Portfolio

Programming

Javascript
XHR (with XML/JSON)
jQuery
PHP
Actionscript 6 projects/~500 work hours
4 projects
1 project/~30 work hours
8 projects/~700 work hours
3 projects/~300 work hours

Sitebuilding

Strict HTML + CSS 8 projects/~400 work hours

Design

Photoshop
Illustrator
Flash ~1400 work hours
~100 work hours
~200 work hours

• Asking the right questions, understanding what a client actually needs and coming up with the right solutions right away, on the spot
• Interface design for complex applications, Temple Grandin style emphatic planning
• Systems design and systemic thinking in general
• Seeing the internet for what it is, an amazing marketing tool yet to be fully explored and understood
• Writing high performance, hand-coded Javascript and PHP
• I'm really good with colour, a competent designer with lots of different gigs under my belt
• I'm a very quick study, with an insatiable hunger for more insight into all the things that make our world turn

Usability studies the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with an application or a web site is designed. Where ergonomy ensures long-term comfort and ease of use with regards to physical objects like a chair or a radio, usability does the same for graphical user interfaces, using our understanding of the human eye, hand and brain to make the things on screen as obvious and effortless to use as possible.At it's best, usability can be a truly transformative approach. Companies like Apple use it's principles to amazing effect, like they did with the iPhone - by creating an interface where every modern application 'simply works', enabling anyone and everyone to just pick up the device and use it right away without reading a lengthy user manual, they were able to completely change what people demand of the devices in their pockets.But even on a much smaller scale, making sure that the internal applications your employees use every day are designed with usability in mind will help them get more done in less time and with much less frustration. People regularly confuse marketing and advertising, even though the latter is nothing more then the most visible sub-discipline of the former. I left the College of International Management and Business after 3 semesters to pursue a career as a webdesigner, but a lot of the things we learned about in the Marketing classes really stuck with me and actually proved themselves to be an amazing set of tools for doing some of what I do.Market segmentation is as good an example as any to show you what I mean. Every second you spend grouping your potential users based on the objectives they'll want to achieve on your site, will drasctically improve your sitemap. Thinking about the right words and images a particular kind of visitor will need to read and see to build up the confidence to spend her money on your site can do wonders to your bottom line.Just like sociology, all these questions come down to empathy in the end - everything on a website is there to communicate something and the more you're able to get into the 'headspace' of another person and walk in their shoes the better your work will get.

My workhorse applications Adobe Photoshop (pixel graphics)
Adobe Illustrator (vector graphics)
EditPlus (coding)
Firefox (debugging) Other programs I know and use Adobe Flash, MS Office, Propellearheads Reason, Audacity, Bryce Programs I'd like to learn to use in the near future Salesforce (cloud-based CRM platform)
Adobe Premiere & AfterEffects (video production)
Adobe inDesign (print publishing)
ProTools (mixing/sound design/music production) If the choice is left to me, I prefer to use a hybrid procedural/object oriented style, retaining OOP's modular and highly organized nature while cutting down on it's verbosity and grammatical quirks.I also prefer to write most of my code from scratch as opposed to most University trained programmers who seem to rely on premade libraries almost exclusively these days.In practice, my way of doing things takes 20-30% longer, but the resulting code runs much faster and is much less resource intensive on both the user's and the server's side. I was never good at rote learning, I remember being green with envy as a kid every time I saw someone on TV with encyclopedic knowledge in some area. Or when the family was traveling somewhere and my dad started reciting long-long poems from memory, stuff he learned 20-30 years ago in elementary school just to pass the time while driving.With time though, I've come to appreciate this distinct mind of mine. It wasn't a great help in school, but when it comes to learning how things actually work, the underlying logic of things, knowledge that enables you to build something where there was nothing before I'm suddenly finding it really handy.Where others go vertical, trying to specialize until they find a little area of which they can be the ultimate expert of, I go horizontal and marvel at all the connections and parallel lanes different professions have.(At this point I'd like to make it very clear that I don't see having a good noggin as an achievement. It absolutely isn't, I was just lucky to come around at the right moment, born into the right lineage and the right circumstances. I really hate to blow my own horn as I'm forced to do on this page, but I feel that this is the very core of who I am as a person...)I LOVE TO TEACH. I know a lot about a lot of things and I'd be honored to teach you about them, my Mom is an elementary school teacher so I'm good at explaining things, it's in my blood.AND I LOVE TO LEARN. So if you feel like it, I'd love to learn anything and everything you know and are willing to share.