beemo | FOLIO

Winter Solstice illustrations

Brian — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:47:00 GMT

ScienceBlogs Artificial Intelligence campaign

Brian — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:56:24 GMT

The Ladders

Brian — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:49:33 GMT

I was tasked with redesigning the search results page and the corresponding saved search job alert e-mail. The “mission” was to bring more value to the user beyond simply listing jobs.

Search Results page (before & after):

With regards to the results page, I collected a lot of search-specific functionality which was scattered over the page and put it all together in its own “toolbox.” I made the text/link color match the existing behavior of the site—also trading the +/- for collapsible arrows. I thought the minus might be confused for a delete function, by consistently using the triangle-arrows throughout the site it might be one less thing for a user to not have to learn.

The existing structure was solid, so I didn’t change it too much. However, one thing I thought about was the “Title” column (which currently really means “Relevance,” the title is just a label. It seemed logical to give each a column, so I kept Title and added a “Relevance” column with a 10-point scale of how accurate a job post is in relation to the search terms.

Saved Search Job Alert E-mail (before & after):

I cleaned up the e-mail by unifying a lot of the colors from the site—namely the Mktg site which uses orange as an accent color.

The existing e-mail had the offer in reverse. The whole purpose of the two text boxes is to get people to understand the value of the resume critique with the Premium membership. So, I elected to explain the deal with the 90% figure first, then finish with a nice graphic of the items that says “resume” and “critique” (paper and pencil). The large image link to the resume critique is definitely more visible than the previous text link.

tags:

Nacole Palmer site

Brian — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:42:04 GMT

See the site here.

tags: layout, logo, site

"The World Wide Webisodes" site

Brian — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:15:35 GMT

After building a successful place to showcase Liz Tuccillo’s new book How To be SIngle, she wanted to share the highly-entertaining videos made while researching the book.

One of the big decisions in producing the site was how to present the video content and how to maximize the viewership. While YouTube is the most recognizable platform, we ended up going with Vimeo. The quality of the video, the customization, and the ability to control the organization of the clips were a better fit. Feel free to view them here.

In order to reach even more people, we also created podcast and put it on the iTunes Store (link opens iTunes).

Check out The World Wide Webisodes site for yourself!

tags:

Icon for Microsoft

Brian — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:39:56 GMT

Here’s an icon for an upcoming Microsoft application which has to do with Performance Analytics. This was the second piece I made for the people over at the Microsoft Application Consulting and Engineering (ACE) Team.

tags: icon

Houlihan Lokey site redesign

Brian — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:51:01 GMT

I teamed up with branding powerhouse Siegel+Gale to come up with some concepts for a financial client of theirs.

The client really wanted to show that they excelled at connecting their clients to great investments. By taking the circle element from their identity and using dots as a subtle visual metaphor, we were able to create a real rhythm to the pages, thus enhancing their brand’s web presence.

tags: layout, pitch, redesign, site, web

"How To be Single" website

Brian — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:38:49 GMT

Liz Tuccillo is the coauthor of the bestselling book He’s Just Not That Into You and was an executive story editor of HBO’s Emmy Award-winning Sex and the City. For the research for this book, she traveled to eight different countries interviewing single men and woman.

Check out the How to Be Single site.

tags: layout, site

Greenzer Newsletter E-mail

Brian — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:42:02 GMT

After a successful site redesign, Greenzer asked me to help develop a companion E-Newsletter (HTML e-mail) for their monthly showcase of environmentally-friendly products.

tags: e-mail, layout

Greenzer Website

Brian — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:35:05 GMT

Greenzer is a next-generation shopping engine designed to make environmentally conscious shopping easier.

They had a novel idea that users could search for environmentally-friendly products in one place. But their existing site design that didn’t truly reflect their reach. So, with the architecture already intact, I designed their site templates to reflect their ideas more clearly. After the first round, I was asked to expand on the site design to build a few more pages from scratch—the “Face-off” page, for example, as well as a Newsletter. I was asked to further tweak the site by adding new functionality like user login placement, new logo placement, as well as providing assets for a French version of the site.

