Corporate branding, identity and logo design for Orlando Spring Corporation. This included visual design, coordination, and production of OrlandoSpring.com as well as design and production services for trade show displays and print collateral.

During my internship at streaming-music startup MOG, I produced a number of simple ads for print advertising in the East Bay Express and SF Weekly papers, as well as banner ads for various web outlets and A/B testing purposes. I also created iPhone mock-ups for promotional use, and custom wallpaper for iPhone, iPad, and HD displays. The selection presented here is representative of the different types of work.

Promotional videos produced for the ManUpCanada.ca campaign.

Team

• Al Sinoy
• Andrew von Rosenbach
• Daniela Pichardo
• Taylor Kachmarski
• Tony Cheung
• Andrew Barber (actor)

Website re-design production work for EPTDESIGN‘s landscape architecture, urban design, and planning studios. Fully standards-compliant and a WordPress back-end for easy upgrades (without my help), mobile compatibility, and capacity to handle the massive amount of projects (100 and counting) featured for each different sector of the industry.

Team

• Photography – Jack Coyier & EPTDESIGN Staff
• Copywriting – EPTDESIGN Staff

An research-based document with supporting infographics completed as part of my IxD summer internship at streaming-music startup MOG. The final product became widely-used and modified for different purposes throughout the summer – It was one of my favorite internship projects. Sadly, this work is still under NDA… I’m posting blurred images so that I’ve got something to show for all of my work.

iPad application concepts completed during my internship at emerging cloud-based music streaming service MOG in Berkeley, California. The concept was to bring the oldschool box of LPs to your lap while still providing quick search, artist pages, sharing, playlists, and advanced capabilities of the MOG web and mobile platforms. These examples represent a massive set of mock-ups completed with mentorship from  Anu Kirk, Rolf Wilkinson, and T. Jay Fowler.

Website created for the Men’s Health Initiative of British Columbia as a hub for the ManUpCanada.ca campaign our team developed. Produced as a targeted campaign for the 18-35 year old male demographic; a simplified counterpart for the AboutMen.ca campaign and website. Integrates jQuery video sliders, a survey, social media tracking, and 960px grid-based implementation of the Man Up Canada brand.

Branding, identity, logo development and campaign branding guidelines for the Man Up Canada campaign developed for the Men’s Health Initiative of British Columbia.

Infographics produced as support for Dr. Larry Goldenberg and the Men’s Health Initiative of the British Columbia Medical Journal.

Team

• Nick Lewis
• Ryan Klesc
• Al Sinoy
• Taylor Kachmarski
• Daniela Pichardo

This short video was produced in a single weekend with MDM classmate Nick Lewis as part of Animation in a Digital World course with professor Larry Bafia. Our instructions were to create a video about getting to school: this one contrasts my ridiculously short but painful commute across Great Northern Way with Nick’s long but peaceful journey from Commercial Drive to the Centre For Digital Media every day.

Shot in HD over two days in Vancouver, the video was first edited to create the full video sequence. We exported every 10th frame, separated them into the contrasting batches, and ran each batch through a series of Photoshop actions to play with levels, saturation, contrast, and add the blurred tilt-shift effect. We then re-assembled the stills at 10fps, added our soundtrack, and exported. The effect was something like a stop-motion film, with elements of tilt-shift miniaturization throughout.

Music

• Stash by Joker & Ginz

This team project paired us with Microsoft Canada and David Eaves to build a web-based game that taps into Open Data from the City of Vancouver, utilizes the Bing Maps Public API, and showcases the power of Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. We named our game TaxiCity.

On May 27th, 2010, our TaxiCity game won the Best Student App as well as the Second Prize in the For The Web (FTW) Awards presented at the Make Web Not War Conference in Montreal.

Microsoft Canada also reported us in one of their press release: Microsoft Continues to Fuel Vibrant App Ecosystem in Vancouver.

Open Data from the City of Vancouver’s public catalog was used to create the game environment; Bing Maps acts as a sort of GPS mini-map for the player; and Silverlight was our main  development platform. Players take on the role of a freelance taxi driver in Vancouver, BC, tasked with picking up and delivering passengers to landmarks around the city. As the players level-up, they unlock new areas of the city and become more familiar with the geography of the region.

