When a client wants a clean simple site, that does not mean less work. The pressure is on to create a subtle site of precision and quality. In this piece, it is the little details that add the sophistication. Project Overview: I created a site for the Riverbend Capital Advisors through my partnership with Seraph Technology Solutions. The main capital advisor, Tom Hession, was re-branding his company and needed a new site. With many years of experience, and a large client list, Tom needed a site that portrayed the stability and growth that his clients found through his services. He wanted the site to be simple though. The content, page structure, and layout are indeed simple. But the interactivity and design details subtly portray the quality of the brand. See the site: www.riverbendcapitaladvisors.com Project Details: A Question of Branding: The idea behind the company name was Tom’s love of the water, specifically the Chicago River. Plus it makes for a great metaphor of investing. Clients need help foreseeing the path beyond the next bend in the river. Who knows what lies beyond. Riverbend Capital Advisors act as a river guide to the torrential waters of the investment market. In their capable hands, the twists and turns of economic boons and downturns seem like still waters. On this project, I worked with Jennifer Lunz, a skilled graphic designer. Jennifer helped create a logo for the Riverbend brand. Jennifer did a great job portraying this concept in the logo. I worked with Jennifer and the client to choose the colors, patterns, and layout of the pages that would best support this conceptual branding. Complexity to the Simplicity Despite the desire to have a simple site, I wanted this site to be more than a plain white corporate homepage. Riverbend clients were not children learning about investing, they were successful and wealthy people looking to maintain their success. They were used to steak dinners, cigars, exotic places, nice cars – all things of quality. So I figured tight lines, patterns, gradients, and interesting interactivity could be a nice subtle touch. To keep the simplicity, there would be no drop-down menus, no aggregated content, no banner rotator element or accordion or flyout to show information. And initially, I wanted a rather monotone site too. This was the main change: after talking about branding (see above), we decided to have some complexity through subtle use of tan and blue. The Subtle Details I really like the subtlety and complexity within the simple setup. I hope the audience barely notices what is going on. Apple OS has a similar subtle interactivity, and people rarely even notice. How about you? Do you see the following… Notice how clicking from page-to-page animates a move? Do you see the horizontal line drop...
For two years I managed this site from the hours of 9-6. Like many big companies, they were hesitant to change what was working. But change the site we did. Project Overview: Forsythe was my employer for many years. For two of them, I was the Interactive Media Specialist. Through small changes, we were able to make the site more SEO friendly, introduced the company to analyzing their web traffic, added video content to the website, improved the user segmentation of the site, and vastly improved the management process. See the site: www.forsythe.com Project Details: Several Projects Really How do you express a 5 year career on a portfolio site? By highlighting the best parts of a 2 year position in as clear a hierarchy as possible. And ideally with a table of contents for quick scanning… Table of Contents: Internal Projects Video Streaming Viewer Segmentation Analyzing Web Traffic Improving Efficiency Search Engines Email Marketing Video Production & Management Homepage Redesign Internal Projects: I Could Tell You, But I Would Have to Kill You: I worked not only on the external site, but a private website for employees only – the company intranet. There is a wealth of cases and success stories from managing portions of the intranet. But I cannot show those private pages. I can only show you the public work completed. Read more… Video Streaming, Like YouTube Only Better: My title at Forsythe was Interactive Media Specialist. That is a broad title, with much grey area that can be included. Which is why many graphic and web projects were bundled into it. But one thing was clearly in my title – video on the web. Read more… Viewer Segmentation, a “Landing Page Optimization” Redesign Project: Often a project requires many roles. In this project, I acted as a project manager and designer. And as a designer, I was utilizing user experience skills and SEO skills. There was significant research and analysis done to justify a change like this to a large corporate site like Forsythe’s. Read more… Analyzing Web Traffic: Re-initiated analytics on the site after over a year of disrepair Ran reports, performed basic analysis, suggested business applications for such data Tested several vendors, identifying their differences and benefits for use Advanced tools such as IP tracking, session details, funnels Performed data analyst work – telling the story behind the numbers Improving Efficiency, an Ongoing Effort: Made it a yearly goal of mine to improve processes around the company’s web presence. The previous process was too complicated, representing a previous generation of technology Higher level of design and site sophistication, incorporating more design elements, sophisticated templates, and custom page coding Improved process for repetitive tasks – ex. creating map of locations, streaming video, homepage ads. Non-technical staff could...
