I had the opportunity to shoot some photos of SpokesBUZZ’s BandSwap that was held at the High Noon Saloon in partnership with the Madison Arts Commission. The event featured two local bands, Sky Road Fly and Sexy Ester, as well as the Denver band Common Anomaly. Here’s some photos of the event, which will take you to the full set at flickr.
You can view the rest of the photographs I took on flickr.
…at a METZ show. Galactic Cannibal and No Joy opened.
Here are the pictures. They will take you to the flickr photos.
Jessica Steinhoff, a Madison-based writer, needed a super clean website to showcase her stellar writing chops to potential clients. I helped her meet that goal with this responsive site made with HTML5/CSS3 and based on WordPress. Now, because minimalist sites can be very bland, I added a hover feature highlighting imagery from each of the pieces of writing showcased, and on top of that, the colors of the portfolio item blocks are randomized. Refresh the site and see for yourself.
At ESDNetwork, there was always a mad scramble for investors, just like the situation is at every other web startup worldwide. Their secret weapon was this set of investor decks that made some Silicon Valley successes request designs for their own stealth startups.
I created these knowing that our investors would be from the jewelry industry but also from tech. Ran and minimal and easy to understand. Emphasis on minimal infographics and easy to read text (both relating to typography and copy writing).
To set us apart from every other Dieter Rams designer doing minimalism, I took cues from Internet icon design and the random alignment errors screen printers are all to familiar with.
OrderPad is an iPad application that was designed for multiple B2B clients at ESDNetwork. It was made to replace the oh-so-old-school briefcase full of jewelry that salesmen would take out to retailers to get them to sell a jewelry brand’s products.
The design is focused on the brand, with the ability to theme the application in a plethora of ways, but also made to handle products with thousands of different options and combinations. This quickly made ESDNetwork realize the mass market appeal and start marketing the app to other industries it could serve.
The design itself is one that lets the buyer dictate the experience. They can sort and filter in a ton of ways, view high resolution 3D versions of products, quickly repurchase past orders without the need for a salesman in the store and more.
Baltimore Sports & Life and I teamed up to create a very Baltimore-centric site design. We worked in state and city flags, along with a skyline and various other Chesapeake Bay related flourishes. Once we had the city more than represented, I wanted to make sure that reading the site would be as easy as possible, since it is very community based with not just blogging, but heavily used message boards as well.
While the blue crab logo didn’t end up being used, it was a great starting point on coming up with a clean serif based logotype.
The University of Wisconsin needed a website designed for their health services department’s new non-profit training website PreventionSpeaks.org. I worked with them to hone a user experience and friendly design that would be usable by a base audience that spanned a huge range of familiarity with websites.
To get started though, I made a logo that could be multipurpose (as illustrated by the large speech bubble in the footer of the site) and hinted at a certain classic 80′s video game (with the thought that the site would have some game-ification worked into the user experience). Then came up with a color scheme that helped to represent the different sections of the site.
World Cocoa Foundation came to Hardly Square with a problem. They couldn’t afford a bells & whistles package from a large agency on a non-profit’s budget. We talked with them and looked over their wants and needs in comparison to their budget and came up with a plan. Minimally tweaking their existing interface to work better with modern and outdated browsers back to IE6, transferring their data to an easy to use web host with plug-and-play apps (such as WordPress and Joomla) and converting their site that had been running on Contribute for nearly 10 years to WordPress. With field agents all over the world and 25,000 pages and posts to manage, WordPress just made things easy. You can login to the site in Ethiopia, post photos from Australia to the training sections and easily filter and sort all of those posts with a custom built administration screen that only presented each user with the options that they could actually use.
User interface design & coding for 12,000 square foot suburban Philidelphia gymnasium.
Utilized stunning photographs as full background images to really highlight the expansive space and Elite’s commitment to serious gym rats.
With the new site, Elite has been able to capitalize on their increased views with an increased membership base subscribing through their website.
Concert poster for Call Me Lightning album release show in Madison, WI.
Photo shoot to promote the Hardly Square company blog Add And Edge. These photos were for use on various social media platforms to help build a buzz about the blog and gain followers by defining the blog as something more creative than your typical design blog and willing to go outside of the digital platform to create for itself.
Poster for the Madison show of this Portland, ME based band. Made of photos I took while visiting their town the previous year.
T-shirt design for this Madison, WI-based kickball team.
Poster to publicize the effects of the BP Oil Spill in 2010.
RateWatch is a major player in financial services data reporting. They work with 5,000+ clients that have 90,000+ locations using their services on a daily basis.
For them, I worked on a major overhaul to their user interface & experience. This made the process of accessing and reporting data for their clients much easier and more efficient – so they could focus on their business and not just getting numbers.
Additional projects I worked on included logo tweaks, an identity package and various front-end work for RateWatch affiliated sites.
User interface design of one of the major midwest indie music festivals of 2009.
Madison Music Project, the yearly music feature from The Isthmus, cover design and element styling.
Album packaging for Michigan-based band that blends hip hop, americana and folk on their album All Too Real.
The cover stencil of the three main band members was made from photographs I took. The band name, as it appears on the cover, is in my sharpie scrawl font. Also, as a note… If you ever need to find my fingerprints for a criminal investigation, this is where you would want to look. I scanned in multiple fingerprints, ink splotches, and other dirty marks on paper to get the grungy elements on the packaging.
I made a collage of band member heads on the back cover to give it a graphical element beyond the barcode and record label logo. Just a simple thresholding of heads from photos I took for the front cover stencil outlines.
To keep the inside of the packaging exciting, there’s an immediate burst of bright red coming from the disc. On the inside left, there’s a collage of closeups of instruments that the Hustlers use for their live shows.
If you want to take a listen to the album, purchase a hard copy with my packaging designs, or download it – you can on Amazon.
Identity package for Eyemedia, an Ann Arbor, MI-based home entertainment electronics shop.
