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While I have weaseled my way into digital product design over the years, I frequently moonlight for the other design gods. Here is a selection of additional projects dating back to 2009 (humor me).
All projects shown here are published works.
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools all over the world were left scrambling. Elementary-aged students, who were the most vulnerable, were backsliding quickly in their fundamental skills. While Amplify typically operates on a B2B model, focusing on school districts, we found ourselves needing to quickly adapt to a B2C approach: reaching out directly to students and their parents. In one of the fastest turnarounds I've experienced, I created the user journey and led a design team to develop the B2C responsive site offering free downloadable instructional materials, lesson guides, books, and videos. This was made possible through synchronized efforts with developers, content writers, and asset production managers.
For the Amplify Boost Reading product, I crafted a responsive site emulating traditional print-based curriculum guides, offering teachers a familiar experience. Months of research, iteration and adaptation went into the project, ultimately leading us to a shift from our initial search interaction to a highly curated and adaptive site architecture. Teachers. Don’t. Have. Time. The site caters to specific personalization needs: state-specific versioning, local district customization, time-of-year homepage topics, grade-specific visuals, and targeted how-to's based on specific user inputs.
While working on UX design teams at Amplify, I often took on additional projects as an illustrator, creating art for games and children's books, primarily for Kindergarten through 6th Grade. All designs underwent testing with students as co-designers, providing us with refreshingly... candid feedback. Sometimes, my personal artistic inspirations meshed with student approval; for instance, the game art pictured here, Wild Planet, drew inspiration from Dan Flavin’s untitled, 1976. All game art and animations were designed as vector-based (with LottieFiles animations) for scalability, faster load times, and truly awful school wifi.
I collaborated with Anna Sui's team, and partnered with Facebook Messenger, to launch a chatbot experience promoting her Macy's Fall 2017 collection. Inspired by the cowboy-themed line, I crafted icons tailored to the recommendations of Facebook's engineering team. The experiment allowed users to shop directly through the chat interface, complete with personalized notifications and emojis. The Facebook feature was… not successful. But it was still very charming!
With the release of iOS 10, came the introduction of Stickers for iMessage. I partnered with the social media and brand directors of various magazines to conceptualize emoji-style sticker sets. These custom sticker packs, digitally illustrated in styles fitting each brand's unique voice, included entities Delish.com, Esquire, Seventeen Magazine, and Harper's Bazaar. Available on the App Store, these illustrations adhered to strict file production specifications required for Xcode development.
Hearst Magazines' eReaders were housed within a universal app, which fetched specific magazine editions from the App Store or Google Play. I designed UX flows that allowed users to explore past editions for free, with subsequent push notifications and ads promoting the purchase of single current editions or monthly subscriptions. This project was completed under a design director, with significant partnering with our QA engineering team.
Collaborating with O Magazine's editors and art director, I designed interactive interfaces, flows, layouts, and type design for the infamous Holiday product round-up. Worked with O Magazine’s editors and art director to create the interaction, flows, layout, and type design for the infamous Holiday product round-up. I met Gale in an elevator at Hearst Tower once and she asked me what I had for lunch.
At Hearst Digital Media, the print magazine and website content of a brand were distinctly separated, each with its own writers, art directors, and editors. This resulted in significantly different design systems between the brand's web presence and print style guide. I straddled these two realms in a role within the "AppLab" product team, where we worked to unify these disparate design systems through the creation of native movile apps for 15+ magazine brands. This also manifested in my contribution to the Apple News project.
Print media was going through an upheaval in the early 2010’s. Magazines were trying to go digital, yet it was proving to be unstable to have a digital-only edition (unless it was free). After many white boarding sessions (should we make the magazine into a house demolition game?!) we created the This Old House interactive iPad app. It was highly successful, and became the foundational template for other Time Inc. magazines to create their iPad editions. I was involved in creating the in-house proprietary software that connected editors and content writers (InCopy) to input their work directly into our interactive designs (InDesign & Photoshop).
My first love, book design. The books Easy Upgrades: Kitchens, Easy Upgrades: Bathrooms, and Salvage Style for This Old House were designed with content from the magazines and websites to curate special editions of How-To books. These published books had their own look and feel, agnostic from how it was presented in print and web, to bring cohesion to the various content streams.
The 1st generation iPad was released mid-2010, and we were scrambling to reformat the site knowing it could be accessed from the new iPad iOS. Working under a design director, early implementations for these grids were maximum breakpoints that were just iPad dimensions. It created a blanket experience that was optimized for iPad and made the web version feel small. I didn’t even have a smartphone yet, what did we know? I had that Samsung phone with the “e-ink” keyboard (the greatest phone of all time).
Working directly with an art director and typographer Neil Summeror to create a fully functional print font based on my handwriting. My hand sketches were drawn on top of layout designs, scanned, cleaned up digitally, and sent to Neil to produce the letterforms into a typeface (alphabet, ligatures, cap alternatives, various glyphs). The font was used at Victoria’s Secret for a specialized holiday season catalog, editorial lookbook, print advertising, and in-store environmental graphics. Later the font was optimized as a digital editorial display font, which various brands currently use, like Good Housekeeping. Under Neil Summeror, the Flirt Script® received the “Certificate of Excellence in Type Design” at TDC2 in 2014.
At the time, Victoria’s Secret was reprioritizing to bring focus to the online business. Catalogs and print materials were shifting from 'mail order' to aspirational advertising pieces. I designed templates and concepts for email that connected the designs from the catalog and editorial lookbooks. REMEMBER DREAMWEAVER? *sweats*