A family run purveyor of fine beers from all over the world, Weird Beers was looking for a referential site that was both modest and evocative of their artistic, hand-crafted brand. The result is a design featuring stylized line drawings, smooth transitions, and clean, easy to find presentations of the essential information clients are looking for. Additionally, I created a small Javascript based static site generator for the occasional inventory or news update.

Gene’s Liquor is a Los Angeles based distributor of rap and house music. Their pride as a source of gritty, bare bones art was an essential quality to convey in their online shop. I created a custom Big Cartel theme, stripping down the store to the most minimal of necessities. This is a brand that doesn’t hide behind anything; their products do all the talking. I tried to let that edginess show through while still offering an ultra smooth, all-device spanning experience that would be dead simple for customers to navigate.

Fractured Atlas is a non profit that offers a range of financial services to artists through convenient web apps. One of those services is Fractured U, intended to educate members on fiscal matters in the arts sector with a curated collection of video lectures. As a software development intern I was tasked with working with two other interns to redesign and rebuild the Fractured U web app in Ruby on Rails. I worked predominantly on the admin section where I created a LDAP authentication service based on the Devise gem in order to leverage Fractured Atlas’s already existing employee accounts. That service was later implemented into all of Fractured Atlas’s apps. I worked on a few iterations of the admin panel interface as well as the design for the database, before delivering a fully functional prototype that other employees were able to use. I also had a chance to fix some bugs and add a few features to the Artful.ly web app. Ultimately, it was a great chance to gain experience in prototyping and building a new web app as well as maintaining a large, already in use code base.

CK-12 creates and distributes open source textbooks. The ambitious non-profit offers highly customizable and interactive textbooks to teachers and students for free. As an an intern I worked mostly in Javascript, using different libraries to create interactive lessons that could be embedded into the HTML versions of textbooks. Specifically, I used a library called JSX to create and debug a series of geometry lessons, fifteen total, for introducing students to axioms, postulates, and shapes. The lessons needed to function in a small space on a page competing with images and text, and with almost no room to describe the interactions they needed to be immediately intuitive. As such, I worked with the Math content team to build a symbolic vocabulary that progressed in complexity in each interactive lesson. My internship at CK-12 allowed me a great hands on experience in Interactive Design through a rapid cycle of iterative prototyping and user-testing.

I was curious to learn about creating procedural content for games. After looking at different randomization algoritms I built this random map generator in Javascript with output to the Canvas element. I also looked into how the raw data could be translated into multiple forms of output, forms not as obvious as arrays of height maps, including natural-language, 3d printing, and graphic design. I found something very pleasing in using a uniform virtual process to generate something uniquely physical.

I've been an actor, a writer, a cook, a script reader, a teacher, a pilgrim, an illustrator, a programmer, and a designer.

If you have work that involves interaction, visuals, or new technology, you need to drop me an email.