FiLife
I moved to NYC in December 2007 when I got a job at FiLife, which had just gotten up and running that summer. Starting out as a front-end developer I quickly took on the designer role. Over the next two years I would redesign the site to various degrees several times as the business grew and changed. Working with a small team of engineers—and an even smaller team of frontend devs—FiLife saw the fastest project turnaround I’ve ever seen. As traffic grew, optimization was paramount. Using aggressive CSS sprites, frameworks such as the 960 grid for CSS, along with custom CSS frameworks I developed for rapid prototyping, page weight shrunk by over 70%. FiLife has grown to be the #3 personal finance site with over 4 million uniques.
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Michael Turek Photography
Michael was moving to NYC and he needed a site. His mantra was “clean and elegant”. It was clear early on that he didn’t want anything extraneous on the page. I decided to take this to the extreme. Rather than work in a previous/next button, the cursor was replaced with a plus or minus depending on where you rolled over the current photo. This subtle navigation seemed to strike a chord since, even now, years later, it’s still the site that I get asked about and complimented on the most. His amazing photographs don’t hurt either.
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Have You Met Ted?
A huge fan of the show, I was shocked to see that it lacked a proper fan site.
Working with a redesigned wordpress theme, I developed this site over about 48 hours in early September ’07. Last year I created a new design that allows for more ad positions while better showcasing the content.
All content on the site is written by me. Since launching I've made a lot of friends, gotten to meet the cast, made an American soldier in Iraq's dream come true, experienced an unbelievable level of access and friendliness with the people behind the show, and even had an episode written about me. It's been my most positive online experience.
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Fusion Salon, Rochester NY
In 2004 I developed a flash site for a local hair salon. That first iteration can be viewed here This version features music. Adjust speakers accordingly. The site was a great success and garnered a lot of exposure and new business for the salon.
Over the years I’ve remained close with Jes and Fusion creating different versions of the site to reflect the ever changing style of the salon.
Recently, the salon moved into a new space, started to staff up, and generally began to take it to the next level. The current version was created to demonstrate maturity and showcase more salon photography. Foregoing a blog which was difficult to maintain, Fusion now uses Facebook for event updates.
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Michelle Holden Photographer
Michelle had recently moved to NYC from Australia and needed a new site. I persuaded her to avoid an all-flash site in favor of jquery and ajax. She was sceptical but I promised the user experience wouldn't be any less rich. Using a combination of found plugins and original animation scripting her portfolio was created. Flash was used for the navigation to ensure crisp typography.
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Mirror Show Management
Mirror Show Management is a medium sized company in Rochester NY that produces trade show booths and materials. They came to Martino Flynn with a single focus in mind—a site that was as fun and original as it was informative.
I served as lead developer on this project. Flash was used on the landing pages for each major section. The biggest task for this site was a custom CMS built with PHP, ajax, and mySQL. The admin controls just about everything on the site including the flash, employee photos and bios, project images, and videos. The “frame” around each photo is built into flash and a photoshop template was produced to ensure the images the client was outputting would seamlessly integrate with the flash structures. The homepage flash has features that let the client control the randomization of images appearing there, to allow a new employee or new project to be featured more prominently.
The videos page is one of the most popular on the site. The broadcast department at Martino Flynn created this series of shorts to demonstrate the fun atmosphere at the MSM office. I built a custom flash player that allowed seamless playback of each video on the page with the capability to autoplay any video from external links throughout the site. The video player and thumbnail block are two different flash files that communicate via javascript.
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Xerox Virtual Library Assistant
Xerox came to Martino Flynn in need of a solution for their sales reps who were inundated with documents, white papers, and case studies. The virtual library tools were our solution. Lead engineer on this project I integrated the content along with video intros into a Flash application. The app read from XML since updates to the documents were frequently required.
I created a custom CMS for maintence of these libraries. From this tool the XML from which the Flash applications read is generated.
Geek Pride: Part way through project development I had the broadcast department produce a how-to video to addres client concerns regarding usability. For scalability I programmed a “smart” how-to—actionscript parses the XML to determine the first node's position on screen.
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You Prevent Violence - United Way Rochester
This may have been the fastest a site I’ve worked on has been completed. The PSD was finsihed on a Monday morning and the completed site launched lunch time Tuesday.
Even mad-dash projects can be used to implement something new: I experimented with CSS sprites for this site, a technique I've been implementing every since. This site was also the first time I completed the valid HTML before moving onto CSS, a timesaving practice I'd continue to implement.
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RIT GMA Gala 2006
It was autumn in 2006 and all of my friends seemed to be getting MBAs. Not wanting to feel totally left out, I offered my services as a pro-bono web designer and developer for the RIT college of business gala fundraiser. I designed, built, and wrote all copy for the site working closely with the GMA representatives and student advisors.
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Blend Studios
Remember in college when you were sure you could take over the world? Blend Studios was born with that very goal in mind. Started in Rochester in 2004 while still in school we enjoyed steady work and positive client feedback for several years.
As with all great empires, ours was not destined to last forever. In the spring of ’06, desiring bigger budgets and challenges, I decided it was time to move on.
Blend Studios now lays dormant. Their site (and portfolio) still exists and is a good cross section of the kind of work I was doing in and directly following college. While there I did the Flash, project management, UX, IA, front and backend development (including some nice custom CMS systems), and all the copywriting.
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