Between client work, I’ve been toiling away on my “collaborative consumption” ride sharing application. Here are some of the interface designs I’ve created:

Since sociality is a vital aspect of the car-pooling concept, I built in a lot of the familiar functionality / semantics of social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, including group & private messaging and real-time notification. Surprisingly, it was probably this feature set, and not the geo-spatial mathematics, that turned out to be the most technically challenging part of the application. Admittedly, the question I asked myself was: “what’s the most intuitive process flow I can imagine?” not “what’s a reasonably intuitive experience, that won’t be a nightmare to implement?”. But I’m glad I was ambitious because I learned a great deal working through the adversity.

My co-founder and I, flew down to Melbourne two weeks ago to pitch the application for a spot in an venture seed-capital incubator called AngelCube. We beat out 200 other start-up applicants to make it into the 20 team pitching round, and beat out a further 10 teams to get into the final interview round. In the end however the investors passed due to Australia’s taxi law, which prohibits profiting from offering a ride without a taxi licence. This was a worry I’d had from the beginning in terms of commercialising the application. Though, I still feel that a subscription based service could be profitable. Regardless, its been a fantastic experience already, not only from the creative and technical standpoint of designing and developing the application myself, but from a business and networking standpoint as well.

I built the app with the Code Igniter PHP framework which has been a really positive experience. The framework itself is pretty bloat-free, the MVC architecture is very flexible and its allowed for a high degree of modularity / re-usability in the code. Besides discovering Code Igniter, I’ve learned a heck-of-alot in a whole slew of different technical arenas: the finer points of JSON, some awesome little Javascript language tricks, MySQL database schematic optimisation, all-about-GeoSpatial-math, how to push data in real-time with Socket.io / long polling and how to push Ajax further than I’d thought possible.

I’ve been working on a complete re-build and re-design for Underpar, an Australian wholesaler golf bags and buggies. It was an especially enjoyable project for the information nerd in me, since there was a large volume of product and company data that needed to categorised and organised into efficient and navigable units.

Since the search experience is at the heart of a product site, I put a great deal of effort into making that experience as seamless as possible, to allow a user to drill down through the large breadth of product, to get exactly what they were after.

One of the major challenges for this site was creating a menu system that allowed the full breadth of the product catalogue (now, and in the future) to be accessible and structurally clear, without cluttering the navigation interface. After much best-practice thought mulching, I went for a the so-called “mega-menu” dropdowns.

I went for Expression Engine as a CMS on this project, since the site administrators were not going to be highly technologically literate, and I knew the site would quickly accrue complexity as the diversity of products got larger. This project was my first opportunity to try out David DeSandro’s excellent Isotope.js in a commercial context – whose super-smooth filtering I implemented into the product search pages. Big ups to Mr. DeSandro on that one.

The guys at Underpar are still updating the site with the latest content, but I’m hoping for a launch some time in the next week. Exciting stuff!

So after a lot of photoshop-pixel pushing and midnights spent in code grapple mode, I’ve launched Dylan Baskind.com my online CV site. I’ve gone for a “minimalism-with-a-few-frills” design approach, with an essentially two-tone colour scheme and a focus on making page elements reactive and interactive. I also went for a fixed top bar navigation, so that the various sections of the CV are all immediately and clearly accessible.

There are a few little responsive elements to the layout. The “connecting” atom on the left resizes for smaller screens, and disappears altogether for really tiny screens. Ditto for the logo in the top left corner.

The information architecture challenge I pushed and pulled with on this project was the breadth and scope of what to include in terms of achievements, skills and portfolio work. It’s a bit of a challenge deciding what content is extraneous and what is salient, when creating a site to highlight an all-rounder type of creativity. I dealt with this challenge by including almost all my creative pursuits in the site, but providing a limited selection of examples.

I am putting the finishing touches to a CV / Professional Skills site (I’ll do an extensive blog post of all tasty design elements for the official site-live, which should hopefully be in the next few days). The concept theme behind the site is the idea of nodes and connections, and I’ve (jokingly) coined the term: “Connectionist” to describe the professional practice of connection making.

The final (cherry-on-top) design element was a logo identity. The challenge was to visually represent the Connectionist idea as well as myself. Here’s what I came up with:

The ‘sell’ of the Connectionist being that having a wide field of training allows someone to make connections between disparate disciplines and hence to produce creative solutions.

The design and development of this project has been (notwithstanding a few notable Jquery pains) quite a joy. The web is evolving faster than early man when he got his first set of opposable thumbs!

I’ve just finished the design and coding work for the Blue Ribbon Design site, through which I’ll be handling all web & design work from now on. An official launch will be coming in the next few weeks.

The design went through a large number of phases as the character of the site developed. At first it was too colloquial, too colourful, then it became too corporate and too monochrome, but eventually after umpteenth revisions, it settled upon (what I hope is an appealing) mid-ground between understated professionalism and a little aesthetic flare.

Technically speaking: I was considering building the site on a WordPress backend (as I have for this, 10th version of Riversend) which certainly makes things easier to update, but in the end just opted for a straight up PHP/MySQL backend. Also, working with the JQuery javascript again for all the client-side navigational functionality has been a real joy, web-technologies are just getting better and better lately, and with modern browsers starting to take standards seriously the HTML/CSS component is also becoming increasingly enjoyable to work with.

Well its taken a year or two, but I’ve finally found time to completely redesign Riversend. This will be the tenth incarnation of the site (if you can believe it), and I believe the ninth year of its existence. Looking back over all the blog posts from previous years, the thing that strikes me is not how I’ve changed over the course of this site’s existence, but how strangely similar my essential state of mind is (to wit: frenzied ecstatic, explosively tangential, creative-work obsessed mania).

Riversend version’s 8 and 9 were running on the CMS ModX, but this time I’ve gone for the currently ubiquitous blogging platform WordPress. More so that I could develop professional skills (i.e. wordpress is a nice easy CMS for web design clients), than for its functionality. Though I have found the system to be easily extendible and the core code well documented, with a thoughtful and clear architecture.