Our final product included three deliverables: the TaxiCity game, the ManPower game engine, and the process documentation that chronicles our experience developing a game in the latest Microsoft frameworks and the potential for Open Data and open APIs in game development. You can check out our progress on the official TaxiCity Website. The video below gives a solid overview of our process.

My Role

I was both Art Director and Client Relations Manager for this team, focusing my attention on branding, UI design, and the creation of all art assets for the gameplay screens and HUD. I also setup the initial project website, logos, and worked on video production for our documentation library. I acted as the liaison between our three primary Microsoft clients, Omar Rashid (Director, Government at Microsoft Corporation), Barb Berg (Director, Healthcare and Western Government at Microsoft Corporation) and Chris Pendleton (Bing Maps Technical Evangelist) –  as well as our Open Data contact, the infamous David Eaves, an avid proponent and expert on the Open Data scene. This job took a turn as interest in our product heated-up, keeping me in touch with PR executives for Microsoft, experts at the City of Vancouver, other Open Data evangelists and developers, and a myriad of  other interested parties at Microsoft Canada.

Play The Game

You can play the final build of our game here.

Team

• Seth Marinello – Producer
• Mohamed El Eryan – Programmer
• Sagar Datta – Project Manager
• Ryleigh Kostash – Game Designer
• Dhruv Adhia – Programmer
• Dashan Yue – Technical Director

Our final assignment for George Johnson‘s Visual Story class was completed in a one week. Our task was to create a game that explored aspects of journey, transition, and character development through an interactive game or film experience. We were asked to consider the mythical tale of Charon and his boat traveling down the River Styx, transporting dead souls who may or may not interact with one another.

The specific challenge for this exercise is developing strong characters. The idea was that the more the user explores the game space or environment, the stronger any sense of the personality of one or more characters becomes. Also from the assignment instructions: “The nature of the player should be addressed and made clear within the project.” Early inspiration for our game was based on principles of ‘art games’ like The Passage, Execution, The Path, Flower, The Marriage, and of course Tamagotchi – each of which deals with elements of life/death, and a finite ending to the experience without “three lives remaining”.

As with most of this course, we were also working to understand implicit vs. explicit narrative and what role these types of communication have when story telling becomes interactive. As before, we were free to choose our own teams, and I was excited to be part of a group of talented and motivated guys, each bringing a fresh set of skills and ideas to the table.

Also – I am Managotchi. My first modelling gig. Beyond the 908 random photographs that became our game, my primary role was Creative Director. Our team was composed of a solid mix of programmers, game designers, and artists; my job was to align the overall vision of this production. I coordinated imagery to each action in the game, ran massive batch actions in Photoshop to refine the look of the images, coordinated sound effects, and compiled the final Flash video clips.

Play The Game

This game is 10MB, and will take a while to load – but it’s well worth the wait. Click here to load Managotchi in a new window/tab.

Team

Ryan Klesc
Jeff Lane
Clark Kim
Anshul Goyal
Ryleigh Kostash
Nick Lewis

CODE Live was a component of the 2010 Winter Olympics representing a “Cultural Olympiad – Digital Edition”. For 18 days, CODE Live will be occupying space at Emily Carr University, Great Northern Way Campus, and the Vancouver Public Library, rolling out a lineup of powerful interactive art and cutting-edge music. As part of the Building Virtual Worlds curriculum, the CODE Live project actually represented a step back into real world. MDM Faculty to teamed-up with the organizers of CODE Live, utilizing student teams to solve their biggest problem: find a way to get people to CODE Live @ Great Northern Way Campus. There only requirement was the use of interactive technologies to solve the problem.
Of the 11 original proposals, three were chosen to be executed before the end of the semester. Andrew von Rosenbach, Azhar Boumarah and I were assigned eight talented new team members and challenged to take our proposal and make it real. Unlike the 10 other teams attacking this challenge, we chose to tap into the power of existing social media networks in order to build awareness of the CODE Live event. Our proposed solution, Digital Bridge, used three components to connect people to CODE Live. The first is a Guerrilla Marketing Campaign that uses a light-hearted, bright-pink poster campaign to Vancouverites to digitalbridge.ca. The second was a simple Web Portal that includes a promotional reel with artist and performer information and links to easily share the site or dig deeper for more information. The third was a social media campaign that included a strong Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook presence, ultimately connecting people to the events. Of the 11 proposals, ours was one of three selected for full execution.

