Professional Experience
While we talk about avoiding silos, I was the front end silo. I cleaned up non-semantic markup, inline CSS and <center> tags. I pondered whether to use a <dl> or a two column table, a line chart or a bar chart. I tore apart table based layouts and superfluous <divs>.
I designed, marked up and styled an internal dashboard that we used to watch high level important numbers. I conducted A/B test on different interface designs. Where I could I slid microformats into the codebase.
I helped launch and maintained the company weblog. I translated static Photoshop mockups into real live HTML / CSS and (depending on the case) Ruby on Rails ERB. I cut away at interface designs with Occam's Razor.
- RubySpec Continuous Integration Dashboard
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Ryan Davis and Evan Phoenix asked me to bang out a dashboard design plus the HTML / CSS to illustrate high level progress of the Rubinius (and later MRI and JRuby) builds on different platforms. Ryan and I iterated really quickly over a few permutations. The evolution is below in the order that it transpired.
Contact : Evan Phoenix -
- Seattle.rb
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I've been going to Seattle Ruby Brigade meetings for a few years. I have started working with some of the other rubyists on 'marketing' kinds of things for various ruby projects.
Contact : Eric Hodel - Seattle.rb logo
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The first thing I did for Seattle.rb was to cleanup and stylize the logo. The first thumbnail below is the old logo, all the others are my redesigns. There are multiple versions for various use cases. Some one color, some with a gradient. With word mark, without. Some are horizontal, some more square-ish.
Contact : Ryan Davis -
- Seattle.rb Website
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The design goal was to highlight three things important to the group: the people involved, the regular meetings and the projects made by the people involved. Secondarily, my aim was to reduce the complexity of the data by using one column and one page. Less clicking about. The first thumbnail is the old website.
Contact : Ryan Davis -
- Heckle
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I commissioned an illustration and worked as Art Director on this logo. The vectorization was also done by me.
Contact : Ryan Davis -
- Mechanzie
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I cleaned an old illustration and repurposed it for this logo. I added the typography.
Contact : Aaron Patterson -
- Rubinius
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I designed the main project logo. I designed and coded up the initial Rubinius homepage (black background). While at RailsConf 2008 in Portland I whipped up a new homepage (white background) to replace the older one. For the website version of the logo, I art directed a friend converting my 2D flat version into a shiny 3D version.
Contact : Evan Phoenix -
- ZineDistro
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I did nearly all the work on this project, excluding content. I designed it, wrote all the of html and css and ruby/rails code. I used some new html5 markup on this site.
Contact : Eli Duke -
- ListYourList
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Eli Duke and I rebuilt this together from the ground up using all the new the new tricks and techniques that we had picked up in the 3 years since its inception.
Contact : Eli Duke -
White Raven is the company of Marvin Schlaak, my previous creative director at Arcadus. I've contracted with him on and off for several years. Work has included Flash development, interface design, PHP scripting and xhtml and css devlopment.
Examples of our work together include: Cobb County Energy, Hestia Custom Homes and Griffiti.
I worked between the designers and the programmers. We experimented with Flash as a replacement for the front-end for WisdomTool's application. I built prototypes of different pieces in the application. I was also a part of a small team who adventured on redesigning the front-end interface of their application top to bottom.
A few months later, the dot com bubble popped. 30 of us were laid off.
I was the across-the-board designer. I was responsible for the website design, collateral design and Flash rapid application development.
While I was there IIPI was making location based applications for mobile devices. I would make Flash based mockups of what the application could be down the road.
I did Flash interactive design on external and in-house projects including rebranding public relaunch and internal sales demo tool. Client branding design. I was a part of Plaid's rebranding and Mac of All Trades' rebranding.
Both of these have, of course, since overhauled their sites, but the brand is still based on the work we did. A couple years after I left, Arcadus merged with another company then shortly later went out of business. Thus, no website.
Skills and Technologies
- HTML & CSS
- HTML and CSS is like the one-two-punch of any web designer worth their weight in saffron. It's the lingua franca of application development these days. I've been writing HTML since 1995 in high school, with a commitment to "doing it right" with web standards since 2002.
- Web Standards
- Adhering to web standards like X/HTML, CSS and DOM scripting means websites are smaller, faster, easier to maintain and rank higher in search engines.
- Semantic Markup
- I always try to use the most meaningful markup for the data in question. If it's an address, use <address>. If it's a paragraph, use <p>. Abbreviation, <abbr>. Headings, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on.
- Microformats
- By using specific class names combined with semantic markup, we can give plain ol' html more valuable meaning. I use microformats where ever possible. See for example: hCard (bottom of this resume), rel-tag (this skills list), hCalendar (the Seattle.rb site) and hresume (you're looking at it).
- Ruby on Rails
- I've used Ruby on Rails since March of 2006 on all of my projects. My role has ranged from interface designer to all around developer.
- Git
- I use a git workflow for all of my projects and deployment.
- Subversion
- I've used Subversion on past projects and while I prefer git to it, I am competent using it..
- Ruby
- I made the switch from PHP to Ruby in March of 2006 and haven't looked back.
- Illustrator
- Almost all the design work I do is done primarily in Illustrator. I've been using Illustrator since Version 7 (1998).
- Photoshop
- Photoshop is like a nuclear submarine; no one is the master of all parts of it. I know the areas I need to know well enough. When I don't know an area, I know where to look for help.
- Flash
- I got into Flash with Version 2 (1998). I did nothing but Flash and ActionScript for 5 years. I never want to do it again.