portfolio (more in the lab)
solutions
Fitness Form, Modal Window Prototypes
In December 2009, I was tapped to develop solutions for the complex modal window forms on Strands Fitness. These eventually became the modal window forms you see today. However we explored a lot of interesting options, most of which I’m not at liberty to share. One of my favorites was the ability to preview a post before you saved it.
Here’s a taste of my ideas for solving the UX problems with the forms.
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0Magento template
Bookplate Ink
The Bookplate Ink project was a complete reinvention of a small company’s style. I gave them a new logo, a new color palette, and a new website built using Magenta. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to keep working with them due to a cross-country move, so all I have to show now is the original template design.
Roles: Design: web. CSS, HTML. Magento template.
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0for SaaS apps,
social networks
Old User Interface Designs 1 (misc)
I designed and built these user interfaces while at 3cStudios working on their 3cPlatform product. A few were customized for Sports Rooster, some were a style called “Xanadu”, and others were developed along the way. I’m including the type of application these were for with each screenshot.
Admittedly some of these are kind of crap (it’s been years since I started user interface design), but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere!
Roles: Design: web, user interface, user experience. CSS, HTML, some ASP.NET.
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0SaaS/CMS apps
Put It Somewhere
Put It Somewhere was my Getting Things Done blog for a number of years. Found it hard to maintain it plus Hanami Design so I’ve brought those worlds together. Really loved the logo, but the site felt a little unfinished. Colors were fresh and fun.
Roles: Design: web, graphic (custom logo). CSS, HTML, some ASP.NET.
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0design
Xanadu/3cPlatform SaaS User Interface
3cPlatform is a modular suite of solutions for managing business content online. Subscribers can choose from a variety of tools for managing business leads, team calendars, reports, site content, and so on. They could even extend their businesses with a white label social networking solution. Lots of cool stuff.
3cStudios, developers for 3cPlatform, have since moved on with their interface, but here’s what I originally worked up for the global dashboard. Not much more than a list of current subscriptions and these days I’d probably focus a lot more on notifications and updates from the individual modules. I’d also tone down the blue a bit. However, I really liked the design, especially the big jump menu and flexible tab + drop-down menu groupings, so take it for what it’s worth.
3cStudios will be more than willing to show you more than what I have here, so give ‘em a visit.
Roles: Design: web, UI, UX. CSS, HTML, some ASP.NET, XML.
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0WordPress
Visit
Passport Living
Passport Living is my personal travel site. As of August 2011, a little out of date, but a representation of the kind of travel my wife and I like to do and a fun exercise in creating a top-of-table + travel theme.
WordPress theme plus some minor PHP customizations.
Roles: Design: web. CSS, HTML, some PHP.
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0Flash + ASP
Visit
DJ Ekin
Worked on the DJ Ekin website back around 2003 or so and I’m still happy with how well the Flash treatment conveyed Ekin’s outgoing personality. Also the most orange I’ve ever used in a website and all things considered, I think it works. From what I can tell, Ekin is still just as “most connected” as ever.
Roles: Design: web. Flash (AS2), CSS, HTML, ASP (built custom CMS).
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0website,
SaaS/CMS apps
Visit
Orlando Science Center
This was a joint effort between Fry Hammond Barr and 3cStudios. Our contributions were mostly integration of the design into 3cPlatform. A very pretty site, but challenging to construct, especially given the layering along the bottom and the need for the page to flex. Still being used today, I believe.
Roles: CSS, HTML, some ASP.NET, Flash (AS2). Sales and marketing.
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0Visit
Steve Murphy Music
Steve is an amazing musician that I had the pleasure to record with a few years back. For fun we worked on creating a website that could feature his work. My design goal was to build the site around his image and name which was (at least in my personal opinion) a success. As far as personality driven sites are concerned, I’m of the firm belief that weaving the content literally around photographs, whether a single image or collage, helps bring real energy to a website and makes branding so more instantly recognizable.
Doesn’t seem that he’s updated it much after the first post so I can’t exactly where it’s headed, but it was a fun project.
Roles: Design: web. CSS, HTML, some PHP.
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2application
Strands Fitness Events
Strands Fitness Events is a straight to the point registration system for fitness events such as marathon and 5k races. It’s design is based mostly on the rushed-to-production aesthetic of Strands Fitness, but with a touch more of its own personality.
Roles: Design: web, UX, UI. CSS, HTML, some Ruby on Rails. HAML, SASS.
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0Visit
Hilton Club New York
This was a redesign project, meant to bring a fresh look to a washed out style. Obviously has been a while; centered sites like this have long since gone the way of the dodo. However I think it holds up okay and is very clean and to the point.
I was recently surprised to discover that the site is still active. See Hilton Club.
Roles: Web design. CSS, HTML. Sales and marketing.
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0Pilates Style
Pilates Style is a fitness related magazine for women by LifeStyle Media in New York City. My task was to create a nice, flexible design to be used as a template in their content management system. This was one of the first times I designed primarily for a CMS and though I was on the mark in most respects, my font choices were a bit problematic. I felt (though I can’t confirm) that my use of softer colors and rounded corners would be appealing to their audience, but with time I think I didn’t quite grasp the personality of the magazine. Also the design now seems to be completely disconnected from the background.
Roles: Design: web. CSS, HTML, Flash. Sales and marketing.
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1SaaS/CMS apps
Journeys Restaurant
I love Journeys Restaurant and the website I designed for them. Clean, friendly, and accurate to their personality, this was a breakthrough project for me at the time. Recently the site has been shelved to make way for “ChefBram.com”, so I’m not sure what’s going on with them at the moment, but I’m happy to have been a part of this.
