Naturel, a visual artist specializing in digital illustrations and prints, is a close friend of mine whom I’ve known for over 15 years. Watching his most recent work go from a simple idea posted on Instagram to almost breaking the Internet a few times has been incredible to watch. When he reached out to me about needing a site to sell his work online, I was more than excited to help him bring it to life.
His pieces sell out within hours so we needed a system that could keep up with inventory and streamline shipments. Shopify was the most straightforward solution for this so starting with some design direction from Naturel, I designed and developed a solution that elegantly shows off his work and offers a simple yet intuitive payment interaction for visitors.
After working with the Normal earphones team, I was contacted by their partner company, Quirky, to work on a full-screen microsite for a new product called Wink Relay—a smart device that connects and regulates your home appliances. They were announcing it in just two weeks, so after meeting with the team in person to discuss specifics and review their design, I immediately started to build it.
Using HTML, jQuery and LESS, I quickly delivered a dynamic, fast loading, responsive experience, that effectively promoted their new product—and on time. Unfortunately, the campaign ended in 2014 and is no longer live.
As a proud music nerd, I was really excited to work with a brand that is pushing the envelope of earphone design. Each pair of Nrml earphones are one-of-a-kind and 3d-printed to fit the unique shape of your ear.
The Nrml team provided a design that combined high-res product shots with a focus on product details and specs. This was a frontend-only build so I was tasked with taking their design and turning it into a functional and responsive HTML/JS/CSS site.
GE Link bulbs are part of a series of innovative product ideas produced by Quirky for GE. These futuristic light bulbs can be scheduled to turn on and off via your mobile phone and they’re also super energy-efficient. I worked with Quirky to build a microsite to showcase the bulbs and all of their great features.
This was another front-end development only project where the design direction was provided by Quirky designers. I used a custom front-end framework to implement various common features and streamline the development process.
I initially started working with Khoi Vinh, one of the most brilliant designers I know, a few years ago when we collaborated on a premium WordPress theme called Basic Maths. At the time, he was new to WordPress and was using Expression Engine to power his uber-popular blog. A few years later after seeing how malleable WordPress was, he asked me to help him reimagine his blog using WordPress as the backbone, and there was no way I could turn it down.
Khoi led the design while I did all of the WordPress development on the site. There are tons of nuggets of smart design and slick interaction techniques used throughout the site that you are simply better off seeing for yourself.
View the live site.
For this project, I had the pleasure of working on-site with the good folks at AREA17, hand-in-hand with their design lead and back-end developers. The NY Media Center is an “incubator” of sorts that provides artists, innovators and entrepreneurs with resources to help them take their ideas to the next level.
The project itself was pretty large as it combines two separate CMSes and exists on two separate servers. I led the front-end development and built the WordPress portions of the CMS development.
Partners & Spade is a really awesome brand agency based in New York. I had been aware of their work and their brand for a while when Tom Ran, of The Scout online magazine first brought the project to my attention, so I was very excited to take this one on.
I worked directly with Anthony Sperduti, the co-founder of the brand, and his design team to showcase the amazing work that P&S produces. They also wanted to be able to maintain the site on their own which made WordPress an easy choice for the backend. The site also features a built in storefront solution that they use to sell rare products.
Outside of some of the visual and interactive work that I do, I also produce music. The Stuyvesants is a collaborative instrumental hip-hop project that I started with my long time friend, art director, and music enthusiast Darien Birks. What started out as a Friday night, after-work routine of listening to old records and getting inspired to make new music turned into a five-album journey that continues to grow and reach people far beyond our expectations.
Besides producing the music for this project, I also have a hand in creating the record cover art. I built the site using a combination of WordPress, the SoundCloud API, and an integration of Sellfy to manage sales.
Listen for free here: thestuyvesants.com.
