Client: VM Economic Consulting - New York, New York
Dates: October 2011 - January 2012

Description: The concept for this project was simple: "we are new, don't have lots of clients, so something small, simple, and sleek will do". VMEC is a new consulting company focused on import/export market research, aimed at helping mid-sized domestic businesses reach their target market with efficiency and ease. For this project I was to brand and design the new company's image, develop their website, and create a simple, light and pleasant user experience. The site features a light, textured background, contrasted by deep blue undertones of the logo, and a simple content sliding navigation technique.

Task: Branding, Logo Design, User Experience, Website Design and Development

Visit Site: VMEC

Description: For my own branding and website design, I focused on the motif of a web/graph. With using a gray scale color theme and throwing away the standard convention of logo branding for a light and elegant font face, I aimed to express a minimal yet detailed brand. Typography was a huge focus, in the end using the "District" open-type font for the main bits and the "Vegur" open-type font for the large chunks of information. The background graphic was developed with Processing and aims to solve the pesky problem of display dimensions and background images. The background is generated via Processing on-load, scaling the dimensions of the composition according to the user's browser window. For the interactions, a jQuery accordion was used to house each project and a page-slide action was used to display information about myself as well as my contact info.

Client: Lou Lou - Le Petit Bistro - Miami, Florida
Dates: July 2011 - December 2011

Description: This project encompassed a wide array of design tasks and challenges. The goal of the overall site was to give the user a lot of information about Lou Lou without being bombarded with a lot of content. I decided to structure the site around a large-image background, giving the user a feel for what the restaurant was like right from the start. The web-page was designed around the motif of "slides". I wanted to make the user experience for viewing the site similar to that of going through a menu in a restaurant. Accordingly, the user is meant to find and discover information about the restaurant incrementally, the same way a customer peruses items on a menu. The site was partitioned into two parts: controls on the left side were aimed at new users, ones who had never seen or been to the restaurant before, while the right side held controls of the experienced customer, housing information about new specials, as well as direction to the restaurants Twitter and Facebook accounts. The site was also designed to be a multi-device user experience. Optimized for iPad and compatible with the iPhone, the site scales fully with respect to dimensions, making the experience unified, whether it be on a computer, tablet, or mobile device.

Task: Branding, Logo Design, Interface Design, User Experience, Website Design and Development

Visit Site: Lou Lou - Le Petit Bistro

Client: Chilmark Builders, Inc - Pleasantville, New York
Dates: August 2011 - January 2012

Description: Chilmark Builders, Inc is a full service, high-end, construction, building, and finishing company. They specialize in building and finishing fine residential homes, interiors, and corporate office spaces. Chilmark came to me in the summer of 2011, after seeing a past project of mine (for Opacic Architects) and asked if I could do something similar for them. They wanted something simple and elegant, a site that had touches of traditional style, modern sleekness, and a face for the company that reflected their brand of catering to high-end construction projects. The site was built on Flash, and posed a lot of the same challenges as the site for Opacic Architects. The difference in projects was that while Opacic Architects had access to original bitmap images of their projects, Chilmark did not. The challenge here was to design a site that would accommodate Chilmark in a way that, while being small and simple, still showed their attention to quality and detail. The site was scaled in proper dimensions to house photos and projects, and a custom image viewer was built around this as well, partitioning the showcase into "interior" and "exterior" images.

Task: Branding & Typography, Interface Design, User Experience, Website Design and Development

Visit Site: Chilmark Builders, Inc

Class: INFO 1100: Media Programming
Date: November 2011

Description: In the Fall of 2011, I was enrolled in INFO 1100: Media Programming at Cornell University, a class that aimed to both teach basic programming and media design through the use of Processing. For the poetry visualization assignment, students were to pick a poem and create a data visualization of the words within the poem. For this I picked Jorge Luis Borges's "Instantes", and designed the composition around the motif of the beating heart. The center red ring was animated to pulsate repeatedly, while the "bubbles" represent each word in the poem. The visualizer aims to orient more important words in the poem, that reflect the core ideas of the piece, closer to the "heart", and the less important ones further from the center. The sizes of the bubbles are constructed in proportion to the sizes of the words and how often it appears in the poem. Ellipses were added to the composition to give a 3-dimensional illusion to the bubbles, making the words of less importance seem to be floating up and away from the "heart".

