Web Background
Designers Guild
Currently freelancing at Designer's Guild this month after travelling India for a couple of weeks. I have been designing emails via Photoshop, building them via Dreamweaver, and testing via Adestra, such as for easter, kids bedding, furniture, fabric and wallpaper. I have also been designing home page and smaller banners, as well as updating daily amends on the website using their CMS, Colony.
Click here to view a B2C email to UK retail customers - a fabric and wallpaper customers
Click here to view a B2B email for UK trade customers - a furniture email for spring/summer 2012
Travelling India
I spent an amazing couple of weeks travelling north India, visiting Delhi, Agra, Ranthanborne National Park, Jaipur, Jodphur, and Rishikesh.
Locker Room
Locker room are a digital agency based in Putney with 15 years experience. They gave me the opportunity to work for a few fashion brands including Alexon, Ann Harvey, Dash, Eastex, Kaliko, Lazy Lu, Minuet Petite, as well as work for Eskimo Jo. Fashion is an area within design that I wish to explore further. At Locker Room the work load was approx 90% design and 10% coding in html, css and actionscript.
Asos
Whilst looking for something on a more permanent basis, I completed a test during a 3 stage interview for Asos, which included an email and a microsite that collobarated with Remmington.
Lipsy
Whilst looking for something on a more permanent basis, I completed a test for Lipsy, which included an email and the home page.
Steel London
Steel gave me the opportunity to work conceptually with retail brands. Steel are a digital agency based in Wandsworth Town, with over 16 years experience. Mainly working on the Debenhams account, I was involved with creating scamps, through to final amends. Mainly using Photoshop, I translate briefs into visual digital pieces, such as emails. Working with fashion brands I get to do things like matching up a pair of shoes and handbag to a dress, which can be fun. Other clients include Talk Talk and Mark Warner.
Digital and Direct Communications Ltd
Working closely with a project manager, art director, and copywriter, I was involved with the following;
- Icon redesign for Thomas Cook, as well as developing banners around the concept that the brand has been around since 1865
- Banners for Lucozade YES campaign, Fans Five, Sport 360
- Landing page for BIMA Awards and Sky with interaction taken into account, eg. lightbox effect
- Amends on DAD’s website as well as getting involved in the storyboard for DAD’s showreel
- Email templates for Sky, Prince’s Trust, The Cloud and other new clients
- GIF animation and static banners for Sky
- Amends for other clients such as Pronamel and JP Morgan
Flight Centre
My most recent contract was working as a Web Designer for Flight Centre, where I helped build the Amazing Thailand campaign online, and Flight Centre's Flash Sale, where html emails had to be built. As well as getting involved with Flight Centre's other brands, such as Escape and Round the World Experts. View my banners to get an idea of what banners I created here. I used a couple of different CMS systems, where I would edit PHP snippets or add/edit html and css. I managed to convince Flight Centre to CSS3 shadow effect, as I felt it was a more efficient way of creating and editing these images.
MRM London
Before the Christmas break, Alice Johnson at ECOM recruitment put me in contact with MRM London. They urgently needed a freelancer to work on their Alico project. Alico is part of Metlife. The company came to MRM to provide a more exciting approach to selling their insurance policies.
MRM worked with a 3D agency to provide a 'Good, Bad and the Ugly' depiction, as life isn't always as perfect as you hope it to be. For the pdf, the copywriter would provide 3 alternative answers depending on the users answers in the user interface. The user interface was built in flash and this pdf (above) had to remain consistent with it.
Blue Hive / Wunderman
Purple put me in contact with Blue Hive, who are part of Wunderman, Ogilvy and Mindshare. However, was technically employed by Wunderman. These guys are a great agency to work for, however I missed working in design.
I was put on a short term contract as a Project Co-ordinator to help the Microsites team with projects such as the Ford C-MAX project go live. The 23 markets were translated directly into the XML via SVN and tested for any errors. For example, if there were any errors in the CSS, I would communicate this across to the developers. At the beginning of the project I worked closely with the other project co-ordinators, account managers, project manager and developers, to ensure we would meet our first deadlines to go on to staging.
The xmls were edited in Notepad++ and committed within Wunderman's SVN tool (Eclipse) and uploaded onto the server via FileZilla. Other work includes; work on Mondeo, tagging-checks, mobile testing and app research, as well as being inspired by our fortnightly Digital Honey meeting, where we share ideas on the latest interactive advertising campaigns.
Fantasy League
Working closely under the guidance of the full-time front-end developer, I edited the white label templates. After the world cup, another contractor joined the team, where he was under my supervision for most of the time. The HTML and CSS was edited in Fantasy League's CMS and in Visual Studio, or when that wasn't working, in Notepad++.
Photoshop was used to create banners and football montages, in occordance to the client's brand guidelines. Now that I feel confident with the basics of front-end development, I would like the opportunity to work more conceptually with the design.
Winona eSolutions
Winona eSolutions specialised in working with charities, educational authorities and the national health. They had clients such as London Fashion Week and Action for Children. They asked me to come in to help out with other similar projects.
As a freelancer, I worked closely with Steven, the senior designer, as well as with the project managers. There were some projects where I came into from the middle of the process and others right from the start. When I say 'from the middle', I mean that I was creating wireframes and photoshop mock-ups for new pages or profile pages to be added.
Coming from Florid, I was able to understand the needs of what the users wanted from their website. Therefore I was responsible in redesigning parts of their site, mainly the homepage. However, time restrictions and budgets did not allow the whole re-design to take place. However, I'm glad to see some of my ideas were used in the now live version at: http://florid.org.uk/
Travelling Thailand and Laos
I spent an amazing couple of months travelling Thailand and Laos. Starting in Bangkok, I travelled up to Chiang Mai and Pai, across to Vang Vieng, then down to Vientienne, back to Bangkok, and finally Tonsai, near Krabi and Koh Phi Phi.
