Apigee began life as Sonoa Systems, a company that manufactured API management appliances. In 2008,
it became clear that many of the world's companies were going to rely on hosted services via APIs. Sonoa realized the company needed to move away from the hardware business towards offering cloud-based API management services.

The company decided it needed to have the room to experiment free from Sonoa's legacy, so we created
a separate brand named Apigee. Under Apigee, we worked to develop a set of tools to encourage software developers to build with APIs. Over the course of four years, I designed Apigee’s identity, marketing site, and tools that help developers learn and debug APIs.

Apigee was so well-received by Sonoa's customers and investors, the company decided to rebrand itself. In the three years following the rebrand, Apigee has enjoyed a ten-fold increase in visitors and revenue, and has become a recognized leader in the API management space.

Swivel was started with a simple observation: people are drowning in data. Swivel's founders believed that when citizens, businesses, and governments can see data better, they will make better decisions. We set out to provide a place where people could collect, explore, present, and discuss data.

During my time at Swivel, I designed three significant generations of the product. I developed interaction models for social data exploration and storytelling.
I worked closely with the product team determine
the features required for launch.

Unfortunately, Swivel was not a success. We discover-ed that the problem space for social data sharing is extremely complex. Real data is messy. Deriving meaning from data is hard, and presenting it in a way that increases understanding is quite difficult.

Despite Swivel not succeeding, the problems we set out to solve still exist and are more relevant than ever.

In the spring of 2004, Nike initiated a large marketing push to showcase cycling clothing, promote Lance Armstrong, and give the brand credibility with cycling enthusiasts.

We had a limited palette of assets to work with: product images, some athlete photos, and a couple of feature stories. The primary design challenge was to find a way to pull these into a cohesive whole.

Some sections of the site contained only a few items, so we devised a navigation scheme that incorporated product photos. This simplified the site's structure and reduced the number of clicks needed to see product details. The site's restrained appearance was used as a backdrop for interactive flourishes and animations.

Nike Cycling has been recognized by I.D. Magazine and the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Nike kicked off a $50 million marketing campaign in preparation for the 2004 summer Olympics. It wanted a small promotional site for teenage girls featuring videos about Nike-sponsored athletes on the US National Women’s Soccer Team.

The site was limited in scope, offering a handful of interview videos, bios of the team’s two most popular athletes, and some downloadable assets. Our challenge was to make this small site seem more complete and substantial than it actually was.

Doing work for Nike can be very inspiring, but there's
a danger of over-designing things. This site's photography was its strength, so we made sure the visual design served to enhance, rather than compete.

In 2002, the mobile web was primarily consumed through custom carrier-authored applications and WAP-enabled web sites. Macromedia commissioned
a series of live demos to show how Flash could be deployed on mobile devices. I designed weather channels, a local entertainment guide, and a tutorial
on how to use FlashCast.

The design of these demos embraced a number of technical and physical constraints. Memory was in short supply. Screen resolution was a tiny 176 x 208 pixels, and phone controls were not well-suited for complex interactions. Despite these limitations, we were able to make something that was quite compelling for the time.

In the end, FlashCast suffered from the shortcomings of a platform that was fundamentally unequipped to provide what people really wanted. As history has shown, mobile technology needed a complete rethink before becoming a pervasive part of everyday life.

In 2004 David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO, set about creating a new design school at Stanford University. The d.school's charter was to offer a multidisciplinary approach to design learning. The school needed a stop-gap website to educate students about the programs offered and encourage fundraising.

The budget for this project was small, so we had to organize the site based on existing content. One of
the assets we had to work with was a mind map David Kelley developed to articulate the scope and approach of the new design school. This became the background image for the site and the inspiration to use hand-lettered text for important calls to action.

These designs were completed over a four-day period and became the foundation for the site build-out.

In 2004, Yahoo had begun to explore what on-demand Television over IP (IPTV) would look like. We were tasked with exploring the implications for the discovery of nearly unlimited amounts of on-demand video programming. We were also asked to consider what happens when you add personalization and a live social component to TV viewing experiences.

I made concept wireframes for video discovery and designed high-fidelity mockups that were incorporated into a live prototype used to promote Yahoo IPTV to executive decision-makers.

Designing for the 10-foot experience is very different than designing for web. Remote-based navigation places a great deal of importance on clearly indicating available navigation options. Low information density
is an issue. These screens were designed for CRT displays which require special attention be paid to minimize contrast between screen element boundaries.

Yahoo IPTV did not make it to production.

In spring 2007, CNET decided it was time for a major redesign. We were asked to create a reference design that would be the basis for a visual build out by CNET design staff. I was the design lead for the project.
I gathered requirements and supervised a small design team to develop some look-and-feel options.

The challenges were considerable. CNET had a massive amount of content. Editorial and advertising were difficult to distinguish from one another. Each section of the site was owned by a different business group with its own revenue goals. Each page on the site was highly monetized with specific requirements for ad placement.

The screens that follow show the visual direction that
I created. Some aspects of this design were incorporated into the direction that was approved for launch.

In 2001, BEA Systems, a leading application infra-structure company, found that its sales presentations weren't hitting the mark. During the course of a sales engagement it was common for BEA to build custom sales demos. These demos were expensive, unattractive, and needed to be operated by highly-trained sales engineers.

In response to this, we designed a fictitious holding company which was used as a backdrop to showcase how BEA could be used to improve industry-specific business processes. The demos were tightly scripted and could be presented by non-technical sales staff.

BEA was so satisfied with our initial work that we designed eight additional demos and BEA’s own sales portal. These demos were used to sell over $400 million in software and services. I worked with the BEA marketing team to come up with the appropriate features to support each product story. I wireframed, wrote all content, and art directed.

In 2001, BEHR decided to increase its presence in Home Depot by adding a touch-based interactive kiosk. The ColorSmart kiosk was designed to help people choose colors, match paints, visualize color choices, and calculate paint quantities.

The timeline was aggressive so I prototyped the application with rough hand-drawn sketches. This allowed us to quickly explore ideas and gave us a sense about what it would be like to use the kiosk.

During the course of the project, we learned that designing for touch kiosks involves many of the same challenges as working in interactive television or mobile devices. Kiosks offer low information density and the number of choices seen on the screen at any one time must be minimized to reduce the potential for error.

The BEHR ColorsSmart Kiosk can be found in over 1500 Home Depot locations in the US and Canada.

Every interface design project starts with an attempt
to understand what a site or application is supposed
to do, what functionality it will contain, and how an audience will use it. During the course of a project,
it's common to employ a combination of sketching, schematic diagramming, architecture diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes.

These artifacts help a project team figure out what
an application is supposed to do. They get decision-makers involved in discovering promising design solutions. They give developers the information required to build and test a functional application.

The following screens show some of the things I've produced when employed to gather requirements, organize information, and propose ways for interfaces to accomplish a project's goals.

A big portion of my work happens long before a project moves into visual design and development. Icons and illustrations can be useful in helping communicate what's at stake before product development begins in earnest.

Icon graphics used in project documentation are a great way to encourage the agreement required to move a project along to higher levels of design fidelity.

Many of the interfaces I've made tend to be transactional or involve a lot of content. Icons and diagrams can be useful for describing and organizing functionality.

The following screens show icons and illustrations I've made for various projects.