Blancspot Media - iPad

Role: Creative Director
Contribution: All visual design, UX work and Flash development

Design Challenge: Take the successful Blancspot iPhone experience and bring it to the iPad, taking advantage of the larger screen and existing interaction paradigm of the iPad platform. Created a fully interactive Flash prototype to show off how the iPhone experience would be transfered to this new platform.

PlayMode Experience on iPad

The iPad version of Blancspot takes advantage of the very large screen of the iPad and really makes the Blancspot cinematic experience shine. A large, rich visual world sets Blancspot apart from all other news application running on the iPad.

ReaderMode Experience on iPad

ReaderMode on the iPad uses a unique two scrolling column approach that allows users to simultaneously read the news story and see relevant Tweets on the same screen. All of this is overlaid on the image to still keep the user connected with the strong visual the prompted their interaction in the first place.

Sharing via Facebook on iPad

Redesigned the Facebook sharing UX to be inline with standard iPad navigation style taking advantage of modal windows to focus the user on a singular action, but without taking them totally out of context from their previous state.

Blancspot Media - iPhone

Role: Creative Director
Contribution: All visual design and UX work
Awards/Recognitions: iPhone App of the week (Sept 6th - 12th 2010)

Design Challenge: Create a new way of experiencing news on mobile devices, integrating imagery, audio, motion and social networking. Did all concept, design work and would ultimately led the development team that built this iPhone app.

PlayMode Experience on iPhone

This is the signature cinematic experience of the Blancspot app built with a focus on a singular large image animated with a Ken Burns effect, set to contemporary music curated for each news channel. This is the starting point of the experience, automatically dropping the user into a stream of events happening in real-time with information about their friends activity integrated into the headline bar.

Dashboard Experience on iPhone

The Dashboard is the aggregate view of news, displaying all news channels for Blancspot, including the unique personal channels - Suggested, Friend's Activity and My Channel. Each personal channel offers a unique way of individual news consumption. "Suggested" news stories are stories your personal network have specifically recommended to you, "Friend's Activity" is news stories you friends are view currently and "My Channel" is both a personal news browser history, as well as stories set to be read later by the user.

ReaderMode Experience on iPhone

After tapping on the headline bar in PlayMode, the user is taken to ReaderMode to view the news story of interest. Here the user can read, view Tweets related to this event or share via email, Twitter, Facebook or Blancspot's unique 'Suggest' feature.

Reset Generation - Game (S60 and Web)

Role: Producer
Contribution: As Producer on Reset Generation I was responsible for all aspects of design and development. All development was done by the amazing team at RedLynx.

Design Challenge: Reset Generation was designed to be an entirely new kind of mobile game that connected Mobile to PC gamers in a seamless multiplayer experience. The vision was to create a game that was inviting to play and unfairly addictive. These two points would be our guiding design principles as we set out to make a game about games, a unique homage to all things gaming. This game would go on to win numerous awards to accolades including a 10/10 from Pocket Gamer.

Reset Generation Logo

The above logo for the game was inspired by old pixel games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Adventure, etc. The name was inspired from a Salon.com article about this group of kids, now adults, who grew up playing videogames and how that has altered their behavior.

Reset Generation on N78 and N86

Reset Generation, is bright, colorful and joyfully celebratory of all things video games. Truly designed for a mobile user, with a focus on one-thumb game play with an average play-session length of ten minutes. The two major design challenges in creating a mobile multiplayer game are; how do you allow players to quickly get into a multiplayer match and second, how do you keep all players interested and active for the entire game without wanting to quit part way through, especially if they are losing?

Reset Generation on N95 8GB

The first problem was solved by creating an entirely new matching system for mobile and the second by creating a, “Rubberband Effect”, such that even when down a player always had a chance to comeback and steal victory from the jaws of defeat.

