Since i started dabbling a bit with using WordPress for a dynamic, content-driven site, i thought it might be interesting to see if i could make it work for more of an “archival” site such as this.

It took some tinkering, but i think i figured out a way to make it work. Below is a random selection of case studies spanning the full breadth and depth of my portfolio. This will keep the landing page dynamic and constantly changing. You can click through to read them, but you can also use the menus to the left to explore all of my posted work by business sector or by work category. This gives the audience (that would be you) the ability to navigate vertically or laterally through my work, with a random option as well.

The beauty of this format is that all of the content is here in a database, and it’s now completely separated from the look and feel of the site. When it’s time to freshen up the look, it’s a matter of just updating the templates or applying a new theme, and it’s done.

There is something nice about presenting a printed portfolio of work… seeing a career’s worth of work collected into one book is quite gratifying. But the time investment vs. the return on that investment didn’t seem to make sense any more. Yes, i’ve invested a HUGE amount of time getting this latest site redesign up and running, but it’s an investment that should pay off down the road as future updates will be almost trivially easy.

Besides, this also gives me an excuse to buy an iPad to present my portfolio.

Check back soon for more changes and updates, and feel free to drop me a line!

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.

Crest Whitestrips is one of those products that does not lend itself well to sampling, because results are only seen over a longer period. Therefore, knowing someone who has tried the product and liked it can be an important factor in the trial decision.

In developing the program, we researched potential partners, and discovered an excellent fit with Curves fitness clubs. Their members were in the right demographic for the program, but more importantly, they were people who had already made a commitment toward self-improvement, and according to P&G’s research, the target consumer for the teeth-whitening category in Canada was more interested in whitening to feel good about themselves than simply a cosmetic improvement.

We created a program in partnership with Curves to turn in-club advisors into product advocates. Each club was given sample product for the advisors to use, along with posters and newsletters and a $10 off coupon for product trial. The program also included branded apparel and an advisors manual with tips on how to engage members in conversation about the Crest line of whitening products.

The program was very successful and was renewed and expanded for a second year to include a Crest-sponsored a makeover contest for the Curves member with the best story about how having a great smile made a difference in their life.

Lavalife (Canada’s top online personals site) was also brought on as a partner as it represented another opportunity to speak directly with targeted audiences who were also engaged in life-changing activities. Crest sponsored the “send a smile” functionality within Lavalife, as well as a “Smile of the Month” contest with product prizing and a grand prize of a cruise. Targeted banners within the Lavalife environment also directed users to sign up to receive a $10 off coupon.

Reactor was called in to contribute to the user experience of the first generation of the site, and along the way, we managed to land the branding assignment as well. (… or was that the other way around?)

Keep in mind that 1998 was pre-iMac, pre-iPod… pre-iAnything, really. Truly groundbreaking! (You can thank us later, Mr. Jobs… just send the royalties to the following… but i digress…) The i❘money brand lasted through several iterations of the site design before it was folded into another financial services site in 2000.

It was very innovative at the time, and even bested the efforts of many of the major banks, who were taking very tentative steps into the online consumer investment and trading world. Alas, the screenshots of the i❘money interface design have been lost to the ravages of pixel erosion. Besides, they were so ’90s!

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.

One issue that we identified was that while they had a set grid and typographic treatment for their collateral, they had some issues with consistency. Their brand look had evolved (or devolved) over time, largely as a result of product managers art-directing over the shoulder of the design staff. Since their previous creative platform did not have a well-articulated rationale behind it (or if it originally did, it was lost over time), the creative staff often had no solid ground from which they could defend the integrity of their creative direction and decision-making.

We saw an opportunity to evolve the Mackenzie brand look, and to work with the stakeholders involved to develop a creative platform and rationale for image selection that would allow the creative staff and product managers to all be working together toward a common goal of brand and image consistency. By involving the stakeholders from an early stage, we helped them to collectively take ownership of this new platform in order to ease its introduction and have it take root and grow in a sustainable and consistent way over time.

The creative platform that was proposed and accepted focused on a core theme of “organic growth”. Drawing inspiration from images of growth in the natural world put a diverse catalogue of images at our disposal, with image content and execution tied to each Mackenzie brand, sub-brand, product and service offering.

Roll over the images to see the “before” state of each of these pieces:

Investor Guides were given the Mackenzie brand blue background. The old “pinstripe” look was retired in favour of a cleaner, more contemporary look that would have fewer reproduction issues. The core imagery was enlarged, and images were treated in a multi-pane approach, with a gentle upward movement of the panes from left to right (reflecting the upward growth of a bar chart).

Images were also chosen to be symbolically relevant to the subject matter. For example, the “Inside China” guide depicts lotus flowers on the cover. The use of symbolic images and metaphor was a strict requirement to help guide the creative staff and product managers away from the use of literal images on the covers, to get away from the predictable stock imagery that would result in the Mackenzie brand appearing less distinctive.

To make the advisor guides distinct from the investor pieces, they were given white backgrounds. This allowed quick recognition between advisor and investor pieces when faced with a large volume of printed pieces.

Different fund families were also given “sub-groupings” within the overall theme of organic growth. Mackenzie-branded funds used the forest as its core imagery, and other fund families under the Mackenzie umbrella used more specific imagery. For example, Maxxum funds would use oak trees and acorns, a symbol of strength and endurance; Cundill funds would show images of growth happening in adverse conditions – a tree growing out of a cliffside or crocuses pushing up through the snow – to symbolize “finding value in unlikely places”; Symmetry portfolios would use imagery of crystals growing, and so on.

The quarterly fund summary pieces were given seasonal images on their covers, with a slightly more “editorial” feel under the “Mackenzie EXPRESS” masthead.

Post to come…

Individual fact sheets were also updated, using a narrow strip of a brand-affiliated image on the left to tie each fund to its parent product grouping.

The new brand platform was a tremendous success. The creative staff felt they had a strong creative platform from which to work, and product managers were slowly brought on board with the use of symbolism and metaphor as more unique and distinctive ways of expressing their product’s attributes without falling back on trite and literal imagery.

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?

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.