In 1988, i was a teenager obsessed with guitars. (I had always been more interested in the instrument and gear than in actually learning how to be a proficient player.) A friend told me about a guitar shop in Toronto that occasionally offered courses in guitar construction. I followed up on that tip and enrolled in a 10-week course to build my first guitar. I was hooked.

But being on a career trajectory to be a graphic designer, it was too late in my high school career to switch directions, so building guitars was a dream that would have to wait. In the intervening decades, i continued to refine designs with the hope of eventually building again once i got access to a shop.

In 2009, Decibel Guitars was launched.

Things are off to a slow but steady start, and the designs have been very well received. You can read (and see) more over at the Decibel Guitars website.

Decibel has also been an opportunity for me to exercise the power and potential of social media, with active Facebook and Twitter content driving traffic to the site and acting as open, two-way conduits of communication between myself and potential customers.

I’ve been interested in design for small screens for quite a while. The resolution and user input constraints have always presented unique challenges from a design and user experience perspective.

Of course, as screen resolutions, graphic processing power, touch screens, alternate pointing devices and full QWERTY keyboards have become increasingly common, many of those requirements and limitations have been eased (or eliminated altogether) but new input methodologies have also meant new challenges and new UX paradigms that need to evolve to address the ever-changing state of human-computer interaction.

When RIM moved more into the consumer space with the introduction of the BlackBerry Pearl in 1995, i took interest. But it wasn’t for a couple of years that i started delving into theme design for BlackBerry handhelds for my own personal use.

My first run at it was heavily influenced by the iPhone’s user interface, but i opted to not use any Apple intellectual property, unlike other theme designers, who simply cropped icons out of Apple screen shots, and most other elements fell short of the same level of polish.

The visual language i began with glassTile prompted me to expand it out into a cleaner, original theme family that ended up with three “metal” variants as well as red and pink themes based off the same iconography. These were made commercially available and they were purchased by several thousand happy users.

The themes were all based around the same concept of having a “horizon line” splitting the screen into defined areas. There is a clean “status bar” at the top, showing signal and battery strength, carrier info and small icons for secondary functionality such as Bluetooth. The “dashboard” area above the horizon line features a prominently positioned clock in a modern, flush-left position, as well as date information and the profile icon.

These themes were, of course, based primarily on my own preferences for information hierarchy, but it felt completely natural and intuitive. The position of the horizon line was designed to allow consistency of the menu bar and dashboard on subsequent screens for phone lists and in-call displays.

Capgemini was preparing a joint pitch with HP in response to an eHealth initiative at Ontario’s Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. As part of our response, visual mockups were created to present a conceptual framework of potential functionality and user experience, as a way of framing discussion and opening dialogue with the client. While integrated records management has still not been implemented in the province, this concept shows some of the power and potential of an integrated approach.

In 2003, i worked on an interesting project with a small but outstanding team. We were flown in to assist with the front-end development on a financial services application that was being developed for Standard & Poor’s in Capgemini’s development centre in Lower Manhattan.

I worked as lead designer on a tactical team with information architects and coders, to deliver the user experience for a complex and powerful hosted investment management application which S&P was planning to white-label and sell to their customers – financial services operations whose investment activities were not their primary line of business – to use for managing client assets and linking S&P research with a wide range of investment products and services.

Not only did the architecture need to be robust and scaleable, the user interface had to be modular and “skinnable” so the look and feel of the application could be tailored to each customer’s brand standards. When demonstrating the application, we were able to do live “switching” of the UI using CSS and JavaScript, which was quite innovative for the time. This capability exceeded the client’s expectations, and demonstrated that we truly understood their business challenges and could deliver capabilities that gave them additional features they could use to sell the platform to their customers.

In 2001, our team at Capgemini (formerly Cap Gemini Ernst & Young) worked with Bell Canada on a multi-vendor project to completely re-vamp the Bell.ca eStore. At that time, most of Bell’s site was brochure-ware: Lots of information up front, but transactional functionality – buying and activating cell phones, home phone service, satellite TV, etc. – was buried several layers deep.

Our task was essentially to invert that structure, so the transactional elements were front-and-centre, supported by static content.

