Design Philosophy

I design towards simplicity. Design is bound to its content and ought to enhance conveyance without competition. The design that delivers the most is the design that distracts the least. Subtle and even whimsical details have their place but only insofar as they work fluidly with the needs at hand.

I aim for semantics above all else in the code I write. Code ought not be written to simply get the job done, it ought to be written in a way that shows craftsmanship and attention to detail and growth. The quality and design of code are equally important to the longevity of content as they are the usefulness of a tool. Code that is approachable and reasoned is the code that will last, and these are standards I adhere to not with dogmatic but pragmatic diligence.

Inside CCS →

Inside CCS is a new site for the College for Creative Studies, Detroit's premier art school, tailored to potential students who are interested in pursuing a BFA. I developed and site's XHTML, JS engine, and CCS on my own and offered advice throughout its design phase on how we could best meet the forward thinking needs of the client. We were tasked with creating a site that would immediately visually stimulate potential students while simultaneously offering a look inside student life. I developed a method to embed large format Flash movies behind the HTML site while also writing a JS engine using jQuery, that allows users to browse pages without causing a page load between each click and yet preserving browser state and history.

A large portion of the engineering time on this site was spent developing the Degree Directions page. This page was to serve not only as the degree listings but additionally display recent student work in each respective degree. I developed this page in Javascript only, via the jQuery framework which I opted to teach myself in the development of the Inside CCS site. I also made sure to keep this site as accessible as possible as can be seen here in that keyboard navigation is as supported for degree exploration as is traditional mouse-based navigation. November 2008–January 2009 · Visit Inside CCS → · Visit Degree Directions →

Washtenaw Community College →

Washtenaw Community College had been working on a complete rebranding and re-architecting of their site for the last year and brought me on towards the end to help out with implementing their more involved Javascript needs. As a publicly funded college they must meet strict accessibility guidelines, but for modern browsers they wanted to offer dynamic features such as dynamic search results, image transitions without Flash, a fully interactive calendar and more. I developed these features, massaged CSS and XHTML to better support the needs of the static option and my new dynamic variants, and mentored their in-house team in the kind of code I wrote for them.

The largest piece I developed was the interactive calendar for their faculty and students. The calendar previously allowed visitors to view a single month, or a single day with the month below it. I added the abilities to dynamically load new months, to dynamically view an event’s extended details, and to dynamically insert a given day's list of events above the calendar for convenient viewing. These all require significant error checking and date filtering, as well as sniffing for the proper attributes in the HTML so as to correctly build the detail views. January 2009 · Visit WCC → · Visit WCC Calendar →

Boostin’ Nuts →

Boostin’ Nuts began as an easter egg tucked away on the Jeep Liberty Sessions microsite but after a fan base grew around it, a small team and I designed a Facebook application to give it new life. I learned the Facebook API and determined the way in which our Flash game would need to interact with the site, then designed and built the application container to house it. With the application, our 3,000+ players automatically have access to full statistics on their games and scores as well as the ability to compare themselves to all of their friends and the global high score list. I implemented the communication bridge between the application and a private scoreboard database I helped design and build. Additionally, I devised a way to export the all-time “Top 10” list as a JSON object for inclusion on the Jeep Facebook Page and the Jeep brand Experience site. January 2008–February 2008, February 2009 · Visit application →

Glass Blower Ben →

Ben Dombey is a young glass artist in New Orleans who contacted me about creating a small portfolio site that he could easily manage. I set up a Flickr account for him and taught him how to use that, and then using the Flickr API I wrote a very simple and easy to use CMS to allow Ben to choose which of his Flickr sets and photos would be incorporated into his portfolio. January 2009–February 2009 · Visit Glass Blower Ben →

Incentives →

Incentives is an AJAX-powered tool that allows visitors to Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler’s sites to look up the vehicle-specific incentives that the brand is offering but also the incentives that their local dealership is offering. For this site, I built the entire MooTools-based Javascript engine that controls visual state, vehicle loading, dealer-by-zipcode lookup, incentive offer loading, data parsing, and runtime validation on all of the above. With some extra time we found during the project, I added the ability for the site to constantly update its URL such that at any time users could bookmark or send to a friend their current location and have the site restore itself to that exact state (example). Finally, I provided support and helped ensure cross-browser CSS compatibility across all three brands. Please see not only Dodge’s Incentives site but also Jeep and Chrysler’s. April 2008–June 2008 · Visit site →

Chrysler Experience →

Chrysler Experience is the brand-centric portal tailored for passionate Chrysler vehicle owners. In this project I led the engineering effort, building the XHTML page templates, organizing the XML data describing each page, and structuring the XSLT which formatted and inserted said data into the pages, all within our in-house CMS. Alongside this, I wrote functionality that imports in specific Chrysler content from YouTube and Flickr. Furthermore, I rewrote the MooTools-based Javascript that powers the site (adapted from Jeep Experience) and functioned in an advisory role for CSS design.

