I’m a Creative Director leading experience design projects for Fortune 10 and consumer brands.
Since 2018, I’ve had the opportunity 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 place-making lobby experience for the world’s largest bank’s newest location: Argyle Street, Glasgow, Scotland
Challenge
How do you 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 real-time 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 sheet with dozens of story ideas.
MLB liked them and hired us to create 10 story modes across exterior and interior canvases.
Three of these—Showstopper, Playmaker, and Longball—I curated using data-tagged video clips from their extensive 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 and 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 iconic NYC landmark across from Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller center
Deploy an automated content management system, with manual override in a simplified workflow and integration of three APIs.
Solutions + Outcomes
Iconic NYC Location: Created a real-time scoreboard across from one of the most visited spots in NYC, Rockefeller Center, a location garnering millions of impressions daily.
Stopping Power: Many 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, informing CMS and playback logic.
Revenue: Created workflows and template designs for easy ad hoc curation and product promotion. Developed monetizable 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 experiences throughout the NBA HQ.
Twelve animated stories across an array of discrete endpoints blend real-time and video content across the eight floors.
Further uniting the workplace, TAD also created a wayfinding system that integrates the NBA’s room booking platform.
A first for me, our digital wayfinding design and its visual program were used to guide the physical wayfinding and signage.
WORKPLACE APP + PROMOTIONAL VIDEO
Pfizer HQ
Writing and 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 sq. ft., 11 floors, 12 unique spaces, and nine 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. The design included five content modes, interactive design, kinetic real-time data sculpture, a gestural interactive game (Dance or Tai Chi), and a new workplace app. I named and designed the 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 Real-Time Data Visualizations and News Content
This is an interactive, parametric, real-time data visualization experience with three discrete content canvases. The exterior is a physical installation, 60 feet wide by 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 three exterior sides of the wall, Boids (bird-like objects) murmur (swarm) to the rhythms of 21 markets, driven by three parameters: volume, velocity, and volatility. Approaching the wall opens a portal in the swarm to list the data moving the Boids. On the second side, five news sources scroll, and on the third, a 3D earth turns to breaking news in real-time, flipping to reveal infographics with the financial impact of discrete news stories.
Welcoming visitors, students, and colleagues are eight content modes playing on a trident LED under glass, inviting gestural navigation to learn about different facets of the firm, its history, current office events, philanthropy, and multiple ambient modes. I helped propose, curate, and create all stories and motion graphics.
Financial Firm
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 inspired by the notion of golden fields of abundance inherent in the Japanese name of this firm.
We also designed the wayfinding system across all floors.
Financial Firm
Pop-up Signage product
Created brand identity, content modes, templates, and custom motion graphics illustrating the assembly process. Also designed and measured the service design of this mobile IT support platform.
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 the world’s emerging megacities. Accomplished with a hand-picked team of 50 from five 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 team 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 right away. I proposed a new brand and a repositioning strategy for the mass market as an edgy fashion icon.
Launching her into the mainstream began in earnest when Playboy bought her brand just 4 months later.
Discussing this success story often makes people (especially in the US) uncomfortable, but it was 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 2000s (see my Print article), I did art direction for Brazilian lingerie advertising. A fellow dot-com colleague and programmer turned sex kit 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 ephemera that people like and that make 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 scantily clad body parts in our home studio in Rio de Janeiro.
Strategy-wise, my role was limited to art direction, given my wife’s award-winning work for this client.
I remember telling 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 at my poor gringo puritanism, “the blowjob stays.”
Christie: B2B Film
I love creating content + stories, especially via
time-based media
Wrote and directed a promotional film for Christie cinema projection systems.
Discovery Channel: B2B Film
On-air + upfront promotional film
Wrote, directed, and narrated. This is likely one of my very favorite projects and certainly one that makes me love storytelling and film so much. And making art for Discovery, an honor. Getting to channel inspiration from Thoreau, Emerson, Anais Nin, Goethe and Rilke, a joy.
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: CHALLENGE: How to sell a premium HDTV content package to affiliates in 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 styles and aptitudes.
Playful Annual Report
The 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 annual report to play and then return either when they choose or lose.
Experience Design K-12
Designed spaces, content, and systems: a new satellite campus, classrooms, content and material for the school learning systems and notebooks, a metacognitive learning system, as well as 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
Online Circular Economy Retailer Website
Art Direction + webdesign for circular economy start-up
Teaching design makes me a better designer because it exercises the ability to reach and resonate with different mental models.
Explaining design to non-english speakers in Korea