Reset Generation on N72 and E75

Reset Generation was over flowing with game references including, princesses, heros, castles, blocks, cannons, weapons (BFGP - Biggest Freaking Gun Possible), etc. Though the mechanics were also designed to acknowledge games of the past, the main design of these were to allow for a fast passed tactical game that would work well on mobile and PC without affording an unfair advantage to the PC gamers who woud have larger screens and massive network bandwidth, with little to no latency. Turns were resolved some asynchronously and some were synchronized to keep a pass that was active, for a tactical game, but not too fast for a mobile game, which, at the time, were not well suited for high activity give the poor rocker input of most devices.

Reset Generation on 6630 and N82

Besides the Pocket Gamer award Reset Generation would earn recognition from myriad of sources. 

Evergeek (4.75 / 5)
"The age of mobile gaming second-citizenship has ended with the opening of a multicolored, multiplayer, multilayered can of online, cross-platform, old-school-inspired Whoop-Ass."
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MTV
"I highly recommend you check out "Reset Generation" (available free here); it's an immensely addictive combo of "Tetris" and "Advance Wars"and only takes a few minutes to pick up."
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PCWorld
"I've been playing Reset Generation--the most cleverly designed, most addictive, and most hard-to-quickly-describe puzzle game in ages."
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Reset Generation - Website

Role: Producer and Art Director
Contribution: Working with Themis Group, I led the art direction for the game/website

Design Challenge: Create a framework for the web version of the Reset Generation game to be housed in, that also gave the user quick access to specific gaming features - Rankings, Player Page, Player of the Day, Trophies, News and Event, etc.

Home page - Reset Generation.com

 The main goal for the home page was to create a comfortable place for users to play Reset Generation. The secondary goals for the site where to promote the game in general as well as promote N-Gage in general. One of the interesting things we did to support this, was embedded the game widget in a Nokia device frame that could be changed on the backend to promote whatever was the latest N-Gage compatible device.

 Rankings - Reset Generation.com

Rankings was bay far the most popular feature on N-Gage and Reset Generation would have some of the most active leaderboards of all N-Gage games. To avoid user having to sift through tons of boards and stats, we limited the number of stats we tracked for rankings, but added a "Belt" system that allowed players to earn belts if they were the current leader in a specific event i.e. Princess Rescued, best specific hero, etc. This allowed user to have unique reward, but not leave it locked to one player, like the top five in ranking boards tend to be.

Player Page - Reset Generation.com

Since Reset Generation was built to be a multiplayer game, Player Pages were critical to the success of the game. In addition to the expect features of stats, belts, achievements and hero art, we added a replay system that allowed users to watch all their past matches or the matches of others to learn tips and tricks on how to improve their game play. This was a first of it's kind for a mobile game.

Virtua Fighter 4 - Website

Role: Art Director
Contribution: All visual design, UX and flash development work

Design Challenge: Create an international (translated in 11 languages) marketing site for the new Virtua Fighter 4 game franchise that showed off the new characters, stages and fighting styles. Even though this site was designed in 2002, over 8 years ago, it is still in use today - www.virtua-fighter-4.com

Virtua Fighter 4 - Intro

Clearly dated by todays standards of web design, this site, like many at the time contains the now ultra annoying "Skip Intro" button, but at the time, motion graphics on the web was something to actually sit through and enjoy.

 Virtua Fighter 4 - Home

The website's landing page was intentionally sparse to create maximum visual space for the game art and not add any additional elements to detract from rich character art. The site was divided intro three core areas - Characters, Fighting Styles and Stages, since each Fighter had a unique style, and a specific stage. The user could then cross navigate these areas, for example learning about a specific fighting style - Vale Tudo, would lead the user to Vanessa, where they would learn she fights on the Harbor stage.

 Virtua Fighter 4 - Character (Akira)

Virtua Fighter 4 - Stage (Temple)

The art direction and style established here would go on to be used in the follow up game the franchise - Virtua Fight 4 Evo and also used in print and other ad campaigns. The site was very well received by the notoriously picky AM2 development team, headed by the well known game designer Yu Suzuki.