Off for a couple weeks.
Here’s a doodle from my sketchbook. Apologies for the morbid theme. As a character, I always thought that General Grievous was pretty cool. Largely a robot, he has a hint of humanity and thus, some ultimate weakness. It stands to reason that he would be a significant foe to the Jedi, he has the advantages of an automaton, balanced with the reason/unreasonable qualities of a mortal. I think it’s his wheezing voice that really drives home his credibility as a character; clearly a powerful leader with some obvious frailty.

These are some shots of a recently completed project for a local IT company called Rove. The project involved a set of icons to be used in their soon to be released series of IT focused apps for mobile devices. The creative brief essentially required a set of icons that would represent the function of the app, adequately support the company brand and ensure a consistent look and feel across the products. The company is undertaking a series of these types of apps and needed to set an open yet adaptable guideline for future icons. Below is the finished series for the Notification, Exchange and VMware apps. Once the design is completed, its an entirely different task to create the finished assets in the appropriate sizes and for the different platforms. I suppose it would be a designer’s pipe dream to think that the different device manufacturers could settle on a standardized spec for graphic assets.

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My design for the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest Website. You will notice that there are some differences between the design and the actual site.

I was retained by the site builders to consider a design for this popular website with a particular constraint of it being built in Drupal (a very popular open source CMS platform). My experience with the platform continuous guided my approach to the information architecture and eventually the look and feel. At first, the design was very schematic, since the client had not yet considered what the theme might be for this year. The “going Hollywood” theme was provided and I ran with it. I was trying to avoid the obvious cliches and making an enormous effort to ensure the site was clean, intuitively presented and ultimately….buildable within the crazy time limits. (more…)

This is a small project for a local Ottawa startup. Its still a work in progress and is covered by an NDA, so I can’t really say anything about it. The concept essentially provides business and marketing executives with a dashboard that provides some insight into the performance of their online stores. The real magic is behind the scenes (but I can’t talk about that). The essence of the design is to provide the client with a simple way (everything is green= everything is ok) to gauge their store’s state. If something is wrong, the UI facilitates the ability to drill down and discover the underlying problems.

I’m still waiting for my credentials to come thru from Apple before I can officially upload this to the iTunes store. What you see are screenshots of the app running in the iPhone emulator on my desktop.
This app is a bare bones RSS reader for one of my clients. I’ve been thinking  for a while now, that it would be nice to have a standalone application that would let me pull the content from a blog site without having to launch and navigate to the website…and then zoom and pan to read the page. This app pulls the feed content from the site and displays it in an optimized format for the device.
There was minimal coding for this project, the bulk of the heavy lifting was done using the WYSIWIG tools provide by Xcode and Dashcode. It was then all wrapped up with the Phonegap SDK to “iPhonize” it. This was pretty much a “Hello World” project, but I like to think that I added some decent UI design to it. Can’t say it was easy, since it involved a bit of trial and error, but the end result appears to be stable and useful. Once I get my full developer credentials, I can test it on my new iPhone (legitamizing its business use) and deploy it to the store. I have a bunch of ideas for more involved and interesting apps…and can’t wait to get started on them.