If you’re interested in comparing how green your favorite products are, I highly recommend you check them out.

tags: layout, site

blipBooth

Brian — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:23:19 GMT

Here’s a concept for yet another badass “toy” from Ojingo Labs. It’s a webcam/mobile phone Photo Booth widget for all your social media needs.

tags: concept, widget

ScienceBlogs German blog campaign

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:37:47 GMT

tags: advertising, banner ad

blipMap

Brian — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:46:51 GMT

Ojingo Labs asked me to come up with a starting place to “hold” their existing blipBack and blipBooth widget products. Since their software was already location-aware, a map seemed to be the logical way to go. One thing I tried to do was play with the varying degrees of zoom in map apis (this one being Google Maps). Which is to say, when a user is fully zoomed out and staring at Earth, it’s difficult to really identify with the data. So, we incorporated one of the Ojingo robots to help guide the user to drill into the map with a little more enjoyment.

tags: concept, layout, site, social media

ScienceBlogs Ill Considered campaign

Brian — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:46:38 GMT

tags: advertising, banner ad

ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose campaign

Brian — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:25:56 GMT

In an effort to increase science literacy, ScienceBlogs wanted to use the DonorsChoose platform to help raise funds for this cause, as well as rewarding donors by offering weekly prizes. I designed the banners and landing page for this internal promotion.

tags: advertising, banner ad, landing page

ScienceBlogs Public Library of Science campaign

Brian — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:03:51 GMT

These were a series of banner ads to introduce specific scientist bloggers on ScienceBlogs.com to the many scientists on the Public Library of Science site.

tags:

NYC & Company "This Is New York City"

Brian — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:28:31 GMT

Explore the site for yourself here.

tags: layout, site

ScienceBlogs 500k campaign

Brian — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:59:28 GMT

ScienceBlogs had a contest to celebrate their 500,000th comment, so I designed an internal campaign to promote the contest. Shown here are the three different banner sizes as well as the header graphic which was shown as soon as the 500,000th comment was made.

tags: advertising, banner ad

ScienceBlogs "Intersection" blog header

Brian — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:56:42 GMT

The Intersection is a blog, within ScienceBlogs, that covers topic relating to science and politics.

tags: advertising

Ojingo Labs bots

Brian — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:02:58 GMT

These bots were commissioned by Ojingo Labs for use on their homepage.

tags: illustration

HP "Shorty" campaign

Brian — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 05:20:15 GMT

“How can we get IT professionals excited about (another) server?”

That was the big question at the briefing. IT managers are constantly bombarded with the “newest, fastest, & highest capacity” fill-in-the-blank piece of hardware. After learning about Hewlett-Packard’s new entry level blade server we began to see the true potential to challenge the current standard of business infrastructure in an exponentially more efficient manner.

We needed a way to reach these managers on their level and show them how this little server, nicknamed “Shorty,” could change their business infrafructure for the better.

This account being vital, my client established 3 teams of designers and writers (I was the only outside contractor to the agency). Although the principle deliverable was direct mail, we developed e-mails, microsites, and banners as well.

Again, how could we invigorate IT managers with another server? I kept thinking about software packaging—there are always “Minimum Requirements” listed on the side of the box. Since this server has the ability to cool itself and you can plug it into any outlet, I immediately knew this was the key—Minimum Requirements. So, how could we deliver this message to them?

In a really big envelope!

There was talk of mailing out an array of chotchkies, but I really wanted them to have something practical that directly related to the product.

With the exact measurements of the server, I taped a bunch of paper together to get an idea of Shorty’s size. BAM! there was my concept! How great would it be if we could have our advertising space to brag about how great Shorty is, while the IT personnel could fold out the piece to visualize how small the server’s footprint actually is. I imagined them taking the mailer to a broom closet and laying it on the floor to verify that there’s enough space. This, I believed, was a lot more practical for both our budget and for the relevance to the consumer.

For our presentation to HP, I shot how the piece was supposed to work, fold by fold. Here’s a demonstration:

Internally, it was a great success, our group won the internal competition. A few days later, it was presented to HP and they absolutely loved the idea!

tags: advertising, campaign, direct mail

Seed magazine subscription campaign

Brian — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 03:36:14 GMT

tags: advertising, banner ad

blipBack interface

Brian — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:15:37 GMT

Here’s an early sketch of a video commenting widget. It was designed to be output in Flash, allowing user’s to customize the background color (default being black, which is shown here).

tags: interface, ui, video

iCrossing mobile site

Brian — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:31:19 GMT

A year after my first go at designing and developing iCrossing’s mobile web presence (then known as mCrossing), I was tasked to build a new one to reflect the updated internal rebranding. My starting place was to use the World Wide Web’s (W3C) Mobile Web Best Practices, allowing optimal styling while still degrading to lower end devices as well.

The thing I am most proud of is the navigation system. Due to lack of screen space, a navigational system for mobile devices can be quite tricky, especially with secondary and tertiary navigation. The solution I came up with, which I have never seen anywhere before, was to include breadcrumbs in the global navigation. Combining these two elements assured the user could jump back and forth to wherever they wanted to regardless of how deep in the site they were. There’s visual feedback for which section of the site you’re in (global nav) as well as how deep (secondary or tertiary pages).

