental trend of websites that are designed more like an application, with interfaces that feel inviting to touch and explore, all more achievable now with the growing standardization and increasing efficiency of javascript in modern browsers.

The demos below are very rough as they were built very quickly for presentation purposes only, but they should both work in any modern browser, including Safari on iPad. Demo 1 may require a reload if the layout appears wonky.
View Demo 1 >   View Demo 2 >

(1996-1998) - Before the internet came about, the popular digital distribution media were CD-Roms and floppy disks. I was working for Waters Design at the time in the early days of my career and had done a few playable floppy disk demos for our clients, and the primary limit to design and production was the meager 1.4 megabyte file size limit. It was always a challenge and a lot of time was spent trying different ways of compressing images.

One of the techniques I tried one day was to take a 640x480 background image (that was full-size monitor resolution back then), reduce it to 320x240 pixels, and then resize it to fill the 640x480 space. Since it was a background image, the loss of resolution might not be so bad if we were in a crunch for disk space. This led me to think, what if I took a 40x30 pixel image and blew it up to fill the space? I started making some random pixel drawings, up-sized them to fill the space, and thought that looked pretty dope. The file size was practically zilch since the original image was so tiny, but the effect of it filling the space was pretty strong. I then started making some animations with these tiny images and had so much fun, I just kept making more and more.

I don't quite remember how I came about deciding to turn these into playable floppy disk demos, but it just became a creative outlet for me to make drawings, cartoons, video game commentaries, and just about any random video loop or interactive page I could come up with. Each floppy disk demo consisted of a 40x30 animated menu screen and 4 chapters worth of randomness. On top of that, I added audio loops for each menu screen and chapter, adding to the challenge of cramming as much as I could into the 1.4 megabyte limit.

I didn't really know what to do with them, and purely out of a random idea, I curated a list of agencies and other random people to mail them to. I created and mailed exactly one per week. I guess I was a bit of a troll back then, because I didn't include a note or any contact information, and I just imagined how funny or odd these people must think this is when they get this random disk each week, pop it into their computer, and see this weird-ass shit. One company did manage to track me down, since I always put my name in the bottom corner in small type, and they offered me a job, but I decided not to respond to maintain the oddity of it all.

My goal was to get to 100 of these, but around #45 came the emergence of the internet as a marketing tool, and the fairly immediate death of the floppy disk for promotional purposes. I created a few more targeting the internet as the platform, but without the 1.4 megabyte challenge, it felt somewhat meaningless. I don't know what it was about that silly file size limit, but it just wasn't fun without it. I made a final push to make it to 50 just to get to a round number, but the creativity had been sapped out of it. 50 sounds cooler anyway.

When I was done with them all, I decided to submit them to some award competitions for the heck of it, not expecting anything at all, and it ended up getting accepted into all of them, including the Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual 4, PRINT Digital Design & Illustration Annual 6, and HOW Annaul Self-Promotion Competition. I actually received a call from one of the judges for Communication Arts and was told that while they don't award 1st place, 2nd place and so on, if they did, they would have awarded 1st place to me. I was delighted to hear that. Little did anyone know that essentially, even I had no idea why I did it at all.