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[luvemanates]

A social network for sexy photography

In 2006 when no one knew what twitter was I was busy leaving my advertising gig at fastclick and still testing my skills with rails.  I had no design experience at the time, and Zivity was looking for its first full time engineer. I read the Zen of CSS design..

They thought I had what it took and one year later I had helped them land $10M in venture capital.  Meanwhile I cried “we need a human computer interaction specialist!"   And the angel team was so good they landed John Manoogian

And while everyone was being cool running on Apple machines I took the humble road and installed gentoo on an old toshiba to save money… You know startups.

Meanwhile after design change after design change we finally landed something that looked artistic and unique.

I was in charge of building everything in rails 1.x - 2.x .  Building out features so photographers could upload a zip file of all of the photos.  So the servers would unzip them… Making it so the photographers could put a nice lipstick stamp on the photos for copyright protection.  Allowing models and photographers to become friends and follow each others work.  Hooking up paypal payments so fans could vote on a set, or a photo for a $1. 

And then there was reading and reading… and keeping up with rails on edge or off… books still helped.

Engineering and styling all of the pages that John could dream about… and little did we know Cyan and Scott landed a venture deal and the site is still up though with a different look.  Thanks to digging into yet another book:

Two years at this startup prepared me up to bring a professional presence wherever I worked thereafter.  It taught me that loving what I made could make an important difference even if that difference is as small as a font choice.  

So I took a short vacation for my birthday

And as a side project I took to facebook and a spin the bottle app that grew about 5,000 users.

[luvemanates]

Designining and Engineering an open source store

This project is still live at dreambop.com - The whole project is built using ruby on rails, and photoshop.  It is powered by nginX, passenger, and amazon ec2.  After building it I released it for open source which I encourage you to look at.  It is no complicated feat of engineering, but not easy either. This same code was cleaned up and then used to power faucetcentral.

You’ll notice the design is patterned with frosted diamonds, and the font choice was a modern gothic you commonly see in minimal advertising work.  All of the content is centered and optimized for 14.4" screen sizes.  Although it still looks good on smaller devices it was built to look good anywhere.

Engineering included uploading data from 3rd party sellers for dropshipping.  The sales portion of the site was in need of some reworking, and the products in need of updating… all of which were on my to do list should I choose to start selling again. 

The product images are arranged next to the description copy to make scanning the products more attractive.  Superfluous but related details are kept at the bottom of the product page… again to make scanning the page easier for common users of the site.  All of the products are hierarchically arranged in a tree structure at the top of the page so similar products can be found by text.  Also at the bottom of the page are pictures of similar products.  At the top you can easily find your cart, view your account, return to the home page, or search for products. 

Currently shown, and visible at the website is the second design version of the site.

[luvemanates]

Creative Commons and Consulting

As the financial collapse hit in 2008 I cut from the team at Zivity and decided to do more research while I made spare change doing consulting work.  I cut a creative commons album and made a simple website in rails for the 14 instrumental hip hop tracks I dubbed the “Remix Elixirs."  I never cut a deal even after 300,000+ downloads and an A&R phone call.

As the downloads were accruing I went to work consulting for Tige boats.  They wanted buyers to be able to fully customize their boat with an online experience.  With a lot of photoshop magic, and pieces of PHP CodeIgniter … we ended up with a great feeling design. 

Making the jquery play nice with all of the work done by the CAD engineer took a lot of time to make it look like everything was already loaded.

I did some work with venue.com and fuddruckers… and started reading a university coursework required book by Charles Lamb.

I took four p’s of marketing: product, price, placement, and promotion and gave fuddruckers a rundown on what I thought they might be able to do.

[luvemanates]

A student photography startup

After all of my time with stores it was nice to go to something a little different… and this different was a meandering road back to photography.  But I liked the demographic.  They were hiring young, and their customer base was mostly young. 

It was a bit of a winding path ending up there… as faucet central was looking great, and feeling great… but dealing with an absentee owner made things move like sludge.  There was a hold up on all ends of the business… and it seemed like I needed to be somewhere where the owners just wanted to get things done again.  And this startup did.  And it was also time for me to do more management. And as a team we accomplished a lot.  I wanted to accomplish more, but I still feel like we did more than was asked of us and ended up wanting to do more.  Funding at startups can always be the end of discussion though.  Needless to say.. Here are some interesting things we did. 

We took this book and threw it in the trash.  Then we had a look at their designs with “a lot of PHP” already done.  I looked at the code, and I looked at the design.. and everything looked like garbage.  If ever there was a lot to do, this was the job.  There were a few years old, and already 5 years behind. The fun thing was, I was surrounded by stock photographers… and they always keep things interesting even if there isn’t a lot of money. 

So we looked at this design and wondered… and then we looked at the menu bar and wondered some more… “Doesn’t it seem a little cluttered?” we humbly asked our seasoned vet designer who was also very much an absent presence.  “NO. Students like this."   "Really?” We asked. We absolutely have to have two full sets of menu selections right on top of each other? We really need menu links for “Portfolios”, “Contests”, “Resources”, “Stock.EDU”, “Product Reviews”, “Jobs”, “Stores”, “Tour”, “About Student Stock”…. etc… “It really speaks to you that students like this?” “YES” So we deferred and sat on the design as a “just for now” consideration. We worked on the backend… fully rspec tested… things working like a charm… Me… still learning my management chops to keep things running smooth while I still bust out a flow of clean working code.  Finally after making a social network merge with a store, and making BOTH sides work, with a store you can buy art on paypal.. with a social network where you can upload your photos… where you can message other users.  Where you can pick your uploads and sizes that sell in the store…. All running with the same ruby object models, and all running from the same database running as a rails engine!  This was highly cutting edge stuff.