While image use was kept to a minimal to allow for quick page-loading, I tried to carry over a few motifs from the wireline site—mostly the color palette. Because the image size is constrained to a very small size, I added a thin vertical red line to strengthen the red color from the wireline site. I also drew custom icons in the footer using the same color palette.

Check out the site at mobile.icrossing.com.

tags: interface, mobile, site, ui, usability, web, web standards

Carney, Sandoe & Associates site redesign

Brian — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:18:14 GMT

Carney Sandoe & Associates needed a complete redesign as their current design was patched up from previous iterations. We began by reorganizing the information to better reflect the aim of the company (which is to marry schools and people who work at schools) as well as account for a better degree of flexibility. One of the requirements was to pull back on photography. They felt like many of the images on the existing site were generic and repeated too often. Since there wasn’t a budget to accommodate a large image database, I tried to compensate by bringing the typography more to the foreground—both system text and image headers.

I Chose Times Oblique to correspond to their logo for a header/subheader font, while sticking with Times for the body copy. Another way I compensated for lacking photography was to create small internal advertising pieces. Here I chose Gotham Rounded (what a beautiful face!) and used light-colored accents to give the page a bit of variety.

Lastly, the client was adamant about using a puzzle motif. The current execution was a bit off because they were only showing one puzzle piece. I chose to show two inter-locking puzzle pieces to illustrate in a clearer manner how their organization brings two entities together.

Overall, I was very excited with this project. It was an excellent example of problem-solving with few resources and still ending up with a beautiful and usable web site.

In the end, the client decided to axe the initial redirection and stick to their existing layout, just cleaning up some of the existing inconsistencies.

tags: layout, site

Run Down The Emphasis chapbook

Brian — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:19:37 GMT

I designed and illustrated Run Down The Emphasis, a chapbook of wonderful poetry by Erin Burke. You can also read a review here.

tags: print

Bowflex RFP

Brian — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:23:40 GMT

tags: pitch

Dell brochure

Brian — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 14:53:04 GMT

Here’s a bilingual (portuguese and spanish) print piece done for Dell Computer’s Latin America support division via B2.

tags: print

Wyndam RFP

Brian — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:28:04 GMT

tags: print

Kennedy Space Center

Brian — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:15:25 GMT

tags: site, ui, widget

Petco "Canine Culprits" site

Brian — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:00:30 GMT

View archived site here.

tags: layout, site, web

MGM Grand "Maximum Vegas" site

Brian — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:16:52 GMT

tags: layout, site, web

Coca-Cola homepage redesign

Brian — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 10:52:00 GMT

Coca-Cola had just partnered with AKQA to build sites for their current “Side of Life” campaign (which turned out really well in my opinion), but was having some difficulties directing traffic from their homepage.

Designing the homepage for Coke was a lot of fun for me, a true exercise in restraint, heh. Many ideas for streaming media, flash interfaces, etc. were brought to the table but in the end a simple, accessible, and usable design made more sense for the homepage of the world’s most recognized brand.

One of the challenges was to direct traffic to the many global sites. In my opinion, this was the primary issue with the current page. Mousing over region, country, then language is difficult and frustrating for a user, complicated by small buttons.

To remedy this, I designed a region/country/language interface which fits in a small area, relies on a click (rather than mouseover) and scroll bar.

tags: interface, layout, ui, web

Dollar Rent A Car site

Brian — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:40:00 GMT

Dollar Rent A Car was interested in improvements both with design and user experience. First thing was to see if a horizontal booking module could fit right under the global navigation and breadcrumbs (not shown on homepage). However reluctant I was do build this, I think it came out surprisingly well. Since the module is so short and wide it leaves a small footprint, which leaves more room for larger marketing material.

The other improvement was to bring the personalities of the cars to the front, allowing a user to use a slider to see the variation in car types along the “Economy” and “Luxury” continuum.

Finally, the layout was specifically designed to behave more like a web application than a purely marketing site. That is, minimal graphics, lightweight markup, and a heavy dose of clean style sheets. Although the current demographic leans more towards family members than business people, by building the site like this we could easily make a mobile version of the site.

tags: layout, pitch, site

Charles Schwab site section design

Brian — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:27:00 GMT

Charles Schwab was interested in getting a younger crowd interested in their brand. I mean, what 12 year old doesn’t love investing for the future?! Anyhow, to really connect with a younger demographic, I suggested a toolbox approach—downloadable desktop widgets that actually help younger kids visualize where their allowances are going. Stylized to look similar to Apple’s Dashboard and Yahoo’s widgets, the kids wouldn’t necessarily get freaked out at the idea of an investment company’s evil spyware on their machine, but something relatively familiar. It seemed like a fair way for everyone to try out something new—both client and potential customer.