My Role

I remained Creative Director throughout this project, but found myself primarily splitting time between art direction and production. We split our team of 11 into four groups: Graphics, Video, Web, and Social Media. I worked closely with each team to uphold our original creative vision, coordinate between teams, and provide creative input on all things graphic, video, web and otherwise. It was a nice place to be – surrounded by talented designers, developers, and video editors looking to me for direction in order to produce something brilliant.

Team

Andrew von Rosenbach
Azhar Boumarah
Daniella Pichardo
Shahrzad Aghasharifianesfahani
Al Sinoy
Nick Marouhos
Gabe van Bergen
Erez Barzilay
Airlia Hansen
Mohamed El Eryan

This very short video was completed as a small assignment for Interdisciplinary Improvisation. The task was to convey some sort of legacy or impact you’ll have on the world. My original video was a little too heavy-handed, so this one has been edited down to something a little more lighthearted. Produced in about 30 minutes.

Music

Ellie Goulding covering Bon Iver’s ‘The Wolves (Acts I and II)

As our first group assignment for Building Virtual Worlds, we were tasked with creating an interactive experience that would teach people about a given Vancouver landmark. My team chose the new Vancouver Convention Centre, a state-of-the-art architectural wonder built out over the Burrard Inlet, and our goal was to tell the story of sustainability of this building.

The Vancouver Convention Centre features recycled materials, a massive living roof with a colony of bees to pollenate it, highly advanced heating and cooling systems, and adaptive lighting to keep energy consumption to a minimum. While other teams mainly created games, our demographic was a more business-class crowd of professionals attending conferences and visitors to the city. We chose to create an iPhone application that would allow visitors to see the intrinsic sustainable aspects of the building from their phone. We wanted to create an engaging and lighthearted experience, and chose augmented reality to bring the building to life. Although scope dictated that we couldn’t possibly create an actual augmented reality application or model the building in a mobile game engine like Unity, we delivered a proof-of-concept built in Flash that conveyed the experience and intent of the application interactively.

My Role

I was the Creative Director for this project; establishing and upholding the creative vision throughout the production process. I chose to use a near-360-degree panoramic photograph to provide an experience that would be interesting to users whether using the app inside the building or elsewhere in the world. I also headed-up the photography process; setting up a nodal ninja-mounted DSLR that we used to shoot 96 HDR images in a space that represented as many interesting features of the building as possible; and finally stitched everything together using panoramic stitching software. I worked with the artists and flash programmers to implement their designs; outlined script requirements for our voice actor, and stepped-in to coordinate things in the absence of our Project Manager at the end of the project.

Preview The App

You will need the Adobe Flash Player in order to play this file locally. You can download the 4.4MB zip file here.

Team

• Nickolas Marouhos
• Gabe van Bergen
• Khadija Ghazi
• Milim Kim
• Andrew von Rosenbach

This was a one-week group project for my Building Virtual Worlds class where teams of four were to explore concepts of using digital media to allow distance collaboration between people from around the world. We were given five minutes to tell our story in a video format, no exceptions. The emphasis was on exploration of the concept rather than top-notch video production. We chose the lighthearted theme of Mad Libs and had four friends from around the world collaborate via Skype to write a story and then illustrate their story using Odopod‘s Odosketch tools.

My Role

Because the timeline was so short, the conceptual and pre-production phases needed to move quickly. We each contributed to the concept, and I knew about Odosketch because of a mild fascination with the Odopod design studio in San Francisco, who created it basically as a fun, award-winning side project. We each had our instructions, conducted our ‘interviews’ immediately (time-zone permitting), and brought our footage back for editing and story creation. I worked primarily on sound production for the interview sections, did some voice acting work to fill the gaps inherent to Mad Libs, and then completed screen-recording and video editing for the sketching component. We worked closely and efficiently together in relatively undefined roles, picking-up slack as needed to make our deadline.