I recreated 50 pages of content one-at-a-time when I created the site for the Chicago Alumni Chapter of Delta Sigma Pi co-ed professional fraternity. Updating an old site can be challenging, especially when the content has decades of history within it. And you can be sure that the finance and accounting people will audit your success for mistakes! Project Summary: There was a lot of planning that went into the creation of such a little site. The site itself did not take much work. Sometimes, the real challenge is uncovering the existing processes, convincing the managers you can improve their processes, and keeping the volunteers motivated to help. See the site: www.chicagodsp.org Project Details: At the Core – Scholarships and Events: After reviewing what was important to the group, two things came to the top of the list. One was keeping records of award winners. The organization sponsored several initiatives to support young professionals in school. The second thing was events. The organization hosts professional and community service events to support its members and the community. So it was obvious what the site needed: event tracking and pictures. Lots of pictures. A Site Powered By Other Sites: Like many things in this generation of the web, information feeds and developer APIs have allowed the web to interlink in ways never thought possible on this site. For images, I knew there was one major player in the industry in 2010 – Flickr. So I created an account for them. In the future, they can create a group where people add pictures to the site through a community, with the site admins only filtering the results of the best to the top. For events, I had to sit down and talk about processing fees and margins and ticket distributions with the VP of Activities and VP of Finance. All events this organization threw required a lot of website coding to set up ticketing. And even then, they admitted there were several mistakes. Customers had to fill out offline forms after purchase, occasionally had to be reimbursed money, and sometimes did not have an online ticket location at all. So I spent several hours setting up the CAC with my favorite new company, EventBrite. EventBrite is an event planning service that offers more features for a smaller margin than most others I have looked at. We were able to quickly integrate with Facebook, print tickets, offer checkout with multiple payment options, set up early bird tickets, and easily create the entries into their website without hard-coding...
The Seraph Technology Solutions site was one of my favorite recent projects. It was quite a challenge. Not only were we limited by budget, but were limited by time frame. Any Management 101 class will tell you that in a scenario like that, quality will suffer. Luckily for them, they hired me. I am very good at putting polish on quickly. And these awesome guys do IT – so they were able to build up the infrastructure themselves after the design was complete. Project Summary: This site is a good example of a unique business model in design. I did not create the site template – we used a template. Yet the result is very unique to the company. See the site: www.seraphts.com Project Details: Design Excels With Limitations: I like to offer clients the option of removing several steps from the design process. This saves budget. Seraph had only one week and very limited budget to go live. And after all the preliminary meetings and waiting for content and images, I really had only 4 days to design this site. An Alternative Design Process: After initial limitations were discussed, the we agreed to use a pre-made template on the WordPress platform. And because there are some outstanding website templates out there, this yields impressive results. Working on a pre-made template allows me to focus on two things only (1) project management and configuration of the site and (2) graphics and page layout. And these are some of my most outstanding skills. The basic fact is, the amount of hours required to build and test a website template is not always worth the effort for many small businesses. So the natural question is, if buying a template, why would you need to hire a designer? Well, for several reasons. First, a designer can often make changes to the template that you could not. Things like editing images, changing web style sheets, moving or removing elements, or troubleshooting coding and hosting issues are not easy skills to learn. Secondly, even if you like the template exactly as-is, it is easy to get overwhelmed with the process of setting up a site. An experienced project manager will save you stress and allow you to keep from pulling out your hair. And lastly, even if you have the technical know-how to understand all the menus, check boxes, and pages upon pages of manuals to get a site configured, very few people have the creative eye to still create content and graphics that make the most of a site. Your template will look hollow and go under-utilized. Consider this option for your next website or micro site. You will not be able to get the entire kitchen sink of features. But as technology changes...
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Please Notice: This portfolio site is limited to older works only. Only projects prior to 2013 are shown, to comply with the corporate policy of my employer, Invesco Ltd and PowerShares. I apologize if this causes any inconvenience, and encourage you to contact me directly for more examples.A portfolio of solutions. This is not an academic exercise. I am not a young man just out of college. You will not find projects rejected by clients. Because I feel that design is not as beautiful without the constraints. So each project listed in this site has constraints – limitations. And it is these limitations, which may seem like flaws, that make each project something I am proud of.
Learn MoreMy philosophy begins with two questions:
1. What is design if it does not solve a problem?
2. How can one solve a problem without clearly defining that problem first?