A major portion of the Experience build was the creation of Chrysler News. News is an AJAX-powered site that reads and parses RSS feeds of internal Chrysler PR, Chrysler-approved stories in the media, and Chrysler reviews found on auto sites. The site runs hand-in-hand with a server-side RSS creation tool developed in-house simultaneously. News allows for dynamic article searching based on on-the-fly tag organization as well as feed selection. Finally, for Chrysler PR, News provides an article display page (example) that allows readers to share the article on popular sites such as Digg, Facebook, and del.icio.us. January 2008–March 2008 · Visit Experience → · Visit News →

Miles →

Miles is a web-based iPhone application I independently designed and developed in the month following the introduction of the iPhone and support solo to this day. Miles provides a lightweight interface for on-the-road gas mileage logging. Miles is written with svelte XHTML and CSS, powered by Joe Hewitt’s iUI Javascript library. Miles allows free account creation, storing MD5 hashes of login credentials so as to securely and privately store information. Each of its 4,000+ users can review their full mileage history and driving data totals. A Cocoa Touch rewrite is underway. August 2007–Present · Visit tool →

AIGA Detroit →

I joined the AIGA Detroit chapter after college and found myself nominated and approved to the Co-Interactive Chair on the Board of Directors. In this position I headed the project to redesign and rearchitect the chapter’s website. I developed a grid-based industrial visual design for the site that retains touches of the previous design’s long-standing aesthetic. I worked with the AIGA Internet Kit CMS while simultaneously teaching myself its intricacies in order to orchestrate this ground up rebuild and reorganization of the chapter’s online information. November 2007–February 2008 · Visit site →

The Michigan Daily →

The Michigan Daily was my largest project in college in terms of time, energy and exposure (3.2 million page views per year). In the two years that I was involved with the Daily, I took part in two major redesigns and two incremental design updates. In the summer of 2006 I executed a ground-up redesign on my own using CSS, XHTML and a proprietary CMS language provided by the content framework which I had to learn. I completely redesigned the visual appearance of the site, completely rewrote all XHTML and CSS behind the site, restructured the site’s organizational scheme and retrained the online content publishers in the new system.

Concurrent to this redesign was the of applying of the above to the seven Michigan Daily blogs. All of these WordPress-powered blogs were completely redesigned and brought into close visual relation to the primary Daily’s site (at the time) while still providing unique branding. Each blog was incorporated not only with the others, but with dynamically generated material on the Daily’s primary site itself. (Ed. note the blogs are currently offline for the summer.)

In addition to design duties, I served in four positions on the Online staff. I came in as a designer, became an Assistant Editor, an Associate Editor and the Managing Editor. In performing all of these rolls, I had to handle project planning and management, staff training, day-to-day operations, pay roll and standard web design and maintenance duties. October 2005–April 2007 · Visit site →

The Ann Arbor Crier →

The Ann Arbor Crier was started by a group of friends and myself as a project for our last semester at the University of Michigan. We wanted to create a vibrant online magazine that focused on culture and life in Ann Arbor to provide useful and interesting information for students. I worked with another designer in sketching the site while constructing the pages on my own. The site uses a custom-written PHP back-end that binds together dynamic content from Movable Type, weekly custom CSS and a dynamic XHTML template that changes both on a weekly basis and due to which page is being viewed. For this site I taught myself the basics of working in Flash to create weekly slideshows. Additionally, I wrote a PHP parser to display events from another student created site, Eventivore.com. I wrote and designed a custom PHP page for emailing articles to friends along with adding the overhead needed to support posting articles on popular sites like Digg, Facebook and Newsvine. January 2007–September 2007 · Visit site →

Dokas Photos →

I designed this site for my father’s large-format photography business. Knowing the client so well allowed me to make a site highly tailored to his tastes while at the same time causing me to work with him at all stages of development.

In this project I created the entire design in CSS and XHTML, using a number of uncommon techniques such as pure-CSS image drop-shadows. I used Movable Type to maintain all content and taught the client how to use the publishing platform for site updates. Furthermore, I wrote PHP adapters to allow customers to purchase prints directly from this site. The site is currently undergoing a realignment which can be explored. Summer 2004 · Visit site →

Jetless Heights →

Jetless Heights has been my stomping ground since high school. The site sat largely dormant for years while I rethought my relationship with public writing, leaving the last iteration I put considerable effort into to languish. I have recently brought it out of dormancy and am rebuilding the site and adding features (e.g. archives, deep navigation) in public so as not to stall my newfound desire to publish again. January 2000–Present · Visit site →