Team

• Clark Kim
• Anshul Goyal
• Ryleigh Kostash

Music

• Dancing Queen by ABBA
• Super Mario Bros by Koji Kondo

As part of our Visual Story class with George Johnson, this assignment was to create an immersive, interactive experience that explores character development and implicit vs. explicit narrative in storytelling. My team chose to create Flash-based interactive experience complete with stop-motion-style photography and breathing as our only audio. OUTLINE uses interactive navigation through a minimalist, split-screen Flash interface, where the user is forced to learn the navigation on the fly. They also experience this control being taken away and given back throughout the story, eventually learning that they have the ability to tell the story the way they want. Two control elements were implemented to ensure the story would always make sense: forced catch-up points along the way ensure the viewer doesn’t lose their way, and several automatic sequences that take the viewer through a scene quickly, with no control over pacing. Our story involves three main characters involved in a simple office romance that takes a brutal turn, and was shot at a graphic design studio in downtown Vancouver. We ended up with over 2800 images to sort through, 438 of which were edited and incorporated into the final setup.

My Role

I worked as a photographer, actor, photo and video editor and interaction designer.

Team

• Matthew Schade
• Jennifer Dowding
• Ryleigh Kostash
• Jordan Braun
• Mohamed El Eryan
• Caitlin McCarthy
• Noah Rosenbaum.

Experience OUTLINE

To open the interactive flash version in a new window, click here. Navigation is intuitive – just start clicking and you’ll figure it out.

Music

• Breathless by Static Revenger

As one of the first extra-curricular events of my grad student existence, the 48-Hour Design Jam was definitely a great way to jump into a fast-paced design/production process with a team of relatively new classmates. The theme this year was “I dreamed a thousand new paths and woke and walked my old one”, and the only constraint was that the game be based on this theme and use one of the following terms as either a concept or a character:

Palindrome
Serrated
Plump

My team came up with a game concept based around Ubu Roi, a 19th century silent play based upon a character named King Ubu. Ubu represents a fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous character who, in the case of our game, is mostly just obsessed with food. Because some of the MDM Alumni were there to help us out, we were convinced that using the Blender 3D game engine was both appropriate for our concept and possible in such a tight time-frame. Our completed game was definitely rough – Ubu is lying on his back in the middle of a large kitchen; as different types of food fall from the sky, you are able to move underneath then to collect points and grow larger, while avoiding potentially fatal falling cutlery. The finale has a gigantic Ma Ubu (his wife) falling from the sky to crush the entire kitchen. Original concepts had him growing until he crashed through the floor, yielding a new level. Overall, we had a great time on our first-ever game design, and getting our hands into some new software on the fly.

My Role

3D modelling of the intro screens, kitchen, and some food objects in Blender 3D, as well as contributing to the overall concept design and production over the course of the weekend.

Play The Game

To play the game, you must first have the Blender 3D game engine – you can download it here.

You can download the a 14MB full version of our game here.

Team

• Airlia Hansen
• Alice Tai
• Carmen Chow
• Jennifer Dowding

This silly mash-up was created as a quick assignment for my Interdisciplinary Improvisation class. Created in about an hour, this video celebrates ‘remix culture’ by combining two very dissimilar genres: The Muppets and Kanye West. Not necessarily the most impressive portfolio piece… but fun.

