The logotype came first; it is fun and has a suggestion of movement. If there was ever a place that Futura felt at home, it’s in this piece. The subtle change in weight provides a sense of action and is a visual token for the mind to hold on to and remember. It does, however, remind me of something HP might have done before. I reworked the home screen to feature the new logo, along with some expanded navigational options. In retrospect, this may have not been the best approach. A subtler, more elegant approach may have been more appropriate for this simple and calming game. That said,  there is a lot of potential in this design. I can envision this as animated or static, as well as providing a great base for adding features.

Lastly, I wanted to address the game’s staging screens (stats/instructions between levels). While this particular page has not been completely flushed out, I believe it shows a possible direction. My goals here were to introduce both a visual progress indicator (levels) and a scoring indicator, that could be used on both the staging screens and in game. Currently, Boomshine only displays the score between levels. This element could be used transparently over the game screen to always keep the player informed of their cumulative score.

During this attempt to redesign Boomshine, I struggled for a long time on whether to use iPhone design elements. While I choose to develop my own given more time I might explore options that included native iPhone UI elements like the notification system.

After the initial fifteen minute conversation to basically go over what exactly CB Hermanovce wanted, I grabbed my sketchbook and started wire framing. It took one hour to go from blank page to revised digital composition. I used Adobe’s Kuler application to provide a quick color scheme. Next was WordPress’s five minute install and a few hours spent coding a three file template that could be used to serve all of the sites different content.  A short round of testing and polishing followed before the website was setup to receive content.

The only design input I received was the desire for rotating header images and a “big footer.” Slovaks like short bursts of information so the aim of the design was to create a page that would look respectable with little to no actual content on it. Fortunately, both of their requested features helped with my design goals. Along with the featured content header I also made sure to include a fully featured image gallery and options for posting audio recordings of sermons. Both features that, while not immediately requested, I think will be well received and easily adopted. The biggest weakness in this project is it’s lack of rounded corners in Internet Explorer. To save time I decided to use the CSS3 border-radius property. While this works in most modern browsers it leaves Internet Explorer oddly boxy. Given more time I could have used images or javascript for full cross browser compatibility but in this case it just wasn’t an option. This site is currently being built out with content and will be live soon.

Note: what you see here are screenshots of the coded website before the final content was added. I have pledged to give an additional hour to refine any formatting issues and last minute touch ups after they have finished this process.

At two meters by three meters it consisted of a cherry stained wooden box frame around a vinyl sticker on 8mm plexiglass. The original plan was to use a 3M manufactured etched glass vinyl but it unfortunately didn’t provide adequate contrast and as a result was pretty much unreadable. The solution came in the form of a solid white vinyl which seemed to do the trick just right. In retrospect, I probably would have built a deeper box frame to bring the glass away from the wall more. Eight inches instead of three would probably be appropriate.

This gallery exhibition was for my senior thesis at San Jose State University. It was the culmination of four years of education and nearly seven months of dedicated planning and building. The central piece from this show was a six foot tall sculpture cast in bronze of an earth suspended by an assortment of  electrical cables. On top sat a wooden telecommunications tower. The gallery itself was then layered with newspaper stories on what appeared to be a bleeding wall of ink. A stencil I made based on the sculpture was used around campus as a form of propaganda/graffiti advertising. It, along with a television stencil, was used on the walls as well.

My hope was to show or draw up imagery of what our modern day civilization would look like if it came to an end. This could happen for a number of reasons and was not solely tied to the idea of a post apocalyptic or doomsday type scenario. I drew inspiration from the likes of Saul Bass and Shepard Fairey.

I sketched up four ideas playing off of two different themes all centered around a custom logotype I had come up with. They ultimately choose to feature Slovakia and it’s breath taking natural scenery. Slovakia’s iconic High Tatra mountains set the stage well. My aim was to draw the viewer in through layering and to make the logotype big, bold, and imposing so as to jump off the page.

This piece could use a lot of criticism. In the end the client was happy and they got what they wanted. I still think it lacks excitement and a call to action. Sure the image has a sense of aura and magnificence about i,t but it does little to bring the viewer to action. I suppose that is subjective, but of the four ideas I had, the one chosen was my least favorite mostly because it was the most generic. That said, it did stand out well in the book.

Another enjoyable piece is a poster used for a spring time celebration that happened in May (Náza). The original file was handed off to someone else for content but this earlier version still shows the final design and what it was to become.

Its unique visual style is one of my favorite aspects of this piece. I chose to blur the line between form and function a bit. While a simpler design could have led to better readablity I felt my solution was functional enough and visually interesting.

While I feel the design and hierarchy shown here is solid, it leaves a lot to be desired. In hindsight, I would probably have gotten rid of the graphical calendar in favor of better one emphasizing the event dates. A bump in size and maybe floating position outside of the main column would probably do the trick. Some tweaks to the typopgraphic spacing like loosening up the line heights would help with legibility as well as making the actual calendar details a bit smaller to help with hierarchy. There is a lot to love about this design; in truth, it’s pretty good, but it’s probably one revision away from being great.

As the resident designer, network administrator, and overall technology evangelist, my aim was for this website to solve problems with how information was disseminated. That meant having a functional bilingual website in Slovak and English. It also meant news feeds for each grade level as well as a main channel for school wide news. All of this news would then propagate dedicated class pages with RSS and email subscription options to keep parents informed with what was going on at school. Lastly, a photo gallery would accompany everything to provide albums for classes and events throughout the year. The idea was that the vast majority of site users (returning parents) would land on the home page or dedicated class pages. The rest of the site was built around the information flow that best suited the parents of incoming students. The site was built on WordPress for its ease of use and multilingual friendly features. This allowed each teacher to have control of their classes page and a centralized voice to reach out to parents.

Major challenges included, but were certainly not limited to, the obvious language barrier (I don’t speak Slovak), supporting legacy browsers, and developing a multilingual friendly site structure. It was common to find best practices often used in the United States that simply didn’t translate literally or systematically.