kevin deevey architect inc

More unbuilt…

kevin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:35:31 +0000

Another one from the sketchbook.
The client pulled the plug on this one.
The design features a simple, energy efficient main house, with a set back garage and an apartment on the upper level.
Its a bit of a shame…I really wanted to see this one through, I think it could have been a spectacular home.

On vacation…

kevin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:01:24 +0000

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.

Iphone/Blackberry App Graphic Design

kevin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:52:17 +0000

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.

For the application splash screen, we took a more generic approach and decided to emphasize the company brand. Given the brief exposure of the graphic (1-2 seconds on the iPhone), we felt it was important to only deal with one message, the corporate brand. It’s assumed the user already clicked on the product icon, so they know which app is starting up. Any further product branding would be a bit redundant. This also provides the client with a single splash screen for all future apps.

All the Rove apps are dependent on a server element called the “Gateway”. We decided to play up the product name and provide the landing webpage with a vivid vector graphic. The scheme for the page was already established, we felt that the white picket fence and the bold green of the grass would provide the page with a splash of excitement and a strong focal anchor. The picket fence motif is used in a lesser fashion as a line separator on the page.

Unbuilt #2

kevin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:12:52 +0000

Here is a drawing that been lingering in my sketch book.

A proposal for one of two houses to be built on a split lot in Alta Vista. The owner is a car guy, and wanted to dedicate the main floor to garage and workshop space. The sentiment among the local community was that large garages on the front on infill houses were a sensitive issue. Given that we needed some relief from the zoning (min. lot width) to pull off this project, we worked up a tandem garage design (two cars front to back) with some generous workshop space as well. I think we were able to minimize the impact of the garage and still provided an oasis for the car loving owner. Otherwise, we were able to meet all the other requirements for development, including the max. building height.

Secret work

kevin — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:30:37 +0000

I do a lot of work that I never talk about.
This is one of them.
A very good contractor I work with was planning to build a house. He hired a local (to him) part-time “draftsman” to draw up some plans. This “draftsman” was also a fulltime firefighter. Lets just hope that he’s better at putting out fires. The drawings that my friend showed me were horrifying. I believe that “friends don’t let friends design bad houses”…so I offered to “tweak” the design a bit. He left it with me and I came up with the above result. Needless to say, its nothing “avant garde”, and it doesn’t meet any of the criteria for the work I want to do as part of this firm. But sometimes you have to take a bullet and help out a friend.

Design vs. Implementation

kevin — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:20:21 +0000

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. Much like the design /build process in architecture, I was designing bits as the developer was implementing…obviously…a challenging process that limits iteration and revisions. A lot of the scope was carried over from the previous site and some new social media elements introduced…the dreaded “feature creep”. My goal was to move away from the dark themes from previous years and use some basic graphic design gestures to layout elements logically. Minimize movement and get the user to focus on the “call to action”, which is ideally to register and buy tickets. A tight budget limited my involvement to design only, which was difficult, since a design is often “optimized” during the implementation process with regular consultation and course corrections. It was difficult to stand back and let the design take its own course. My vain attempts to influence the clients to get Emm Gryner, Coeur de Pirate and Teagan & Sara to be in the lineup were also unfruitful.

Work in Progress…

kevin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:03:28 +0000

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.

Small things

kevin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:35:57 +0000

A sketch that I dug up. This was for one of two utility rooms placed in the Aberdeen Pavilion (a national historic site).
This is probably late ’90′s vintage, hence the rather po-mo design. The finished product looks almost identical to this. I’ve been killing myself trying to find the color version of this one…I need it for a small article I’m putting together.

Our latest award…

kevin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:34:42 +0000

edit: Updated link to the City’s award web page.
Just a quick update to announce that we have been awarded the “Award of Excellence” for 444 Highcroft Ave. from the City of Ottawa as part of the Ottawa Architectural Conservation Awards. I have blogged about this project previously here. You can also view the case study page here.
We are quite pleased about the recognition and are proud to have worked with such great client. A considerable amount of credit should go to the contractor Vincent DeBeer, who really raised the bar on quality.

My first iPhone app

kevin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:28:54 +0000

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.