Here’s some stuff I did while freelancing at MTV. They’re all public sites, so I think it’s OK.

For TCA 2010 (Television Critics Association)

TCA (twice a year in Los Angeles, CA) is where the networks announce their new shows for the upcoming season.

A desktop and iPhone version were developed. I used the same code base, but 2 different stylesheets and some devious CSS manipulation to control the different versions. This is a huge advantage because I don’t have to maintain separate code. It’s just 1 set of PHP files for 2 versions of the site.

TCA 2009

MTV Networks Careers site

This was a Squarespace-hosted site. I had to write some Javascript and CSS hacks to get the design to look right in order to get around Squarespace’s limited CMS controls. You don’t have complete flexibility when using WYSYWYG tools.

This is for 8 Foundation, a non-profit org headquartered in Switzerland. The art director wanted a sliding panel, a deadline countdown timer, a Paypal donation account, social networking share widgets, and a Wordpress blog. I did all the development and integration. Some nice DOM content replacement Javascript in here too.

I’m now an award winning animator!

This is a Flash piece for FS/TEC 2007 (Oct 10-13 in Atlanta), one of the biggest annual restaurant tradeshow in the US, attended by some big names in the biz like Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, Microsoft, etc. My client wanted something to portray his company as a younger, hipper newcomer to the field of restaurant management software. This animation would be played continuously on a 40″ monitor over their booth as well as on the PCs placed around the floor. He specifically wanted a cartoony illustrated look and showed me some visual styles he liked, especially a designer named Paige Pooler.

Cartoony illustrations are something I specialize in, if you’ve looked around my site, so I felt right at home working on this project. The storyboard and narrative progression came to me really quickly and I sketched it all out in Autodesk Sketchbook. I presented that to the client and got the go ahead to start animating.

That’s where the drudgery starts to kick in and at some points, I felt a sense of dread at the sheer amount of art I had to draw and animating that still lay ahead. I always had a clear idea of what I wanted, but getting there took a bit of time. Specific things were the look of the restaurant, which was one of the last things I nailed down, and all that decor to fill up the vast amount of space this Flash was spec’ed for (1200×800). After 2 weeks of intense drawing and animation, this is what I came up with.

The client was very pleased when he saw this and said everyone loves it. He also said how he loved the look of the restaurant too, so I got it right. I told him this would turn a lot of heads at the convention, having full confidence in the quality of the work I do. Little did I know just how many heads this would turn. He emailed me the Sunday after the show to tell me they had won the First Time Exhibitor Award (scroll all the way to the bottom)! A lot of work went into this and people noticed.

This was a really fun project to work on. Lots and lots of details, but they all paid off. I’d like to do more fun projects like this.

A.J. is a little elephant mascot I designed for Jetwit.com, a site started by my friend and fellow JET alum Steven Horowitz. His name is an oyaji gag¹ on several words and concepts (A.J.’s, not Steven’s (x^____^x)).

The full explanation is at Jetwit.com, and can only be appreciated if you have some knowledge of Japanese vocabulary. The rough-hewn line style is influenced by Crayon Shin-chan and Pants Pankuro.

Here he is in New Year’s attire. His sash says “Akemashite omedetou!”, which means “Happy New Year”.

Below: A.J. dressed up as Homer for Halloween. I had forgotten it until now.

¹ - an oyagi gag is the Japanese equivalent of a corny joke. Oyaji means “old man”.

I did these back in January 2008.

A video test for the LED panel at Queens Crossing mall in Flushing, New York, filmed during construction. The animated segment I worked on appears at 0:13 (Bali BBQ). The LED controller doesn’t have the proper Flash player installed, so you’re not seeing the video the way it should be. This is the way it should play.

finished 30 second clips for the LED:

Queens Crossing dining group

The rose petal drift (hand drawn) took some time to figure out the right visual effects, but I finally nailed it. Looks quite nice w/ some motion blur and other effects added to it. Some fun tween effects like the curtain.

Bali BBQ restaurant

the Bali BBQ segment as it should play. Those are actual palm leaves we photographed. I couldn’t find any stock art suitable for the animation, so we went out and bought some real leaves.

Irresistible Home Decor

A houseware and home accessories store

EOTAC

A site I developed for EOTAC, a retailer of military-styled clothing. Custom-designed database and template system, Zen Cart integration and heavy modification, and ongoing maintenance work by me, front-end design work by Echelon Software.

Artists on the Rise

a website I designed and developed last year to find music talent in the Texas area. Timeline was very tight and I had about a week to design the whole thing, on top of developing another site concurrently for the client. The promotion is over now, so many of the site’s features are now inaccessible.

ScatterTunes

another site I developed in the music space. PHP, XHTML, CSS, Flash development work. Front-end designed by Gene Timmons.

Earth Balance Bag

for a distributor of paper-free wine gift bags. Graphics by Tong & Chiu Communication Design. programming by me. Features include a user login system, a MySQL backend for the store locator (currently, there are no stores yet) and user database, and a WordPress blog for client to add new content.

bags

store locator

Kanawha River Terminals

technical direction, client interfacing, PHP development and Flash AS 3.0 programming. Flash map applet designed by me. all other visual assets by Tong & Chiu Communication Design

Flash applet showing their locations and transport routes

pictures of coal processing terminals

Delicious On the Slope

completed in Feb 2009. I had lunch at this restaurant and it just happened that the owner needed web development services. It’s a fantastic little place to eat. Good food and a very friendly owner. Check it out if you’re in Park Slope sometime. I recommend the tuna salad niçoise.

D A Singer Law

Design consulting and web development for DASINGERLAW.COM, completed end of September 2008.

.. and some icons for the train lines

UPDATE: JAN 2009
It appears that an unethical designer has plagiarized my design and DASINGERLAW’s text verbatim for a lawyer out in Colorado, even down to the names and styles in my CSS file. I won’t link to it here.

March 2008. MediaTracks contacted me again to do a horizontal version of their ad. I had done one for them about a year ago. [see below]

Here is the ad mocked up to show how it’d appear on PR Week’s site.

In the time since I did the last ad, Adobe bought Macromedia and released Flash as part of CS3. I learned some new animation tricks and applied them to this ad, which just made the effects look really wonderful. Here is the original horizontal ad I put together for them in 2007.

Jan 2007

MediaTracks Communications, a radio advertising company in Chicago contacted me to do an ad for them for PRWeek. Here are the boards I came up with after talking to their president and getting some copy from him. All custom drawn art in Illustrator CS2, except the logos which came from the client. They had to be tweaked slightly to render legibly at this size.

I really like the way this turned out. I used a few tricks to simulate the rotating globe. Below are the storyboards.

Storyboards shown to client

Right: no-Flash version

a pair of websites for 2 art galleries down in the Miami area. completed beginning of 2008. designed externally, built w/ PHP. Features include a Flash image gallery and a custom-built event calendar, both of which can be easily updated by the client with little or no technical knowledge.

All in all a very successful site. Hundreds of people have joined their mailing list.

..from when I was working for a chat software company. They never made it into the product, so no harm in posting them here.

= cry baby

= dead fish.. i probably intended this to be used to indicate a stale topic?

= Good for you… want a cookie?

= ice cream waffle cone, from a food set

New emotes are a frequently-requested item by users, and I thought they’d add a lot of value to the user experience. I had whole sets of funny emotes designed, but they got axed. I’ll look for the sketches.

You may use these icons for personal use on your website as long as you put a link back to my site. Commercial use is prohibited.