While working at Urban Compass, I participated in a Hackathon to come up with new products or features that could help improve the apartment rental/buying experience. I worked on a team of two to come up with Swift, an iPhone app that minimizes the work and stress of apartment hunting by pairing customers up with an agent and giving them a personal chat experience to let their agent know exactly what they like and don't like. Swift fully leverages the value of working with an agent within a trustworthy and transparent system, and provides agents with genuine leads that are more likely to stick with them.
This is a selection of the pages that I've worked on while employed as a product designer at Urban Compass. The end goal of features that we as a product team have implemented is to develop a platform that makes apartment hunting in NYC faster, easier, and overall a more enjoyable experience.
TaleIt is an online community for anyone who has a story to tell. Whether it's a story about your backpacking trip to the Himalayas or simply a great meal with your friends, TaleIt is a place for people who enjoy life and want to share their experiences with others. I was hired to handle branding, badge illustration, UI design, and front-end development for the site, while working very closely with the client/back-end developer. This was my largest project working both as a designer and developer, but it served as a great experience, and I plan to continue developing this hybrid skillset. The site is almost ready for beta users, and I look forward to showing more of the project in the near future.
For New Years 2013, Chris Streger asked me to participate in the To Resolve Project, an annual undertaking for designers to create their new years resolution in the form of an iPhone wallpaper for others to download. I opted to draw some custom letters for my resolution, and then figured I might as well complete the alphabet. You can download the wallpaper here.
While working at Kettle, I worked on the brand, visual language, and website design for Wishbone.org, a non-profit platform to assist students in fundraising for out-of-school programs that they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. We developed vast icon sets and flexible page structures to accomodate a variety of student-specific content, information on the programs, and value-adding updates for donors. We also created a custom CMS to make it easy to update content and manage donated funds.
In the summer of 2012, my good friends, Sarah and Andy, got married at Sarah's family's farm in Northwestern Connecticut. As a gift to them, I designed their invites and RSVP cards, incorporating organic, country-inspired elements while also maintaining a modest, elegant aesthetic. They were letterpress printed by Big Wheel Press in Northampton, Massachusetts.
For Christmas this past year, I decided to put my skills to good use to make a few family crest stamps for friends. Keeping it simple with some custom type and organic, geometric shapes, I think these turned out to be nice little gifts that are hopefully used and appreciated for years to come.
Rotunda is an experimental display typeface that utilizes concentric shapes and unconventional ornamentation to result in soft, geometric letterforms with distinction. It was developed as a personal, exploratory project, but may at some point be released for public use.
While working at Kettle, I assisted in layout design, navigation iconography, and visual development of the mobile site for Sesame Street. The focus of the project was to make family-friendly content easily accessible to both parents and children, while maintaining the playful character already present in the Sesame Street brand. Key features that I worked on were instructional activity and recipe pages, as well as detail views for specific topics.
For my girlfriend's mother's birthday, I made her a set of custom printed greeting cards that commemorated her new home. I decided to illustrate the new residence with her pets, combining the recognizeable inhabitants with their new surrounding. My intention was for the cards to be mailed out to friends and relatives, so that their immediate recognition of the pets would make the house feel already familiar and comfortable.
For several years, I have participated in Bike MS NYC, an event that exists to raise money and awareness for the National MS Society. My friends and I ride as a team, under the self-appointed name, the "Spacely Sprockets." To help gain support for our cause, I decided to make our team some custom type and a logo to represent us at fundraising events. Additionally, we printed bike jerseys sporting the designs.