“Bypassing the hype with practical design solutions that reconnect a divided community”

Intersections: The Grand Concourse Beyond 100 is a worldwide design competition challenging designers to create “bold visions that describe how the Bronx and the Grand Concourse can evolve in coming decades to cope with pressing needs for housing, green space, and transportation.” Final submissions requirements are simple:  four tabloid jpegs at 300 dpi. As an inspiring departure from the design realm we typically work in, I teamed with three colleagues to create a concept titled “Stitches”. Ours was one of 400 entries from 25 different countries – a phenomenal turnout. Our concept aimed to create a forward-thinking yet realistic framework that could be implemented to reconnect a community divided by eight lanes of traffic. By introducing essential threads of human experience back into its already colorful, multi-cultural, and dense urban fabric, these elements took shape as dynamic ribbons of:

1. Recreation,
2. Artistic Expression, and
3. Agricultural Open Space

into the community by offering a framework of concepts that can be used interchangeably along the length of The Grand Concourse. Our concept promoted a celebration of diversity, arts, entertainment; invited agriculture and open space back into the heart of the city; and mixed the urban threshold with recreational wellness in order to provide the community with the tools to stay active.

My Role

I provided graphic design, copywriting, and minimal art direction for this team of designers. Although the other three team members were passionate and skilled designers with concepts ready to execute, I worked with them to refine and simplify the overall concept, graphic treatments, and deliverables into something with bite.

Team

Douglas Jones
Dennis Sullivan
Nathan Siems

Bigger Than The Sum of its Parts.

Every time I travel, I come across scenes that warrant more than a single photo. Each panoramic shot is created from 10 – 35 images taken from a single focal point, stitched and blended into one massive image. It’s often hit-or-miss, with a high number of ugly ones for every gem. But when they work, I’m left with an image much more true to my memory than if I had simply stood further back to fit it all into one frame.

Ongoing marketing efforts and obligations require for endless messages and formats. Appearing in local business journals, corporate event programs, or in banners on home tours – the tricky part is having fun with an appropriate layout without muddling the brand identity. I was also tasked with adapting EPTDESIGN’s tight branding requirements and latest design work into a recruiting tool for landscape architecture schools across North America.

My Role

As Creative Director, I worked with the Principals of EPTDESIGN through each iterative process, coordinated photography, and produced all visual design work. On the recruitment side, I collaborated closely with top Landscape Architecture programs across the continent ensure that the best-of-the-best graduating designers end up in EPTDESIGN studios. I travelled to industry events, student conferences, trade shows and career fairs with a full marketing kit to ensure we got the exposure needed to reel-in the top talent.

Team

• Photography by Jack Coyier.
• Copywriting in collaboration with Michael LeJeune

Complete web development for EPTDESIGN. The Portfolio section covers nine distinct project types, each providing a deep look at project experience specific to the clients, consultants, and developers using the site. The objective was to create a custom site that carried the brand without forcing users to re-learn navigation. Note: I am currently creating a fresh version of this site based on a mobile-compliant and SEO-optimized CMS platform.

My Role

Creation of interaction design documents for review and art direction by the Principals, photography coordination, copywriting, and visual design assets. I worked directly with a freelance Flash developer, Bruno Correia

, throughout the process. I designed a custom navigation interface that allowed depth of information in all categories (especially the Portfolio section, which showcased up to 81 projects in nine categories), analytics tools, a custom FTP site, and a server-side flash-based database that makes it possible for the firm Principals to edit each section.

Team

Photography by Jack Coyier
Original code structure by Bruno Correia

As EPTDESIGN re-branded itself, this ‘Postcard Series’ was launched as a method of reconnecting with clients, consultants, and industry affiliates that had known the firm as “EPT Landscape Architecture” for 40 years. With careful attention paid to conveying a message of professionalism on a personal level, this series brings together elements of the firm’s best finished work, a polished graphic identity that supports the brand, and some quick insight into each of the Principals, Studio Directors, and Associates. This direct-mail campaign regularly reached over 1500 industry partners on an eight-week cycle from 2004 – 2008.

My Role

I acted as a Producer for this project, coordinating all aspects of imagery, copywriting, mailing-list database management, postage, and completing the final layout and printing coordination.

Team

• Project photography by Jack Coyier
• Creative writing in collaboration with Michael LeJeune
• Original branding concepts by Selbert Perkins Design.

Convertion of EPTDESIGN‘s long-running printed ‘Postcard Series’ to a digital version that works to captivate rather than irritate industry partners, clients, and friends of the firm. This ongoing project continues to play a positive role in EPTDESIGN’s marketing efforts while consuming less paper, postage, and allowing better control and integration of our marketing contacts database.

