Professional Experience
Epic Games
Role: As a Product person on the Online Social Ecosystem team, I create experiences and events that blur the line between gaming and social, including building out the Postparty and the Epic Social overlay.
Goal: Epic Games is a titan in the gaming industry with one of the most successful games of all time in Fortnite, a successful distribution platform in the Epic Games Store, and a graphics engine in Unreal. Our goal is to fuse gaming and social together inside of popular games and services.
Houseparty
Role: I worked on a small team focused on product; including design, product management, prototyping, marketing, and brand design.
Goal: Houseparty is a synchronous video chat app with a majority teenage user base. Our goal was to make a fun and easy user experience that felt like jumping between rooms at a houseparty.
In 2019 it was acquired by Epic Games.
Notability - Ginger Labs Inc
Role: I was a designer on a small team that oversaw the entire product. I worked on product development, prototyping, design, and implementation. I also controlled much of the visual design and marketing of the product.
Goal: Notability is a highly popular note-taking app that focuses on handwriting and easy entry. Notability has a large following in schools and colleges because it makes it easy for people to take, store and view their notes.
Stitcher
Role: I was a designer on a five man product team where I cut my teeth on creating and executing within the product space. I started as visual designer, and by the time I left I was helping drive the Android and Web Products.
Goal: Stitcher is a podcast aggregator that allows for easy access to podcasts and the best talk radio content in the world. We wanted to make something simple and powerful that allows users to access their favorite commentary.
Personal Work
Pleat
Goal: I wanted to explore what apps could be if they focused on pure simplicity and user pleasure. Having used a multitude of overly-complicated task management applications, I decided to make a simpler one. I distilled this down to an app that did three things: allow users to create tasks, scroll through tasks, and complete tasks.
I was able to design and create this app with a friend of mine in a short time, and released it to the app store for people to enjoy.
Apps can be tools and also be fun; I hope my app is a reflection of that.
College Work
Lagunitas
Project Brief: Design a complete set of branding and assets for any company you choose. Lagunitas was the clear choice for me due to my affinity for craft beer and their affinity for bad design.
Goal: Create a set of brand guidelines, a web site, marketing materials and company assets. Based on research I did at their brewery and hours of extensive user testing of their products, I choose to try and illustrate a craft beer experience. I wanted to do something friendly and inviting while trying to elevate the Lagunitas brand.
Treasure Island Music Festival
Project Brief: Design branding and a new set of interesting characters for a brand or event.
Goal: Make something that was character driven and interesting while still being branded. I chose to do skeletons and while cutesy characters aren't exactly my forte, it is an exercise in driving the core values of the brand through character design. The design had to permeate the event through web design, and marketing material. In this case the core demographic is Bay Area Hipsters, and at the time this style was pretty on point.
Chairman Bao Food Truck
Project Brief: Redesign a San Francisco food truck whose name was pulled out of a hat. Be thorough and fully redesign their brand.
Goal: Rebrand an existing and exciting brand of food truck. We picked our topics out of a hat, and I got one of the city's most prolific and well-designed trucks. My result was grittier than the original and therefore spoke more to the street food ideal. Bao are traditional Chinese buns and I chose to reflect on a bit of history with the red revolution.