Roles: Design: web, UI (admin tools). CSS, HTML, some ASP.NET, Flash.
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0laser industry
Visit
Laser Institute of America
The Laser Institute of America project was a nice collaboration between leadership, marketing, and myself. We based in the color scheme on their current artwork and worked through wireframes for a while till we settled on the best ways to retrofit their custom focused CMS with something more user friendly. Made massive improvements to their e-commerce area. SEO improvements apparently worked well; they saw a 30% increase in traffic (if I remember correctly).
Admittedly I’m not 100% happy with how the site has been changed since I last worked on the site. It’s now more cluttered and feels kind of dirty. But as MySpace once proved, as long as it works, that’s really enough.
Roles: Design: web, UI, UX. CSS, HTML, some PHP.
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0Channel Intelligence [B2B]
This design was created seven or eight years ago so the style is a little out of date. This was both a client project and a demonstration tool for our team at the time; I stepped through the process, iteration after iteration, demonstrating how a site design gets built. In retrospect, I would probably do a lot of things differently, but you live and learn.
Overall it’s not bad design, but does feel a little unfinished.
Roles: Design: web.
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0Marketing Collateral/PDF Customization Tool in Flex (Alpha)
The label on this app is misleading. It neither is in beta nor is for KMG. It is also not for Geeks on Call. This was an alpha version of a product we never quite released called 3cPrintShoppe. It produced PDFs of marketing materials that could be customized online.
This app was intended to be more or less MS Publisher in a browser, but we had a ways to go before things were ready for prime time.
I did all the coding for this and there are many (buggy) features:
- Templates (XML). Predesigned templates could be loaded on demand. All text and images are referenced in the XML, parsed by Flex, and saved again as XML.
- Font uploader. Companies can use any fonts they like. Set in the template and loaded at run-time.
- Rich text editing. Colors, bullets, etc.
- Size/placement/text modes. You can resize the boxes, move them, or just work with the text.
- Zoom. In and out, naturally.
- PDF generation. This requires server side code.
Roles: Design: web, UI. Flex Builder 2, Actionscript 3.
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0website,
SaaS/CMS/Flash
apps
Visit
Ultitude
Ultitude is a high-end travel service. They offer inclusive and exclusive travel packages for those who can afford it. I designed and built for them an elegant site to integrate into 3cPlatform, a custom CMS system for businesses and their sites.
Among other things, I built for them a dynamic Flash world map (below).
Roles: Design: web, UI. CSS, HTML, some Flash, XML, ASP.NET.
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0app redesign
Highlights
- Redesign of Strands Fitness
- Design of Strands Fitness Pro for iPhone
Strands Fitness: Before & After
Recently the newly anointed Strands Fitness team was instructed to simplify and clarify a product that was chock full of good features, but sinking under its own weight – at least visually. User experience had been an afterthought and the UI was tired, washed out, and bloated. Strands Fitness needed a diet.
My job was to drive the creative side of the team to solve the biggest user experience and interface problems with our site and mobile app and to get things done “yesterday”. I turned around a new built look and feel for both web and mobile apps within a few weeks.
Here is a look at the results.
Web app
One of our first tasks was to revise the registration: a complicated, buggy, and unnecessarily long process. We cut four pages down to two, gave the site a proper message, and added a Facebook login/sign up option.
We went banshee on the interface and stripped out anything we felt was unnecessary or in need of further development. We simplified the navigation and made the new Progress page the default. Proper action calls were developed and much attention given to fitness goals. The icon-only Share menu was replaced with a textual, content-sensitive mutton.
Though limited time prevented us from doing all we’d hoped with version 1, we managed to crank out a leaner and meaner UI that was far superior to the slow loading, Las-Vegas-meets-lawn-furniture aesthetic of before (pardon the hint of bitterness).
iPhone app
Though in some ways a pretty cool app, Strands for iPhone was frustrating to learn and wasn’t particularly convenient on the go. Furthermore it also was larger in file size than it needed to be with more settings and theming options than you could throw a stick at.
I worked up a theme named “Dum Dum” that put the most frequently used mobile options up front and used a single theme. We cut the size by approximately half. We also got a bump in speed, at least on the iPhone 3G where things run pretty slow these days.
On a related note, Strands Fitness for iPhone has been made the outstanding app section in the App Store of Spain. And we haven’t officially announced it, yet (as of time of writing).
Conclusion
Given the time we had to do all this (and so much more than I’ll describe here), I’m pretty happy. Getting Strands Fitness in shape (pardon the pun) has gone amazingly well. Our goals of a simplified, easy to learn and use fitness app are being realized, but we’re not the kind of team that’s easily satisfied so expect many more improvements as time goes on.
Roles: Design: web, UI, UX. CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails.
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0United Arts
United Arts is a non-profit organization that helps other non-profits in the greater Orlando area get the resources they need. Their site needed to express “art” without being too artsy and the angles went a long way towards doing this. Was a challenge, though, to keep the look maintained with the expanding and contracting of the dynamic content.
I consider this a breakthrough project as it was when I began to see site design as less about boxes and more about personality.
Roles: Design: web. CSS, HTML, Flash, XML, some ASP.NET.
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0Orlando Business Telephone Systems
This is one of my favorite B2B websites – that I’ve designed that is. Really came together fast. If memory serves, I didn’t expect it to stay so grey, since this was a fairly early iteration, but the neutrality actually worked pretty good. The center area was intended to rotate messages and specials. Rest of the site would be information and online registration and help services.
Roles: Design: web, UI. CSS, HTML.
