flukeout luke pacholski's design & illustration blog

I alternate between Chrome and Firefox pretty often and one thing that annoys me is that I’ve got different bookmarks in each browser. Another thing is that depending on the time and day, I’d like different bookmarks to be more prominent. Chrome’s New Tab page is pretty handy in this regard, but it always shows me the same stuff and often lists one site multiple times.

To get out of this first-world quandry, I built a homepage that opens when I open any browser (and when I create a new tab) and shows me the bookmarks I’m most likely to need depending on the time and day.

How’s it work?

The top row are my always-on staples. Damn I love Google. The middle row is time-aware and only shows the bookmarks I want to see on the weekend. The faint bottom row are the rest of my bookmarks, lying in wait until their time to shine has come.

Each active bookmark has a letter below it, which I can press to launch that site.

Try it Out Should work in Firefox and Chrome

Change the day and time slider to see how the page looks at different times.

Seems like Flash has become a dirty word on the web now, but one of the coolest parts of working at Future Shop was working on animated banners for product promotions. Here are a couple of my favourites.

Refresh the page to see the intro animations.

Satellite Radio

This was for the launch of Sirius and XM Satellite radio service in Canada.

XBOX 360 Release

This was for the launch of the XBOX 360.

Up4 was a Facebook app I worked on while at ActiveState. It was a casual hang-out enabler meant to complement Facebook’s native event system. It was a passive approach to getting friends together – you’d list when you were up for certain activities, and friends could join if they were interested. I was responsible for all of the visual design, markup and illustrations. Here’s a few selected screens.

Calendar View

This was the main view of what you were up for. We divided the day into sections keep the events more flexible. You could click anywhere on the calendar to start creating a new “up for”.

Creating an Up4

Once you made an event, other friends you’d invited to the app could find it on the “what your friends are up for” tab and join in.”

Up4 Details

Examining an up4, you’d be able to see who joined, have a discussion with other participants and also share with Facebook friends who you think might also be interested.

Facebook profile box

You could choose to include this Up4 box on your Facebook page. This would allow friends who weren’t Up4 users (yet!) to see what you were up for and join in.

When redesigning the Vibes Sign In page, one of the concepts I came up with was a threaded SMS-style conversation. Vibes is all about mobile so it seemed fitting. Try it out, it has a very rudimentary capacity to carry (a pretty boring) conversation about signing you in. Bonus points if you get the hunter 2 reference.

Click the Boring Sign In link at the bottom see a static version of the final design.

Try out the Prototype Use Firefox – It’s going to look terrible otherwise!

At Vibes, we offer a cool system that lets our customers display interactive, SMS-driven visualizations on large screens in front of an audience. To control these visualizations (I’ll post some examples later), we built a remote controller. The controller lets users select the visualization they want to show, configure it to fit the screen they’re displaying it on, and control what’s being shown on the screen.

The controller below controls a vote visualization. People at the venue text in to choose the next song they want to hear. The remote controller shows the state of the visualization (currently displaying the vote options) as well as the number of votes received.

When time is up, the person in charge of the clicks the Winner screen to display the vote winner to the audience.

Putting a Visualization on a Screen

When the user selects a visualization, the remote controller and popup appear. To put the visualization up on the large venue screen, the user follows the instructions on the popup. When the visualization popup is put into fullscreen mode, it automatically resizes it’s contents to best fit the available screen real estate.

The screen adjustment controls in the remote controller help fine-tune the display and when everything looks correctly positioned the visualization can begin.

The Visualization Popup

Here are some components of the Zeep Mobile website I designed. Zeep is basically an API that allows developers to interact with their website users via SMS.

Homepage

Sign-up Panel

To subscribe users to receive text messages from a website, the developer would embed the Zeep Mobile panel into their site with an iframe (so web 2.0!!!). Here’s the panel.

I mentioned in a previous post that one of the products I work on at Vibes allows people at concerts or other venues to text messages to a big screen for everyone to see. Texting’s great and all, but we want to come up with cooler, more interactive ways for people to send messages to the screen.

Enter the slingshot, it lets people type out a message and then aim it at a target. The message would appear on the big screen according to where it was aimed. This would allow people to shoot over other people’s messages, or to combine their message with an existing one for potential comedy gold.

Try out the Prototype Type a message and launch it with the mouse!

How is it built?

The prototype is built using HTML/CSS + jQuery + CSS animations. I made another version that works on mobile devices via jQuery Mobile. On the iPhone pure jQuery animations are quite slow, but mobile Webkit’s hardware-accelerated CSS transitions came to the rescue.

CSS animations got the job done, but I can’t say I’m a fan. Most of the slingshot animations are triggered by adding a class to some DOM element via jQuery, which then causes the corresponding CSS animation to trigger, seems clunky.

As co-founder and VP of Pixels of Zeep Media, I was in charge of basically everything visual. Here’s a roundup of some of what I made.

Name & Logo

The name Zeep Media came out of day-long brainstorming session (read: beating my head against desk). I think it references the sound of a cell phone when it both beeps and vibrates on a hard surface.

Website

I was in charge of designing and implementing the HTML/CSS layer of the website, as well as light front-end programming duties.

Homepage

The homepage was meant to get potential advertisers going right away. They could fill out their ad copy and move directly to the next step of creating their first campaign.

How it works

This is a step-by-step explanation of the campaign creation process. I included it to show some of the icons and illustrations I made.

Creating a campaign

This is one of the steps in our “wizard” style interface for creating a campaign.

One of the things I work on at Vibes Media are large-scale visualizations that people at a venue can interact with via SMS. For example, at a concert people can send text messages that will then appear on a big screen everyone to see.

I built Tic Tac Tailgate as a prototype of a SMS-driven multiplayer game where large teams can alternate texting in their moves (each square corresponds to a number from 1 to 9).

Try out the Prototype Click the numbers to make moves as both sides. Use Firefox!

How’s it work?

Guys and girls play against each other. Each turn, while the turn timer is running, players from that team text the number corresponding to square they’d like to place their piece. Each team has a unique shortcode assigned to it to make texting easier. Every time a vote comes in, a small puff of fire appears in that square to help the rest of the team clue in to what other people are doing.

Once the turn timer runs out, the game figures out the most voted for square and makes the appropriate move. In case of a tie, the game randomly chooses between the tied squares. If there are no votes, the game chooses a random square for the team.

The game continues until there’s a tie or a winner.

How’s it made?

It’s all a bunch of HTML/CSS driven by some messy JavaScript. The animations are powered by jQuery with a little bit of help from Spritely for the smoke and fire sprites.

What’s next?

I’m planning to finish the prototype and have some folks at the office give it a try. Text-based interactions are kind of limited, and we’ve also started to experiment with web-based UIs that people can use on their smartphones. This would dramatically increase the depth of interactions available. I’d like to take a crack at making some more elaborate games.

This is a logo for probably the coolest web project I’ve been involved with, a Facebook-driven social restaurant review site. I’ll post a link and screenshots later, but here’s the logo I made for it.

I went for a Vegas-themed logo both for the relationship to all you can eat buffets and that “Jackpot!” feeling of discovering an awesome new place to eat.

And here’s the web-app

This shows the main page of the app, where users interact with the map to discover restaurants.