A few months before Philly Beer Week 2010, I was made aware that the event would be featuring an iPhone application to help people navigate through over 800 events. As a member of the local beer media and an interface designer I enlisted the help of some friends from Indy Hall to see if we could come up with something more strategically geard toward the beer drinker in Philadelphia.

Development begun in early March by a team from Philly Cocoa and I was asked to handle the interface and user interaction. We went through a complete learning experience during the development of the user interaction and changed the functionality many times. Needless to say this was a stressful time to be making so many changes in interaction since we had only 2 months to complete the project in time for Philly Beer Week.

The app has received an overall four and a half star rating on the iTunes App store. The members of the team and I are working on a new venture that spawned from the success of the app.

STRIP is a powerful password vault built for the iPhone by Zetetic, a small but very robust software company just outside of Philadelphia. One of the companies partners is a member of Indy Hall and asked if I could help bring some of Zetetic’s properties up to speed in terms of creative.

Starting with STRIP I created a more product driven site, making the features of the app front and center! With this in mind I wanted a bold and easily navigated design while keeping the product in your face. I must give major cudos to the Zetetic team for the way they coded this site. I dabble pretty fluent in CSS/XHTML but the CSS trickery that was used to bring this design to life was impressive from where I stand. Just take a look at the site, if you are experienced with CSS you will certainly appreciate the work the programmers did on the site.

My good buddy Dave Martorana came to me and said he had created a new mail app based on Google’s API. He needed a nice icon and a marketing site in order to direct people to the app store. I gladly accepted the project and knocked out the icon in a couple of hours.

The website was a huge change for me. I usually design with very dark colors, or at least that is what the client wants. This app seemed like it need to be less “slick” and more light and airy. When I think of mail I think blue skies for some reason. Needless to say the project was a blast and I am looking forward to contributing more.

Two Guys On Beer is a podcast I co-host with Dave Martorana. We air weekly on Philly.com, as well as other outlets. The site was my responsibilty since I am the resident pixel pusher here at Indy Hall.

We wanted a gritty feel and I like to make things look gritty. Site is a labor of love as we should be adding blog capability to it sometime in June 2010

Multiplex is an application for DVD management on the Mac. That app was developed with the notion that DVD media should be easier to keep track of as opposed to boxes sitting on a shelf next to your entertainment center. We wanted a clean easy to use interface that utilized Apple’s core animation in every aspect of the application.

I joined the team of Dave Martorana (lead developer), Jason Allum (co-developer) and Jason Tremblay (co-designer) as the creative director and interface designer. Tremblay and I worked closely on every aspect of the interface and how the user interacts. The stadium view interface was something we wanted since preliminary wireframes. We sat with the developers in abundance to get a good idea of how far we could push the design of the interface.

Swordfish Corp. is the consulting firm founded and operated by Ben Metcalfe. After the success of the Seesmic branding, Ben, asked if I could tackle their logo. This project came to my attention during my involvement with Round3Media.

I was instructed that the font was intended to be an intricate part of the brand. In various concepts I tried to use the font’s characters to create a “type” based design. Sitting at my desk, typing some incorrect syntax into the Terminal, I had a thought about old school BBS sites. The ASCII art on these sites was superb and drawing a “fish” using a few characters was common practice on a few. Needless to say it inspired me!

RipIt was originally concepted at Indy Hall. Jason Allum asked if I could do an icon for a DVD ripper he was programming for the Mac. He was sick of how complex the operations of apps like Handbrake were making it to create a digital DVD library.

At the time I had never designed an app icon for the Mac. It seemed like a welcome challenge so I dove right in. The whole icon was drawn in Illustrator from an original sketch. After many grueling hours of discovery we had an icon we were happy with. I quickly started designing the interface for the app immediately after, still exploring my icon illustration techniques as I went.

The App was sold to the Little App Store in the Summer of 2009. Since it was sold it has gone through some transformations which I was not involved. I am just happy it went to a great home and is still being updated.

Loic from Seesmic sought me out with the help of Ben Metcalfe and Alex Hillman. He needed a little help with the Seesmic logo and I was honored to do the work. The original logo was too busy and did not portray the impact which Seesmic would have liked with their brand.

Working with the original logo as a base I created a simple vector logo that could be easily translated across mediums. The logo has become pretty popular and is one of the most recognizable brands that I have illustrated.