OBJECTIVE
A hands-on design or user interface position on a team developing software or services for the Internet or other emerging platforms.

I have twenty years experience applying and developing new technologies in information design and interactive media, as a designer, product manager, technical specialist, educator, and overall source of positive energy and momentum. I'm very good at taking a vague, high-level concept, working through the myriad details to create the full design, and then collaborating closely with developers to get it built.

SKILLS
• designing products that are attractive and easy to use
• taking a broad-stroke concept and making it real
• bridging the gap between technology and the real world
• identifying what's most important and getting it done
• imparting information and enthusiasm to others

EXPERIENCE
Freelance Interface Designer, Boston MA
Feb 01 - Present

My specialty is the creation of complete customer experiences — both functional flow and visual styling — for Internet applications and services. As a Creative Director, I bridge the gap between creativity and technology and frequently act as overall project leader to create an experience that meets the needs of the customer, aligns with the strategic goals of the business and brand, and best leverages the available technology.

Clients include Addison-Wesley Mathematics, Cymfony Inc., Fidelity Investments, Liquid Machines, Trinity Boston Foundation.

BaseSix Interactive, Boston MA
Creative Director, Nov 99 - Feb 01

BaseSix is an Internet design, development, and marketing agency. When I joined in its early days, the company was mostly focused on visual design, creating sites that looked great but that put less emphasis on usability.

As a Creative Director, I worked on several Web projects, but my larger contribution to BaseSix was the establishment of the usability design practice. Structuring the intuitive flow of a user experience is much different than designing what it looks like. I evangelized this distinction and developed standards and templates for addressing usability issues: requirements gathering, site maps, and detailed interactive prototypes. As a result of my efforts, usability design is now a standard part of the BaseSix methodology.

Associated New Media, London England
(Internet division of Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail and London Evening Standard)
Head of Design, Jun 97 - Jun 99

When I started at Associated, the editorial team had grand ambitions for a Web site but no idea how to turn them into detailed software specifications for their Oracle programmers.

I worked intimately with the journalists, translating their high-level ideas into a complete product design, which I prototyped in HTML to create an interactive specification of what we were creating. I was then the liaison with the development group to get the site built. Six months after I started, we launched This Is London, a comprehensive city guide with news, reviews, maps and more, that was voted Best UK Site in 1998 by two major Web awards bodies.

While I was pleased with this achievement, even more important to the success of the whole operation was the database-driven publishing system we built that allowed a small team of journalists (not Web programmers) to maintain the site without any HTML coding. I designed and coded the user interface to this publishing system.

Our next site, This Is Money, a personal finance site, had a simpler but more powerful editorial system that required even fewer journalists to maintain. And this time we built the whole thing in only three months.

Nets Inc., Cambridge MA (merger of AT&T New Media and Industry.net)
Design Director, Aug 96 - Mar 97

Led a team of six Web designers producing the Industry.net and AT&T Business Network Web sites. In addition to overall interface design and art direction, I developed HTML templates for use by other designers, standardized and documented the use of extended tags and add-ons, and incorporated new Internet technologies as they became viable for broad customer acceptance.

AT&T New Media, Cambridge MA (originally Ziff-Davis Interactive)
Senior Interactive Designer, Nov 91 - Aug 96

In 1991 the Web had not happened yet, but Ziff-Davis recognized the potential of the online medium and set out to develop an online publishing platform to exploit it.

I was a founding member of the design team behind the Interchange Online Network, heralded at its introduction in early 1994 as a ground-breaking development in visual sophistication and ease-of-use for online services. Although involved in nearly every aspect of the product's design, my unique focus was on the technologies that supported the visual components of the platform.

At the time, 9600bps modems were the standard, so a developer and I created a specialized graphics format, tools, and documentation that enabled designers to deliver high-quality graphics at this limited speed. I led the team that oversaw Interchange's visual style standards and coded the 400+ screen layout templates in Interchange's SGML-based page description language. I also prototyped numerous product concepts and detailed interfaces in SuperCard and Director for usability testing and focus groups.

Lightspeed Inc., Boston MA
Designer Sep 87 - Oct 88, Product Manager, Oct 88 - Aug 91

Released in early 1988, Lightspeed's Color Layout System (a high-end Macintosh design workstation) was about 2 years ahead of desktop publishing products in that it had full 24-bit color, outline font rendering to screen with dynamic scaling and rotating, and direct links to Scitex and other prepress systems.

As Product Manager, I specified the product's feature set and user interface, dramatically expanding its text composition features, adding PostScript to its output formats, and executing much of its UI widgetry in ResEdit. I wrote documentation, developed marketing videos and multimedia product demos, and generally drove the vision of the product.

Imagination Center, Washington DC (Computer art systems spin-off of Adcom Inc., a graphic arts retailer)
Designer, Tech Support, "Demo Guy" Jul 84 - Sep 87

Desktop publishing had not happened yet. Our six-person company sold computer art workstations and services to design studios and production shops. Since few designers had ever applied computers to their work before, much of my job was translating new technical concepts and tools into terms they were familiar with in the traditional layout and paste-up worlds. We were so small that I did all the internal graphics work, demonstrated products, developed training courses, and did all software support and troubleshooting. I also acted as the "hands" for designers renting studio time on the high-end systems without learning them themselves.