My Role

I completed all concept, visual design, asset coordination, and copywriting for this project. The original concept included a stardardized template consisting of a feature article followed by three ongoing sections:  On The Boards, In The Studios, and Around The World. The crisp simplicity of the layout, visually captivating photography and renderings, and artful use of quick, fun text each uphold branding standards as marketing campaigns shift into the digital realm. This series provides updates that many different audiences will appreciate, from developers to estate clients; from civil engineer consultants to student talent looking for a change.

Each of the four boxes links directly to a flash-based website storyboard, dubbed ‘Spotlight‘, that provides a mix of information and graphics supporting each story. Simple subscribe and unsubscribe links make subscription management simple – the marketing database has actually grown substantially since the release of the first edition. In the future these will link to a mobile-friendly, CMS-driven site which I’m currently working on.

The intent was to keep thing professional, provocative, and authentic – a change from the usual and something that maintains the standards of Professional while reading as strictly Personal.

Team

Photography by Jack Coyier and EPTDESIGN staff
HTML/CSS and database code by Bruno Correia

TREK is part of a yearly in-house competition at EPTDESIGN This offers “Travel, Renewal, Education, and Knowledge”, and challenges all in-house designers to submit a proposal for wherever they want to travel in the world to explore personal interests such as art, culture, architecture, city planning, ecology, horticulture or urban studies. Designers state the case for where they want to go, what they’re going to study while visiting, why this is important, and what they’re going to bring back to the studio to share.

I Won

My proposal was to visit both Amsterdam and Rotterdam and produce a video documentary comparing the impacts of history, planning, and different urban design strategies on the development of each city and the creation of such unique and unquestionably energetic urban places. All this in an attempt to understand what forces play into the creation of a great city. I was chosen as one of two designers to follow-through with my proposal, and in 2007 spent two weeks experiencing Amsterdam and Rotterdam, documenting them with photography, video, and time-lapse. This film was presented as a discussion piece for the design studio which sent me on this trip, hence the photography sections necessary for the comparisons. The film serves as a talking piece, focusing on issues of urban design, city planning, and modern urban infill – all while documenting the local delicacies.

This 34-minute documentary takes a journey through the crowded streets and canals of Amsterdam’s downtown, uptown, and visits the new development of Ijburg – Amsterdam’s new ‘social utopia’ – an answer to the need for real estate in a city unable to expand.  A combination of footage from trains and buses, photography, time-lapse video, and stitched panoramic photography provides a candid and very real perspective on this energetic and thriving urban metropolis. The journey then moves to Rotterdam, exploring the ways a very different set of post-war urban planning policies have shaped this modern meca of daring development.

Music

• Seabear – Libraries
• The National - Fake Empire
• Peter Bjorn & John – Young Folks
• Seabear – I Sing I Swim
• Seabear – Arms
• Seabear – Seashell
• Iron & Wine – Boy With A Coin
• M. Ward – Here Comes The Sun Again
• Radiohead – Jigsaw Falling Into Place
• Radiohead – Reckoner
• Hot Chip – Ready For The Floor

Anatoly Zenkov is a smart guy from Moscow. He wrote this little app called Mousepath that tracks the movement of your mouse for as long as the app is running, then allows you to save it as an image file. It’s like creating fresh artwork on the fly, without even thinking about it. I’ve noticed it also feels good to look back at a long day in front of my MacBook Pro and see a record of how much work I’ve accomplished with all of that mousing around… The app has since been enhanced and renamed IOGraphica and released for Windows and Linux, as well as OS X.

The black indicates a resting mouse; the white translucent circles indicate a held click, and the lines are obviously the movement of the mouse. All of the action in the top two corners is definitely a result of my excessive use of the hot corners in Exposé. The image sizes differ because of different external monitors plugged into my MacBook. The massive black dot occurred while celebrating my birthday: that dot represents a well-deserved break for beers with friends in Kitsilano Beach. These images represent my entire week, from the second week of March when I was pushing 20-hour days of project work for Microsoft at school, freelance web design, portfolio work, and trying to keep my inbox from hitting triple-digits.