All that was different were the controllers running from two different apps with two sets of views and controllers.  The same ENGINE! It was awesome.  And so finally after page after page of clutter I showed them this:

And also showed them this - a working example of buying stock photos after uploading them just like they asked.

Things worked great. We met our deadline. You upload, make friends, choose sizes… and buy stock… All running and tested with rspec on ec2. Management succussfully managed. StudentStock was on it’s way to being a success, and it made our whole team feel great.

Meanwhile I read:

[luvemanates]

Sound Design, Production, and Animation

Meanwhile in my free time while I was at the photography startup I borrowed some open source, and some of my original music from my creative commons album and made an interactive work of art that gives new visuals based on the musical input. 

And finally as 2014 comes around I released a solo album of mine entitled four years in the future.

And I made a small animation of tree leaves for the website.

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[luvemanates]

Say We Rad

When I worked at zivity, John mentioned we should work on a site for people like me.  Orphans. Fostered kids. Adopted people.  I blinked hard.  What a concept. Lately I finally found the time to put it together.  I’d made two social networks by hand… what if I put something together that was open source?  I found someone working on a rails project in spain… and I decided to put the time in to have a go at it.  So saywerad.com was born.

Say We Rad - Because we aren’t

[luvemanates]

Changing The Game

In 2011 I took what I had learned at my previous jobs and put them to use.  I still had very little management experience, but I was ready to take the lead after making dreambop.  This is what I was looking at when I arrived… More perl, a design like this:

This should look a little shocking to you… as this design was recent for them in 2011. A logo the size of a house… an alphabetical arrangement for hundreds of thousands of products, and a huge customer base where even the mere thought about updating the way things worked would instill fear of pissing off an absentee private owner. 

I gained trust from the CEO and proposed a few new looks. 

Though they didn’t keep the whole design it inspired them, a company older than google… to update their home page.  Next was the product page:

These pages would run on for miles… the idea was customers could order hundreds of products at one go all in different sizes if need be.  “Customers liked it” was the reaction sales told me.  But they wanted to see what I could do.  So I cut no corners. I wanted something that would make them look competitive with companies that held a bigger market percentage. This was another design I had in mind if not just for the placement.

The water drops and the bathroom tile had now become a more attractive footer so the logo didn’t need to be so big… The new concise logo font with a modern bold look.  Customer reviews, and FAQ’s unique to the product had now been grouped on a per product basis. This would be more attractive to new buyers, and google browsers. Similar products would not get phots, and not just links.  This design was a dream to them… Here is why:

Everything was built tied to a very crusty old backend that couldn’t move.   A change like this would take a few years at least.  “We have to hold on this."   My dreams were crushed.  So I read while they thought about something better for me to do. 

What a book.  Simple concept.  Take your business goals.  "We need to increase sales by 5%."  Take your business goals and identify EMOTIONS that the customer would need to feel to make the goal a reality.  To see an example of how you might do with this with something as simple as a peanut butter jelly sandwich look at this spreadsheet I made.

I was done with that book and ready to put it into action.  Meanwhile while the absentee owner and the stalled CEO had me reading and doing C++ work.  So I read some more.

What another book!  If ever there was a book to help this company out of the 90’s craigslist design this was it.  Why were sales lower now?  New customers didn’t trust us. Who would trust it when it looks like the site barely moves and the design came out of country gas station from an old 80’s horror movie.  Why did we get so many calls saying they couldn’t check out?  How could anyone figure it out if there was not feedback?  You never knew what page you had just landed on.  My suggestions kept sales rising.  I cut my teeth on another book… while they finalized an idea.  

Make your customer feel emotions that you need them to feel… and make it addicting.  Now it becomes less like sales, and more like an experience.  There are fun incentives even for the customer that can’t be bought.  But they are now spending time on the site. So with my new project… faucet central.  Could I make something work? What am I working with?

I shuttered.  This is what we have up now?  Laughs, giggles, "Yes sir."  Let me see what I can do.  I brainstormed with someone else who liked to talk to design.  We talked games.. I talked with the CEO and the CTO about marketing and business goals.  The designer and I had some good ideas about making the new site into more of a game.  "OK” I said… Lets get version 1 out, and then lets talk about making a game to see how things fly with a new look, and an actually workable site.  This is what we came up with after using the dreambop site and making things more workable.

The CEO handed us the goal of having a theme that would attract designers.  My designer co-worker and I went through hours of discussion… and she loved black.  I wanted white, but we ended up with her very beautiful black pattern.  I took some brushed steel and ironed out the footer.  Then I took her choice of a modern sans-serif font and put a wet floor effect on it.  Next I took some buttons and make them feel sleek with a slight webbing to keep them attached to all the flash. And to top it all off the CEO, my designer friend, the CTO, and me all started coming up with unique banners to run under the buy it now button at the top.  For each banner you could just “click” and purchase it right on the top of the page as the banner changed products while you peruse. 

The next thing to do was figure out how this monolithic-ally old web company and make it work with C++ backend.  I got it all to work and even added a better faucet selection experience kind of like the work I did on Tige Boats.

  Now we had a product page too.  You could select the finish for your faucet… Or you could peruse the manufacturers list in case you just liked their style.  Also the plan was to incorporate the industrial designer’s image with their faucet.  Just like checking out a filmaker’s home page.. you could interact, and feel contemporary while doing it.   Meanwhile the business dev team could add more faucets and link them up just by adding a link, and a product code for the picture upload, and integration with the C++ backend.  It was beautiful, and I’m glad we made it all work… But there was another hold up now.  And this time it was from both the CTO and the CEO… and it was time for me to leave.  Nonetheless I was happy to have built it for them, and hope one day they make time to watch it bring in customers. Sometimes you can see it up and running at testplumbing.com or goodness not faucetcentral.com