I’ve been playing around with generative art in Flash for a while now. Recently I discovered how to work in using the bitmapData class in order to achieve more complex compositions. My first few tests focused on working with older photographs of myself and turning them into organic, painterly pieces.

When the Options Industry Council approached Roundarch with an RFP to redesign and rethink their web-based Options Awareness and Education presence I jumped at the opportunity. Even though this would be a pitch, and thus time would be tight, I relished the opportunity to design a web site and take a break from all of the Flex RIAs I have been doing.

An option is, “a contract to buy or sell a specific financial product officially known as the option’s underlying instrument or underlying interest.” The crux of this concept was to take the dead-feeling content the OIC currently had and add life to it. We didn’t want to recreate their existing library. We wanted to build them a tool. One that through social mechanisms and personalization would be ever-fresh and always relevant.

The design strategy began by cultivating a visual language for each of their three main user groups so that once authenticated, the site would assume the user role’s identity and only offer information relevant to them. We then thought about how we could build an adaptive curriculum that would suggest new and relevant lessons based on what the user has completed and allow the user to share lesson-plans with their peers. Lastly we added the ability for the user to personalize their experience through the concept of “My Folder” and “My Curriculum”.

An exercise in re-skinning an automotive touch-screen UI. The functionality of our proposed interface had already been set by the time I was brought in to re-skin and re-imagine the layout. My primary focus on this project was to show how radically different we could make these “skins” or “themes” while retaining critical functionality.

Shortly after the Visual Design department was created at Roundarch, upper management decided to rebrand Keystone, the company intranet. The goal was to give it a refresh to grow excitement about using the tool to facilitate internal knowledge-share between offices and departments. I led the redesign effort and decided to focus on the logo mark as a storyteller for this metaphor. I decided to create a reactive logo, built in flash, that would measure activity in each of the core competencies of the company and reflect that activity visually in the header of the intranet. For instance, if the UX department was very active blogging, posting white papers and commenting on others’ posts, their color and shape would grow and become more prominent in the logo. Ultimately the script necessary to capture this activity was never written, but the logo and mark lived on with random values being applied at each page refresh.

At Roundarch we were always looking for new and interesting ways to tell our story of the intersection between Technology, Strategy and Design. To illustrate this I created a series of boards for a looping animation – something of a Reel for trade-shows and other venues where a more “lean-back” approach is best. This screen is one of a few showing this concept.

As a designer, working “behind the firewall” is difficult because you can’t show or even talk about your work. Roundarch is one of those consultancies that work almost entirely behind the firewall. So when we had a chance to team up with Sam and Chad from Drop.io we jumped at the opportunity to redesign their web-application. What Drop.io does is input, view and output. That’s it. It’s a simple but powerful concept that we wanted our designs to reflect. The cornerstone of this concept, a feature that is yet to be implemented, is the ability to use the title bar (white-on-black text in the header of the design) as a command-line so that power-users can quickly access the powerful functions of the site (and hacks) right from the header of the page. The rest of the design was meant to be light and functional with the ability to have skins applied to it. Sam and Chad were thrilled with the outcome and Drop.io was a success.

The decision to execute a windowed vs. integrated GUI depends largely on the complexity of tasks the user will engage in. For the MasterCard Customer Extranet we decided to go with the former. In time this RIA was intended to aggregate and commingle well over 100 discreet applications ranging from dispute resolution to new client on-boarding. In the end the client’s appetite didn’t allow us to implement a paradigm much different from the traditional Windows task-bar, but our color language and enhanced user experience represented a huge leap forward from where they began.

During my short tenure at Schematic’s Advanced Interactive Group, I was asked to design and prototype the new NBC Olympics Silverlight video player. Not knowing a thing about Silverlight at the time, I tried to keep the interaction patterns manageable and the experience as immersive as I thought the technology would allow. This was a POC for Microsoft MIX’08 that then got tweaked for production.

Working with an old friend of mine from the eCor boot-camp days, Adam Jackson, I was tasked to come up with site concept for Heineken’s newest product, the Heineken BeerTender, an ultra-premium home-bar solution. My concept revolved around 3 viewpoints to the same event – the viewpoints being “Design”, “Inspiration” and “Innovation” and the event being the perfect pour. The concept was designed to allow the user to filter their experience by seeing the perfect pour of a Heineken Beer colored in 3 different lights.

I have been formulating an idea over the past few months around using flickr’s search/tag system to create a browse-by-relevance experience. Meaning that the starting point for the user’s experience is an image of theirs, and from there they may choose to visualize other flickr users’ images that share the same tags/set/image names. So if I’m in my Africa set and I’m looking at “lion1.jpg” I can decide to flip a switch and see other images that get returned when a search for “Africa” + “Lion” is run.

This idea stems from an idea I had a while back for “capture-collective.com” – what was supposed to be a photo critique/continuing education experience – where users were given an assignment (i.e. “black and white portraiture”) and they could share their photos while receiving and giving critiques on other’s photos in one place. Shortly after I formulated that idea flickr hit the scene in a big way and their “flickr groups” kind of occupied the same conceptual space capture-collective.com did. This is an ongoing personal concept that is continually being refined and rebuilt.