Class: INFO 3450: Human-Computer Interaction Design
Date: September 2011 - November 2011

Description: In the Fall of 2011, I was enrolled in INFO 3450: Human-Computer Interaction Design. For the final project, my group and I were assigned to redesign one of the many user experiences that are part of the Facebook platform. For this we decided to focus on the segment of the site that revolved around the installation and use of apps. Our research showed that, although the current system adds a very interesting element to the online social experience, it is not widely used in the Facebook community. Many participants did not even know that Facebook had apps, and those who did generally marked the platform as "inefficient,” "spammy.” "disorganized," and "untrustworthy.” As a group we set out to make a prototype that demonstrated the system's true capabilities. We designed an App Marketplace similar to that of Apple's app store and Google Chrome's web-app store, creating a new revenue model for the system while reorganizing it and making it much more user friendly. Users would be able to buy and install apps to their Facebook account, track which of their friends had certain apps, make decisions for which apps to install based on their own social network, and generally take the app experience to a new social level. In-app experiences were critically defined to be as social as possible. Users could invite friends while using the app or, while initializing the app, could chat with people they were participating with in-app, and post results of gameplay or app use to their or their friends' walls. App notifications on the current system often bombard the user's notification inbox, but with our system, these notifications would be aggregated based on particular situations, events, and uses. Moreover, the system at its core was designed on the simple principal that not all users are created equal. Although there are plenty of people on Facebook that would benefit from this platform, there are some that would not. Accordingly we designed a simple opt-in, opt-out model, where those who wanted to be part of the app experience could, while others could simply disable the system if they didn't.

Client: Opacic Architects - Irvington, New York
Dates: June 2010 - August 2010

Description: Opacic Architects is a small architecture firm based in Irvington, NY headed by Principal and Head Designer, Radoslav Opacic. The firm prides itself on exceptional attention to detail, well-planned designs, and to provide the utmost customer satisfaction. For this project the initial goal was to redesign Opacic Architects’s then-current site, allowing for much larger images and more projects. After much planning and discussion, the notion of a quick redesign was scrapped and the need for a complete redevelopment was noticed. The site was built on Flash, houses all of Opacic Architects projects, and has 8 to 12 large dimension, high resolution images for each project. Moreover, I was assigned to make the site very minimal. "I never really liked how the old site had a lot of text-info about us. I really just want the projects to speak for themselves, and give prospective clients and users what they really want to see." For the design of the site, I worked closely with Opacic Architects's in-house Graphic Designer, Janet Roseff. Together we devised and augmented the graphic layout of the site and its overall aesthetic nature. Furthermore, I worked on creating a simple, clear, and user-friendly experience. Altogether, the site uses a color combination of natural beige and brown colors, as not to distract the users from the main purpose of the site: to view and learn about past projects. Aside from the projects-view, the motif of "slivers" was used throughout. The client didn't want to give prospective clients too much from the start (homepage), but rather wanted to intrigue them and entice them to go on to explore the site.

Task: Interface Design, User Experience, Website Design and Development

Visit Site: Opacic Architects

Date: June 2010

Description: Inctix Designs was a project that was a personal test run at branding and design. My goal with this was to attempt to create a brand for a theoretical web design firm started by myself. The principals and motto of the business revolves around the notion of clean, efficient and user-friendly sites. I focused mostly on typography, color combinations, and graphic design. It was a chance for me to get acquainted with several different parts of the adobe creative suite, and to take a swing at graphic design. All the parts of this project were assembled into a website, whose format and layout were based on Jonathan Harris's personal website, number27.org.

Visit Site: Inctix

Date: January 2010

Description: Viral Dub was a blog that I maintained when I was in high school. I created the logo and edited blogger's "minimal" template to my liking. I wanted to give the site a "techy" yet experimental feel due to the fact that most of what I would be blogging about would be interesting products, obscure music, and some quirky DIY tutorials.

Visit Site: Viral Dub