Last summer I played Softball on a team with a long-running history of hilarious team names. That year was no exception. I made our logo and we got these printed large and proud on our shirts and looked fab all season.

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.

I posted this one earlier as a collection, but figured it deserved its own post.

Here’s an older drawing I did from a photo of my bro Adam and our family dog Baca. They’re both a lot older and bigger now.

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.

Here are the business cards I made for the Zeep guys. I got called out for the styluses, but I guess back then there was still a chance some mobile devices had them, so I don’t feel too bad. I got these printed in China with rounded corners, they turned out great!

The Post-it on the back is there for notes.

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.