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While I have weaseled my way into digital product design over the years, it feels unsatisfying that I have many projects that are lost to the other design gods. Here’s an assortment of other design projects from current times to 2009. (Humor me, will you.)
In 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. Almost all of the products at Amplify are sold B2B (school districts) but suddenly we had to shift B2C: students and their parents. With one of the quickest turn-arounds I’ve ever worked on (full research-to-release was weeks!), I led a team of designers in creating a responsive site with free downloadable instructional materials, lesson guides, books, and videos. I worked synchronously with developers, content writers, and asset production managers.
Unity based computer game designed with game developers Tomás Vicuña and Christoper Wallace. Based on a comic illustration by Matt Groening, it’s a game you can’t really win. You are the teacher, trying to type letters on your keyboard served up by the chalkboard, while keeping your students engaged and also interrupting their mischief. This game was used in workshops as an icebreaker to build empathy for our teacher personas. Game mechanics were designed based off teacher interviews, district/administrator feedback, and teacher humor Instagram and Twitter accounts.
For traditional print-based curriculum in classrooms, teachers have physical book that guides them through the lessons, answers, and FAQs. Since the Amplify Reading product is digital, we created a responsive site that mimicked a teacher’s experience using the printed guides they are familiar with. This project took months of research and iteration, that led us down a path to change our initial search interaction, to a highly curated and adaptive site. Teachers. Don’t. Have. Time. The site’s adaptivity included state specific versioning, adaption to local district needs, time of year elevated homepage topics, grade specific art and icon styling, and guardrails for 'how-to's based on specific inputs.
While working on UX design teams at Amplify, I was sometimes pulled in to create art for games and children's books. Most of this work was Kindergarten through 6th Grade facing and was all tested with students as co-designers. When it comes to art, let me tell you, kids are wonderfully harsh critics. Sometimes, my own personal art inspirations were approved by students; like the game pictured here, Wild Planet, was inspired by Dan Flavin’s untitled, 1976. Game art and animations were are all vector based (LottieFiles) for scalability, short load times, and truly awful school wifi.
Anna Sui teamed up with Facebook Messenger to launch a chatbot experience to promote their Macy's Fall 2017 collection. I designed and illustrated these icons influenced by her cowboy inspired collection through the Macy's art direction team. This was an experimental opportunity for users to explore and buy products directly in the chat platform while receiving personalized notifications and emojis. The Facebook feature was… not successful. But it was still very cute!
With the release of iOS 10, Stickers were part of the newest update for iMessage. I worked with magazine social media and brand directors to concept suites of emoji-style sticker sets. I digitally illustrated these custom sticker packs in various art styles that worked with particular brand style guides. Brands included Green Giant, Delish.com, Esquire, Seventeen Magazine, and Harper's Bazaar. Downloadable from the App Store, the art also had very specific file production requirements for developers in Xcode.
All eReaders for Hearst Magazines lived within a universal downloadable shell, that would pull specific magazine(s) from the App Store or Google Play. I designed UX flows for free past editions to trial with push notifications/ads to buy a single current edition or monthly subscription. This work was done under a design director with heavy involvement from our QA engineering team.
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. What else is there to say, other than Oprah design is FUN. I met Gale in an elevator at Hearst Tower once and she asked me what I had for lunch.
At Hearst Digital Media, a brand's print magazine and website were under completely different jurisdictions. Magazines had their own content writers, art directors, and editors– separate from the website. Because of this, any Hearst brands’ web presence had a significantly different design system from its print style guide. I spanned both these worlds (see the Apple News project), on a product team called the “AppLab” where we worked on the integration of these two sides to design native mobile apps for the 15+ brands.
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*