UX

(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) - launched as TABASCO's first Facebook app, inviting fans to participate in daily and weekly challenges to earn points, badges, and prizes, sharing photos and keeping track of their TABASCO Sauce drop usage.

I created all of the designs for the entire Facebook app as well as the supporting media placements, including rich media banners, homepage takeovers, and a standalone Yelp contest page. I aimed for a certain sense of southern refinement with just a little bit of wear with the use of subtle textures, heavy use of red for obvious reasons, and an etched clip art style made possible with the Engraver Photoshop plug-in. Additionally, I illustrated all 31 badges and 7 profile frames, all original artwork.

At the time of this writing, just one month from launch, 7,000 people have joined the nation, over 200 of which have already attained the highest achievable level of Ambassador.
Visit >

(2011) - The Weather Channel's iPad app has a media buy that allows a fully interactive HTML5-driven page to be displayed within the app. This is unique in that normally, an interactive page such as this would be built in Flash, but with the shift to the iPad platform, we're now turning to HTML5 with javascript and CSS transforms to perform the same interactivity and motion.

Clicking or dragging the slider spins the landscape left and right, and clicking to watch the videos brings up an overlay which plays the video in an iPad-viewable format.
Watch Demo >   View HTML5 Ad (works on iPad only) >

(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.
Visit Website >

(2010) - The UX of this site was borrowed from the Space Collective website, with boxes that expand and collapse within the page, revealing entire articles and videos without ever leaving the one page. This was similar to the idea I had for the TakePart website, but in a different design with boxes floating and wrapping around each other rather than a single column of expanding rows. But the premise is the same, allowing the user to explore content in one place without the disorientation that can occur when loading page after page.

The Cisco Together site consists of videos of leading technologists in and outside of Cisco talking about video technology and the creative ways it brings people together, from family to academia and medicine, and the possibilities it brings to our future.

The design was kept clean with a subtle variety of colors. A multitude of media placements were created, utilizing the technologists and quotes or short video clips.
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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.
View Demo >

(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.

(2009) - The Realm was an animated web series with custom artwork by renowned comic book artist Mike Mayhew. It featured four superheroes, each representing an aspect of Cisco's Security solution, following their defense of an epic virus attack.

A follow-up project allowed people to create their own custom comic page, armed with the entire library of Mayhew's artwork created for the web series, all meticulously outlined and color-corrected.

I designed both websites, starter custom comics, wallpapers and media, the black & white wallpapers in particular being a joy to assemble from Mayhew's gorgeous drawings.

The Realm series won a 2010 Bronze Effie Award and the Comic Creator received a 40th Creativity Annual Awards Platinum Award and w3 Awards Gold.
Watch Episode 1 >   Watch Episode 2 >   Watch Episode 3 >   Watch Episode 4 >

(2009) - In 2009, Barbie turned 50 years old. So something big needed to be done online to celebrate her big anniversary. Recalling the Halo Believe site from a few years earlier, I thought the idea of a camera flying through a fully built model landscape was a perfect fit, considering how all of the dolls, accessories, houses, vehicles, and animals were made to be assembled together into a toy fantasy land.

The budget was considerably smaller than that of the Halo Believe site, but Barbie's own professional set designers took on the epic task of building six gigantic detailed landscapes with the dolls, accessories and all composed within.

Since the entire site was based on the interaction of this video being played in an infinite loop, I had to get creative with the site map, displaying an oval track with segments that represent a different chapter in the video, with the ability to dive into detailed content at specific interaction points during the video.

I also had the idea of creating a diorama for the timeline, but this was sadly scrapped for a fairly traditional timeline. You can see the diorama timeline in the wireframes below and imagine how the dolls and accessories would relate to when they appear in the video. A simple and fun idea, and one that I'd like to do in some form in the future.

The Barbie 50th Anniversary site received a Silver ADDY Award in 2009.
Watch 50 Years of Barbie >

(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) - This was a very quick pitch to refresh Zebra's website to modern expectations of web design with a fresh clean and open style with a wider footprint. Stylization was kept to a minimum with clean shapes and lines to make the content easy to scan and read. A bold header motif using photos masked within a barcode pattern matched perfectly with Zebra's business, which largely centers around the use of barcodes to tag and track just about anything in the physical world.

(2010) - Cisco was exploring an opportunity to create and showcase a custom Telepresence unit on a live ESPN Sportscenter broadcast in the context of interviewing a professional athlete far across the globe.

We were provided a few shots of the studio, but they weren't enough to illustrate the full flow of how we envisioned the script to unfold. Even though I'd had practically zero experience with any 3D programs beforehand, I decided it was the ideal option since it would only require creating the studio once, and then the view could be placed absolutely anywhere we needed.

I went ahead with Google's free Sketchup application, and just spent a few hours going through the tutorial and getting comfortable with the interface. I got the hang of it quickly enough, and then just went about building the ESPN studio from scratch, using the photos as reference. I pulled out images from the photos such as the floor and the SportsCenter backdrop and texture-mapped them onto the relevant 3D panes, and then plopped a couple of the anchors into the scene and I was set.

