I’m a Creative Director leading experience design projects for Fortune 10 and consumer brands.
Since 2018, I’ve gotten to do this with TAD, imagining and designing experiences for the built environment with dream clients, and defining the edge of digital transformation.
The River, a lobby experience for the the world’s largest bank’s newest location: Argle Street, Glasgow Scotland
Challenge
How to celebrate this, the first technology hub bringing together technology teams from across the UK under one roof?
Solution
Created an art installation, a virtual water feature comprising mosaic of 112 various sized e-cycled LCD’s arranged in the form of the river Clyde playing procedural water animations driven by realtime weather data from 10 tech hubs around the world
Creative insight + inspiration
An authentic circadian painting and a digital placemaking installation, the form of its 112 LCD mosaic is inspired by the sinuous path of the River Clyde. For the community, as a tribute to the spirit of collaboration and the art of engineering, all screens coalesce into a single 32k video feed with eight screens for endo-marketing and external messaging as well as the ability to montage overlays with colors and flags for commemorative events. After all, “What is a river but a multitude of little streams?”* — this water is a canvas, the river a metaphor. * Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar, 1989
Financial Client
MLB asked for content ideas for their 6th Avenue flagship retail store, so I created an excel with dozens of story ideas.
MLB liked them and hired us to create + Design 10 story modes across exterior and interior canvases.
Three of these—Showstopper, Playmaker, and Longball— I curated using data-tagged video clips from their amazing historical database with decades of recorded baseball footage and statistics. Because new game moments occur and are added to the database, these modes are perpetually fresh by design.
Objectives + Challenges
Create a Content Strategy and stories for both exterior 3-sided narrow ribbon signage and interior LCDs.
Walk the talk: create content that leverages if not celebrates the pioneering role of MLB in data science.
Drive impressions and traffic from across Avenue of the Americas
Curate and design content worthy of such an auspicious NYC icon across from Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller center
Deploy an automated content management system, with manual override in a simplified workflow and Integrated of three API’s
Solutions + Outcomes
Iconic NYC Location: Created a realtime scoreboard across from one of the most visited spots in NYC, Rockefeller Center, a location garnering millions of impressions daily.
Stopping power: Much of my site videos show passersby slowing in front of the store’s signage, craning to look up.
Ever Fresh: Continually fresh content is enabled by data-driven curation which informed CMS and playback logic.
Revenue: Created workflows and template designs for easy ad hoc curation and product promotion. Created a montetizable modes for product promotion and special events.
MLB Flagship Retail
NBA HQ
My first hours at TAD were refining a deck to present our content and experience design offering to the NBA. Gulp.
Happily the visual-first storytelling earned us the opportunity to create and build out digital experience throughout the NBA HQ.
12 animated stories across an array of various discrete endpoints blend realtime and video content across the 8 floors.
Further uniting the workplace, TAD also created a wayfinding system that integrates the NBA’s room booking platform.
Atleast a first for me, our digital wayfindig design and its visual program was used to guide for the physical wayfinding and signage.
WORKPLACE APP + PROMOTIONAL VIDEO
Pfizer HQ
Writing + directing a video and designing the software UI it promoted, earned us the opportunity to design the first full stack corporate HQ digital experience.
A workplace app project led to a holistic workplace experience for one of the most recognizable pharmaceutical brands.
Challenges
Coordinate, manage, brand promote a workplace iPhone app that integrates over a dozen discrete technologies in a single pane of glass enabling colleague collaboration, communication and content at the new workplace of the world’s largest pharmaceutical company
Create new content experiences across 800,000 sqft, 11 floors, 12 unique spaces, and 9 discrete digital canvases that integrate with the existing CMS
Objectives:
Bring people together in productive + delightful ways
Filter mass information to maximize usability
Promote well-being
Solution
It’s not an overstatement to say that this experience design connects everything and everyone, delivering a workplace ecosystem that’s easy to monitor, manage, and extend. Design included 5 content modes, interactive design, kinetic real-time data sculpture, a gestural interactive game (Dance or Tai Chi) and a new workplace app. Named and designed brand for the workplace App, CampX.
Objectives:
Bring people together in productive + delightful ways
Filter mass information to maximize usability
Promote well-being
Brand Experience Center: Immersive Space Featuring Touch + Gestural Interactive Wall with Realtime Data Visualizations + News Content
This is an interactive parametric real-time data visualization experience with three discrete content canvases. The exterior is a physical installation of 60 feet wide x 8 feet high with 15 API endpoints and 6,000 lines of code. The interior is an immersive three-sided continuous canvas for touch-interactive collaboration and presentations.
On one of the 3 exterior sides of the wall, Boids (bird-like) objects murmur (swarm) to the rhythms of 21 markets driven by 3 parameters volume, velocity, and volatility. Approcahing the wall opens a portal in the swarm to list the data moving the boids. On the second, 5 news sources scroll and on the third side, a 3D earth turns to breaking news in realtime, flipping to reveal infographics with financial impact of discrete news stories.
