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.

More from the literal vault. This sketch is obviously for a fire escape. I would date it as something from the late 90′s.
The building is the Victoria Woolen Mill in Almonte. I had worked on this building for better than a year while I was an intern. The building has a prominent position on the main street and by the river in this town. The building came into the hands of a couple of local developers, one of whom was Stephen Brathwaite. Stephen is an artist of some repute and proved to be a very fun and thoughtful client.

The firm I was interning with was Julian Smith & Associates, a nationally renown heritage conservation architect. As you may expect, the clientele for a heritage focused firm could be classified as conservative. Working on the Mill, with a progressive and free spirit client like Stephen was both liberating and challenging. At some point, my normally reserved sketches were not resonating with him. I took this as an opportunity to really let loose and design in a more modern manner. At first I didn’t share my sketchbook with him, choosing to try and translate the ideas into more conventional plan/section/elevation. But I was soon turning to the book to try and salvage the design meeting. It was both cathartic and transformational. I soon realized why I was working in this field and made an immediate resolution to pursue a more progressive and forward looking agenda.

The client received these sketches with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the budget didn’t allow for most of the ideas, but I have since noticed that the client has used some of the ideas as time and money allowed.