The design and production process was a collaborative one, with a team of designers, information architects, project managers and developers from our team, from Bell and from the other vendors on the project all working together. While the project was not without its issues (what project isn’t?), the site was launched successfully and immediately started showing results.

The Six String Nation guitar and related projects were conceived in 1995 by Peabody Award winning writer and broadcaster Jowi Taylor, inspired by the looming Quebec Referendum of that year and by the commitment of luthier George Rizsanyi to the value of Canadian woods over the usually preferred exotics. The guitar was to be made entirely of woods and materials from every province and territory, including many of incredible historical and cultural significance. (Read the whole story over at the Six String Nation site.)

Everybody who heard and was moved by the compelling story volunteered their time to help bring this vision to fruition. I was honoured to be asked to create the visual identity for this truly inspiring project. The chosen identity was envisioned as the view from inside the guitar, looking out through the soundhole at the passing Canadian landscape, with the strings resonating into a subtle suggestion of the shape of a maple leaf.

At the Toronto launch of the guitar in 2006, i was even more humbled to learn that the logo was inlaid into the guitar itself and embroidered on the strap. In 2009, the Royal Canadian Mint also honoured the Six String Nation with a guitar pick-shaped coin featuring the rosette designed by luthier George Rizsanyi and the Six String Nation logo reproduced holographically in the middle of the coin. Also in 2009, Douglas & McIntyre published a book documenting the development of the guitar, the history behind some of the materials, some fascinating stories of the guitar’s travels, and photographs of some of the thousands of Canadians who have held, played and had their pictures taken with this cultural icon.

It was a tremendous honour to be invited to share in the creation of such an important and significant Canadian cultural artifact.

Delta Hotels is one of the largest hotel management companies in Canada, and as they grew, they saw a need to update and refresh their brand and visual identity to better reflect their aspiration to be the best of the mid-tier segment of the hospitality industry. In addition to designing the identity, we applied it and the new visual language to everything from signage to advertising and printed collateral, loyalty programs and all the miscellaneous amenities you encounter in a hotel… matchbooks, bathrobes, soap and shampoo… if it could be branded, we did it.

At Reactor, we had the pleasure of doing a lot of collaborative work with various agencies. One assignment that came in was to develop a mnemonic device or visual identity that could be used in campaigns that centred around “The Caramilk Secret”. After a few rounds of creative exploration, this is what we ended up with. The agency Photoshopped in an actual Caramilk square over my illustrated version, but other than that minor change, this iconic symbol is still in use over a decade later, appearing in TV and print advertising, point-of-sale promotional displays, online contests and packaging.

Working closely with Capgemini’s Digital Asset Management consulting group in 2003, i led a creative team to collaborate and brainstorm over a couple of days to develop scenarios and storylines for a future media landscape 5 to 10 years into the future, specifically geared around consumption of media and how digital asset management (and rights management) technologies would play a role.

We developed a set of scenarios that touched on video, audio and printed media in a world with pervasive high-speed wireless networking, and where consumer media is accessed from the “cloud” rather than stored locally. (This was years before the concept of “cloud computing” would have been considered even remotely viable.)

We came up with a name, a visual identity, and mocked up several user interfaces that showed how media would follow the user and adapt itself to the context in which it was being played back or viewed… everything from desktop computers and mobile devices to home theatres and automotive systems.

The opportunity to stretch out and explore the thin edge was very exciting, and the scenarios gave the sales team something concrete which they could take out to clients and demonstrate our thinking.

Some of these were branding exercises that launched and then went in a different direction (or that vanished for one reason or another). Others were just creative exercises or playing around with ideas.

Top row: (left to right) Brand identity for an initiative by Cadillac Fairview to expand their IT reach into their retail properties by offering data and networking services to their tenants. // A creative accident turned into an exploration of a possible future visual identity direction for a Canadian television network. // Reactor art-directed the first few issues of a new hockey magazine. This was my contribution for consideration for the masthead.

Bottom row: (left to right) Brand naming and visual identity for an IT outsourcing joint venture between Capgemini and Hydro One. // Creative exercise to come up with a name and identity for consumer media free of digital rights management. // An data synchronization service where information becomes “loyal” to its owner, and changes get automatically pushed out through the network to subscribers. What better represents loyalty than a retriever?