Welcoming visitors, students and colleagues, are 8 content modes playing on a trident LED under glass inviting gestural navigationto learn about different facets of the firm, its history, current office events, philanthropy, and multiple ambient modes helping propose, curate and create all motion graphics.
Financial Firm
Brand Digital Experience for Corporate HQ: Content + Wayfinding
Created eight content modes, a mix of generative, data-driven and canned motion graphics. We also designed the wayfinding system across all floors.
Designed branded motion graphics deriving inspired by notion of golden fields of abundance inherent in the Japanes name of this firm.
Financial Firm
Pop-up Signage product
Created brand identity, content modes, templates and custom motion graphics illustrating the assembly process. Also designed the and measured the service design of this mobile IT support platform.
Financial Firm
Digital content design for new corporate HQ
Created ten content modes including brand motion graphics in multiple aspect ratios. Integrated multiple API sources and static assets.
Pharmaceutical Company HQ
2003-2017
Innovation: Mobility
Led, managed, researched, and designed GM’s 160 page hard-bound strategy for
a future of sustainable urban mobility SUM2030
Design + thought leadership for GM global innovation
Global Innovation Project Lead, Researcher, Designer: Effected a shift from producing automobiles to providing mobility services in world emerging megacities. Accomplished with a hand-picked team of 50 from 5 continents, designing the process, managing all research, leading co-creation workshops and designing a 160 page book, SUM2030 and all information graphics.
Rebranding
Confronting taboos
A new brand for the world’s most renowned pornstar
One day Jenna Jameson’s people called me asking if I’d make a brochure like the MileHigh Sex Kit, and I was thrilled. Jenna Jameson is a savvy businesswoman—it was easy to sell her on a big strategic idea, she got it it right away. I designed the brochure but also proposed a new brand + a respositioning strategy for the mass market as an edgy fashion icon. And this path into the mainstream began in earnest when Playboy bought her brand 4 months later. Discussing this success story often makes people (especially in the US) uncomfortable, but an honor to have been able to tackle taboos and disrupt in such an impactful way.
Brand Building
Art Direction: selling sensuality
Based on my work which had garnered some renown at a certain point in the 2000’s (See my Print Article) art direction for Brazilian lingerie advertising, a fellow dot com colleage and programmer turned sexkit product entrepreneur, called me up with a request to create a brochure. I proposed a “manifesto” and he loved it. This led to a lot of other projects and of course, to Jenna Jameson hiring me based on how much she wanted a “manifesto” for herself. It feels great to make ephermera that people like and makes an impact.
Advertising
Art direction for Brazilian lingerie adverts
Naturally, I get a lot of questions about this work, none more scathing than my wife’s, and creative partner’s, childhood nanny who was ever curious about photo-retouching ladyparts in our home studio in Rio de Janeiro.
Strategy-wise, my role was limited to art direction, given my wife’s award-winning work precisely for this client.
This was my first art direction project for the Brazilian market, conceived in NYC and presented in Rio de Janeiro. I remember tellling the client the blowjob depicted in this Kama Sutra reference is only FPO. Their response was not what I’d expected. After they stopped laughing my poor gringo puritanism, “the blow job stays.”
Christie: B2B Film
I love creating content + stories, especially via
time-based media
Writing + directing for promotional film for Christie cinema projection systems
Discovery Channel: B2B Film
On-air + upfront promotional film
Wrote, directed and narrated. This is likely one my very favorite projects and certainly one that makes me love experiential design so much.
CLIENT: Discovery Channel
OBJECTIVE: Drive upfront sales + present on-air
CREATIVE DIRECTION: "See with New Eyes”, the art + science of the Discovery channel through concept
CHALLENGE: How to sell premium HD TV content package to affiliates in the rapidly developing world markets like South America?
ROLES: Wrote, directed, co-produced, narrated
Play-inspired Projects
Designing for discovery through play
Playful learning
PLAYLab: a series of thematic workshops that promote language learning through creative play using both technology and analog activities. Moving between multiple modalities really engaged the kids and offered different ways to explore language based on their learning style and aptitudes.
Playful Annual Report
Client loved the creative direction of communicating their human-centric brand through their online annual report by building it as a game. Inspired by the Milton Bradley classic, Simon, a visitor can pause their reading of the AR to play and then return either when choose or lose.
Experience Design K-12
Designed Spaces, content and systems: a new statellite campus, classrooms, content and material for the school learning systems and notebooks and metacognitive learning system as well the first museum as a classroom in South America.
News Product Innovation
Natural language processing based commercial SaaS
Subscription service making sense of the news by visualizing meaningful patterns
Created a new product prototype for one of the largest news clipping services in Brazil. This project draws a direct line to one of my very first projects at TAD
Logistics: Explainer video +App Design
Communication strategy + app design for transportation management startup