It's nothing mind-blowing, but I'm pretty happy with the result of my first 3D endeavor.

(2010) - Cisco was working on a partnership with the New York Times to create a new video platform for the New York Times website. It centered around making live events a more "human" social experience, incorporating live video chat rooms to invite friends through Facebook or Twitter. One example also incorporated a map of the world with real-time audience data, as well as a standard text chat window and live twitter feed.

Another example was a continuous 24 hour broadcast, with one hour allotted to a specific city in each time zone at 6pm local time for each. So one could tune in at any time day or night and get the 6 O'clock news from around the entire world.

(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 >

(2007) - In 2007, Toyota was looking for a full refresh of their website. The process took us through several months of research, exploration, architecting and design. The site eventually relaunched on the conservative side of our ideas and designs, sacrificing a lot of the sexiness that is now easily possible with today's web standards, and not that far from what was possible back then. Full-screen backgrounds, flexible layouts, animated menu and interface transitions. We also proposed the idea of an avatar in the menu that could respond to any questions, much like Firefox's ubiquity or Apple's Siri, to help users in any way, particularly with selecting a vehicle.

(2007) - Insomniac Games had separate websites for each of its games in the Ratchet and Clank series, and they wanted to clean up and pull them together into a single website which could also grow to introduce and include any future Ratchet and Clank games.

It was a fairly straightfoward process pulling all the weapons, characters, worlds, gadgets, and videos and letting the user filter through them all by game.

The design was inspired from styling of the then latest game Ratchet and Clank Future Tools of Destruction, and my aim was to make the pages feel almost like video game box art, very visual and letting the game artwork fill the space.

(2011) - This is a custom theme I built using the open source Convowall, tweaking the code to make the tweets scroll down. Below are two examples of basic CSS changes that show how this can be customized to pretty much any look. I actually keep the NFL one running for good stretches of the day in my office which keeps me informed far quicker than any news media site or forum, something that comes in quite helpful to give me an edge in fantasy football.

The Bieber example is just cause it makes a great example, being that people just do not stop tweeting about Bieber at every hour of the day.
View NFL Wall >   View Bieber Wall >

(2008) - During March Madness of 2008, we played into people's competitive nature and loyalty to their alma mater to make this Cisco's highest engaged banner at the time.

The idea was to let you select which college you'd like to play for, answer a series of basketball-related trivia questions, and a mean/avarage score would be calculated based on everyone's score who selected the same college. A leaderboard would then display which school was smartest. People could take the quiz as many times as they like to improve their college's score, and they could also be encouraged to select a rival college and purposely throw the game to lower their rival college's score.

A 35 second shot clock set a time limit for answering all 5 questions and added a touch of college basketball feel, and also ensured people couldn't just go look up all of the answers at their leisure.

(2009) - This was a brief exploration of a redesign for Nature Made's homepage in both wireframe and visual design including various methods for a horizontally scrollable area to highlight their latest offerings.

(2010) - For a pitch to redesign the KB Homes website with a focus on their Home Configurator, I designed our wireframes as blueprints to give them a unique personality.

Part of the configurator would be to have high profile interior designers giving advice with each choice and allow people to get and share feedback on their configuration with friends.

(2009) - To promote Nature Made Heart Health, I concepted the idea of a snack diet tracker with a heart tamaguchi that became healthier or sicker based on the foods you entered. There would be both an online and mobile component with weekly email progress reports that would show a graph to visually display how your heart was doing.

(2008) - This was a basic process of re-architecting the parents section of the Barbie website. I always feel that inserting line drawings makes the wireframes immensely more readable than just boxes and crosses, particularly when it comes to presenting to clients. It's less work on the mind to interpret and make it easy to imagine what the final product could look and feel like.

(2010) - I originally came up with this idea for Cisco to create an aggregate page of their social media feeds as a purely SEO-minded practice. It wasn't until a few months later that it was brought back in another form to replace their news portal.

The 4-column layout was an easy resolution to share the weight of the different feeds as evenly as possible. And a large full-width feature area ensures Cisco can call attention to something important. And at the bottom are links to the rest of Cisco's social media presences.
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(2008) - To generate buzz around the latest Cisco ASR series of routers, we built a teaser site consisting of five mythical people and how the network helps them do their jobs, from Santa Claus delivering presents to Cupid managing who gets shot with arrows.

Each character presented their stories through a series of funny videos, and the user was consistently presented with the opportunity to register to attend an online event revealing the product.

(2008) - At the time, Cisco was weary of constantly making one-off web pages to promote or highlight new campaigns, solutions or products, which had life spans of a few weeks or even days, ending up sitting dormant on their servers and no specific plan to how to tend to them. I came up with this solution that maintained the layout of the homepage, but expanded the feature area downwards to reveal the content right on the homepage.

The first usage of this displayed a video player with a small library of videos to choose from. A subsequent version displayed video in the full area of the expanded feature. The type of content and interaction was practically limitless within the bounds of the expanded area.

A web banner or other media could also drive directly to the homepage with one of the features already fully expanded, so this page served the same practical purposes as the one-off's with the advantage of easy house cleaning.