Florid
Working mainly from home as a web administrator, I was responsible for adding and sorting the masses of data to their CMS. Their CMS was built by Winona eSolutions, therefore Beth was able to put me in contact with Joe Navin, as she was pleased with my progress.
Whilst at Florid, there were a couple of occasions where I was able to attend a conference and work with service users. This work, on behalf of East London's NHS, made me feel that the work I was responsible for, was valuable to the end user.
IG Index
An email template mock-up was created as an interview test for IG Index. Home of spread betting.
Moneybookers
Working mainly with Fabian Loehmer, business development manager, and Ian Clevett, head of creative. I was responsible for the design for the P2P department.
You can see one of my creations, live at: www.moneybookers.com/send-money For this project, meetings with the rest of the P2P department (Fabian Loehmer, Octave Auger, Felix Leuschner) were made. Following the sign off for the Photoshop mock-ups, it was translated into HTML and CSS, finishing off with cross-browser testing.
As an intern, I was assigned as a sole designer for the P2P department. Due to the recession, this new department was the first to go. However, due to this unforseen cirumstance, I was able to work on some Ecommerce and VIP emails, landing pages, and flash banners, before I left.
Moneybookers are a corporate brand, with a minimalist approach to design. It was a great learning curve. However I would like to progress to work on other non-corporate projects, where it gives me the flexibility to explore my own creativity further.
Specialist Publications
Before working at Pennant Plc, for the MOD (Ministry of Defence), I had an interview at Specialist Publications, who gave me this test to do - a mock web page (see above). A pdf was given to me and I had to translate this into HTML and CSS. A few months later, I managed to get some freelance work with them.
Working alongside Mike Crook, I worked independantly with one of the editors updating their March 2009 issue for Defra Farming. Other work include; cross-browser testing, research in to the usability of the old Specsavers website, and creating a flash banner for Peugeot. Looking at Peugeot's iOn ad, it feels similar to Ford Mondeo ad campaign.
Switchplane
A couple of Photoshop mock-ups made for a leaflet for Switchplane as an interview test.
Fellows Media
Some freelance work came up after an interview. I was given 3 days to redesign and create a website for BSJ. Fathom to say that the site wasn't 100% complete. What I learnt from this job was that I should always prepare a Photoshop mock-up before proceeding.
Pennant Plc
Working as a Multimedia Developer for Pennant in the Computer Based Training (CBT) department, I learnt OpenScript, which was similar to Flash. When Flash 5 came out, Pennant decided to use Toolbook instead and never made the switch. Following amends made by the designer, I edited and wrote code to enable animations, sound using if/else statements.
Working for the MOD, no examples of work can be released.
Louise Carreck
As a favor to my old housemate Louise, I designed a simple website. Click here to view the version I created for Louise. Due to not building the site through a CMS, Louise wasn't able to update the site herself. Visit this photographer's current website at www.louisecarreck.com As you can see, it is similar to the site I created, with a clean white background and use of JavaScript libraries.
Communicating a clear brief of what the Louise wanted before production took place, made the development process a lot quicker.
Climbing Monkey
Above shows the workings of my designs for my final major project, 'Climbing Monkey'. Below shows my final working design. This is currently not online.
I decided to create an social network for climbers. My main competitor was UK Climbing. The problem I found here was the Forums page. Users use this on a 'first come, first serve' basis. Therefore I would have a network where users can choose the information they read, instead of being bombarded with an old mens chit chat. This is why others use 8a.nu Equally, a beep load of data and poorly designed.
When researching my project, I came across Bouldr, which used a Google Map API. I decided to have a search page, with both a map option and drop down menu option. Unlike Bouldr, I thought small first. Once I could get that right, then I would create the other pages for the rest of the UK. I began with my local areas of Swanage and Portland.
After searching eg. Swanage, you can either select or zoom into the area, eg. Dancing Ledge. Under the menu, this was the 'Crags' area. A term commonly used in climbing. On this page you would see a short description of the area, as it does in the guidebook. For my project, I got in contact with a member from the guidebook publishers, Rockfax and the BMC (British Mountaineering Council).
On the same 'Crags' page there would be a list of photos from the area. This has been selected when saving the image. However, you can see everyone's photos on the 'Photos' page, as well as selecting other areas. This was in working order and users were able to upload and view content. However, the environment wasn't safe and would have to be constantly be maintained.
I also wanted to add a 'Videos' page, however time ran out. Therefore, all you could see was a personal video of a friend climbing, to show the nature of uploaded content. I looked into having a YouTube API, however this was a last minute addition and I didn't leave myself enough time to complete this.
As well as using my own photos and creating my own icons, I would like to thank Simon Hann and Johnny Woods (RIP) for letting me use their photos for this project. Huw Moorhouse for his illustration and Carl Martin for his logo design of the monkey.
Braceforce Interiors
After my second year of university life, I contacted Steve Lauder via looking for media agencies via Google. Consequently, I spent my summer working voluntarily for Media Eden. Media Eden offer digital and print solutions to help advertise other brands such as Sudeley Castle. As far as a 1st day goes, Media Eden are up there! I mean, I got shake hands with Cath Kidston!
During my 6 weeks here, I worked on the full flash website for Braceforce Interiors and the HTML site for Zoe-Nutrition. Braceforce Interiors already had some printed material that needed translating onto a digital format, therefore I learnt about CMYK and how it translates to RGB here. I also created a flash banner for Zoe-Nutrition and a flash banner ad for Media Eden. For Zoe-Nutrition, I took her logo of a strawberry and used it to create the idea of falling strawberries, alongside advertising messages.
Working alongside Steve Lauder, Jennie R and Peter Woodland