Miscellaneous

PROJECT: Logo design

ROLE: Designer

I’ve completed a lot of small branding projects over the years, including these:

Arrow Bay is a low-cost reseller of domain names, hosting, e-mail accounts, SSL certificates, and many other services needed to design and support web sites. I designed the name and logo to suggest a wide space with an open sky — but instead of an ocean bay with a bird, it is the vast virtual expanse of the internet with a computer pointer.

Crosswise was the software platform I developed as my thesis research project for my Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Design & Technology at Parsons School of Design. It was an event calendar and planner with powerful data visualization options. The goal was to improve community events through better planning, as well as highlight opportunities for collaboration between organizations. Crosswise never passed alpha status, although I demonstrated it at a Linux Penguin Day in NYC, where it was well received. It relied on a PHP and MySQL back-end with an HTML/CSS/JS front-end that utilized Flash for data visualizations.

MindVox was one of the first ISPs in New York City, made infamous due to its connections with hackers. Once called “the Hells Angels of Cyberspace,” it opened to the public in 1992 with text-only access through dial-up, FTP, and telnet, as its launch predated both HTTP and SSH protocols.* I had MindVox account until it shut down in 1997. Experimental design was common among users, and at some point I made this logo. Although it was not officially accepted, a version of it was featured on MindVox’s Wikipedia page for many years. (A 3D raytracing I made with another MindVox logo is still online.)

AgirPF was the common name for the five-year Agir pour la Planifcation Familiale project in West Africa funded by USAID. The project expanded women’s access to, and use of, family planning services in five countries. I directed the team that designed the logo, which shows a happy and energetic couple with child, and which we expanded to a significant number of printed and digital materials. The color palette was chosen with consultation from our West African colleagues, and represents common national colors across the project’s region.

Death By Design was a new class I proposed while working on my MFA in Design & Technology at Parsons School of Design. It would study UI/UX issues through the lens of safety-critical systems such as medical equipment, nuclear power plants, weapons targeting systems, airplane cockpits, and so on. These are all systems where poor interfaces can lead to injury or death, and history provides many examples. The proposal was turned down, but the logo gained a second life as an official t-shirt design for Parson’s Design & Technology department that year. A non-Parsons version of the graphic is available on RedBubble for purchase on t-shirts, phone cases, notebooks, and more.

* To be accurate: HTTP did exist in 1992, but was not yet considered popular enough for dial-up ISPs to support. SSH was not invented until 1995.