Portfolio & Professional Biography

In February of 1998, I joined Acceleration Software International Corporation (ASIC) as a Graphic Designer. This small software company was dedicated to acceleration utility software, such as d-Time, Superfassst!, and Webcelerator under the company tagline, "...Just Faster!" Initially responsible for banner-ads, web and software creatives, my role within the company quickly evolved into Web Designer to fill the needs of the growing Internet frontier. Over the years I branched out further into server-side scripted Web Development, while still keeping my roots as both Web and Graphic Designer.

Early in my career I enjoyed the sucess of a very high CTR banner-ad featuring 3 animated cups and a ball reminiscient of Three-Card Monte. The animated-GIF was created in Adobe Photoshop and hand-sequenced using Microsoft GIF Animator. The key behind the design was to be as clean and lightweight as possible to expedite delivery times, while keeping the animations accurate — if you were to follow the ball, it was always under the same cup. This banner-ad was featured in Newsweek as one of the top-10 banner ads by volume.

Initially, my Web Design was restricted to the company's Portals, an early-2000 web concept of establishing all-in-one homepages for news, entertainment, and the like. Designing in HTML and a modicum of CSS, but primarily using nested table techniques for layout, these pages adapted their content based on our 3rd-party affiliates, rather than the more modern user-customizable methodolgy. My responsibilities during this time were the adaptation of 3rd-party creative resources, as well as creation of a multitude of custom icons and other web graphics.

During the dotcom boon and subsequent crash, ASIC went through a restructuring, and became eAcceleration Corp. The company weathered the fallout well, adopting a new IP, StopSign Internet Security and further expanding when most companies were locking their doors. This period of growth offered many opportunities for advancement, and saw my first opportunities to expand into Web Development in PHP. The frantic, small-business mentality was replaced with a structured PMO. Under this system I was a lead resource in the design and development of our custom next-generation e-commerce solution.

Inspired by the popular Amazon and eBay e-commerce systems, I worked with a small team to design a dynamic multi-paginated shopping cart to handle a multitude of products and services. This site was created using PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with backend server communications through CURL for payment processing and accounting. Webservices were developed for product and account information retrieval, initially using NuSOAP, but later adopting our own custom webservice solution.

As with the optimization iterations employed when I created and refined banner-ads, a similar concept was used to analyze and improve the experience, promotions, and product/service line within the shopping cart. A streamlined system evolved, making the purchasing process as efficient as possible for the customer, while at the same time increasing conversion rates and revenues.

The Foundation is dedicated to bringing knowledge and exposure about Charcot Foot disease. Charcot Awareness Education Foundation realized that one of the best methods of bringing their education to the public was over the Internet. I was contracted to assist in getting their initial website established, including domain registration, server hosting, and setting up a blog or newsfeed.

We selected WordPress as the website CMS, choosing a stock theme that fit the desires of the Foundation, with minor modifications required to add their logo to the masthead. After the initial setup, I continued to act as Technical Director when necessary, primarily through the education of using the CMS, and mentoring on post frequency, spam elimination, and other routine maintenance.

I'm in the band, dude!

Verdigris was a blues-based rock/jam band, entertaining the greater Seattle area during the early 2000s. I played bass in the band, designed, established, and maintained the band website, and produced all of the album art for our EP.

When we decided to make a website, we jumped upon the Blogger bandwagon, creating a copper & verdigris (it's a color) theme. I assisted the members in establishing their login access, while maintaining the more hand-on portions of the website, such as the calendar. All site graphics were made in Adobe Photoshop, and aside from minor scipting, the entire site was CSS-driven HTML.

Unfortunately, the website is no longer around, and although Archive.org has past record of Verdigris.net, many of the styles have not stood up to the test of time, nor were any of the images indexed.

Hellfire Club is a guild on the Greymane realm in the World of Warcraft MMO. For the guild website, based on the feedback of the members, I developed a custom WordPress theme and accompanying graphics based upon the guild tabard and the "felfire" theme within the game itself.

To start, a series of mockups were created within Adobe Photoshop based on requirements and feedback. Intended originally to simply be modifications to the default WordPress theme, it eventually proved more efficient to develop most of the theme from scratch. This was done in order to best match the styles created within the design phase and avoid an abundance of tweaking. The theme was then debugged and tested, and finally implemented by the site administrator. I also made all of the theme graphics in Photoshop, from the masthead logo to the various background images.

For the Horde!