^{Desktop environment (with other OSX widgets)}

Styled similarly to iTunes (for familiarity). Users can track their daily expenses and see possible patterns where their money is wasting away. The example shown is how a daily Starbucks coffee quickly adds up. If they were to budget that expense, maybe they could afford the new model iPod without asking Mom!
The Savings Calculator could be for calculating any number of investment figures. “You make $10 a week from allowance and generally on the weekends an additional $25 from babysitting. If you save 50% of your earnings, you will have X money in Y weeks.”

The Dictionary widget was as simple as its name: a resource for learning about all those big, scary words your parents use.

tags: design, pitch, site

RideGear site redesign

Brian — Sat, 27 May 2006 02:51:00 GMT

tags: e-commerce, layout, redesign, site

Batteries "The Doctor"

Brian — Wed, 17 May 2006 00:17:00 GMT

Executing these pages was a lot of fun. From making fake comic books to movie posters, this was truly an exercise in building a story from completely unrelated stock photography! These efforts won the Advertising Standard of Excellence award from the Web Marketing Association for The Doctor.

Article links about the campaign:

tags: award, illustration, site, web

Onward Healthcare site

Brian — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 03:06:00 GMT

tags: layout, site, web

eHow site redesign

Brian — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:22:00 GMT

I submited work for eHow’s site redesign. Aside from improving on the current design, I proposed the added functionality of editable content areas as well as saved search RSS feeds—something I think their user base would appreciate.

tags: layout, pitch, redesign, site

St. Ives e-mail

Brian — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 06:33:00 GMT

tags: advertising, e-mail

Citibank

Brian — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 18:41:00 GMT

tags: web

Six Flags mobile

Brian — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 04:34:00 GMT

One of the elements to our pitch was to address the downtime of Six Flags guests. What’s the most “unfun” part of spending the day in a theme park? Waiting in line. So, we came up with a game people can interact with on their mobile phones while standing in line. Ideally, there would be several large monitors which display the current top 6 people. Then, at 6pm, a winner would be sent a text message giving them instructions on collecting their prize.

tags: design, mobile, pitch

Area Code Local identity

Brian — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:37:00 GMT

Area Code Local is a site that allows users to search for things by their area code. My aim was to make this service look fun, functional, and vibrant—a tool that is not only easy to use, but a pleasure to use. Though I began with some garden variety “fat, round, and friendly” typefaces, I ended up drawing everything from scratch. It was also important to have a recognizable icon set people were familiar with and still have it fit nice and snug with the type.

It was quite a challenge to build this logo because there were several variations needed. Not only did there need to be a distinction between wireline and mobile web pages, but each particular area code had to be represented, as well as a general representation.

Wireline, area code specific/geo-targeted
Mobile, area code specific/geo-targeted
Wireline, area code independent
Mobile, area code independent

tags: identity, logo

Holiday invitation

Brian — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 06:21:00 GMT

tags: illustration, print

Mobile presentation graphics

Brian — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:43:00 GMT

This is my jelly stick figure guy that set the tone to many of our mobile pitches. His phone was modeled after one of my favorite mobile devices, the Sony Ericcson T-610 (which was jellyfied as well).

tags: illustration

mCrossing identity

Brian — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 14:35:00 GMT

mCrossing was the “mobile arm” of iCrossing, a search-based interactive agency. The challenge here was to borrow from the existing identity while still allowing a new voice to emerge.

After countless sketches, I had somewhat of an epiphany. Since the company was born out of “everything search,” I noticed the very common search glass² in desktop interfaces was remarkably similar to a lowercase “i”¹ (as in iCrossing). However exciting this was, the mobile element was still missing. After either a walk in the park or banging my head against the wall, it was as simple as replicating the search glasses to form an antenna + radiowave type thing, which was my final element: mobile³.

tags: identity, logo

mCrossing site

Brian — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:42:00 GMT

tags: layout, programming, site, web

Discovery Channel

Brian — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:38:00 GMT

tags: web

Karisma Hotels & Resorts e-mail

Brian — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 13:20:00 GMT

tags: e-mail

Aliquin Technologies

Brian — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 06:57:00 GMT

Aliquin, a new technology company focusing on security issues, wanted a strong mark with an organic touch to suit their experience and trust.

tags: identity, logo