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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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.

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.