Past Projects

Toovio - A speculative interface

Toovio is a powerful realtime marketing tool that tracks cross-platform engagement and delivers customized offers to drive conversion. Yikes — that's a lot of buzzwords! The folks at Toovio are brilliant engineers, but they needed to simplify their profoundly complex software into a easy to use interface. I worked with Jared Lukes to develop a dashboard of visualizations that would use html5 to play back data over time. The interfaces we drafted were meant to directional, so it may be a little while before these appear online.

Purina Cat Journal - Facebook for Felines

The Purina Cat Journal takes cats and their owners through games and activities. Zeus Jones brought me in to integrate a campaign encouraging pet owners to try a new product line, and to iron out the journal's confusing user experience. I plotted the interaction overview, added entry points for the challenge, adapted content to fit the journal activity module, and added content queues to keep new users on track to their precious, precious coupon. My draft of a new, simpler interaction model was my favorite part of the project - a before and after that provides the clearest view of my proposed improvements.

Lesion Library - making angiograms sexy

We were asked to create a sales tool for a rowdy bunch of medical device salesmen - it needed to be on-brand, pull from a user-generated, admin-approved media library, and it had to convince physicians to buy Covidian in the time it takes them to wash their hands. It took a dozen interviews, extensive research, and two build phases to dial in the system, but now it’s used by the 200 person sales force with pride.

Pavlv - the Clever Dogs of Marketing

Catalyst often worked in partnership with people who had good ideas but no money. Pavlv had a simple idea - create an automated service to let photographers market themselves to an exclusive list of buyers. While Bryce Howitson crafted a robust admin, I made gave the Pavlv brand some love. Smiles all round.

Minnesota Hands & Voices - A website in 24 hours

MN Hands & Voices is a non-profit association of parents of children with hearing loss. They needed a new website - and we had 24 hours to make them one. It was the Nerdery’s 2011 24 Hour Web Challenge, our team was called Rainbow Pony Cake - and we build a site designed to showcase the stories of these hardworking parents, and provide them resources and support. I did the visual design for the site, met my lovely girlfriend @heyangiesheldon, and won second place. Big day.

Wolvesnation - Carefully crafted addiction

Accelerated Innovation had made a sports app, but no one wanted to use it. They laid the app at the feet of Catalyst Studios, and asked us to work black magic to make it irresistible. They didn’t know the depth to which we would rework their Fanconnet platform. An install for the Minnesota Timberwolves became our testcase, where we weaved points, badges, and a ranking system that would take 5 years for a fan to complete into a carefully paced feed of goal & reward. We gamified their app. We gamified it hard.

Ben Plattes Identity - Light, heat, direction

A multifunctional identity for artist, photographer, and polymath Ben Plattes. Icons to serve as a silent testament to diverse talent. And a custom industrial typeface never hurts. Because when Ben speaks, it’s worth taking note. benplattes.net

High Kings Clothing - Nobility gone swashbuckling

An urban clothing boutique with an ambition towards the haute couture. A vocabulary of decadence defined the identity. Ornate crown, dense pattern, and a lookbook-style website. Beginning with t-shirts and expanding into the finer details of silk handkerchiefs and cuff links, the High Kings identity attempts to cultivate a monochrome formality opposite geometric aggression.

A fledgling art and design collective

Created to find and feature excellent, undocumented student work in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Thieves need a den, a place for reflection, and conversation. Built during the Cargo Collective beta as a gallery site, wearethives.com was designed to expand to describe a full community, with bios, interviews, events, and connection board for cooperative projects.

Melic - An academic blackletter typeface

Funded by an academic research grant I framed blackletter geometry within the proportions inspired by Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Garamond. The concept, development, and final typeface were presented at the Minnesota Collegiate Honors Symposium.