Sharpcast creates software that allows customers to synchronize their various devices and back them up online.

The design objective was to create an identity that communicated the unification of various ‘islands of data’ and conveyed a premium feel (for a paid service) without relying on explicit synchronization references.

SugarSync is a software application that synchronizes files across computers and mobile phones and backs them up online.

The defining characteristic of the service is how automatic and fast it seems compared to its alternatives. Most competitive synchronization offerings are ‘geeky’ solutions that seem intimidating to the average customer and feature sync arrows prominently as part of their identities.

My objective was to create an identity for SugarSync that communicated its speed and magic and created an emotional connection with the user without seeming geeky, and the Hummingbird captured those requirements perfectly for me. Our customers grew so passionate about the Hummingbird that at one point when we contemplated tinkering with it, there was massive user revolt!

Nanobanana is a t-shirt design company.

The design objective was to create a stylish and memorable identity that played on the fruit theme without being too literal.

Duck Duck Moose Design develops interactive software and games targeted toward children.

The design objective was to create an identity that is colorful, fun, and playful that appeals to children and adults alike.

The client provides mobile personal training service to customers.

The design objective was to communicate the transformative power of personal training combined with the mobile aspect of the service.

Premium TicketHub provides clients with excellent seats for hard-to-get sporting event tickets.

In the secondary market for sports tickets, customers often have difficulty separating the legitimate ticket brokers from the scam artists. The client, who specializes in hard-to-get tickets at sold-out sporting events, wanted to create a premium identity that conveyed trust and authenticity. I used a stylized concept of a ticket stub to achieve this effect.

Sharpcast Photos was the first product based on Sharpcast’s synchronization platform, which allowed users to synchronize photos across various computers, back them up online, and access them from their mobile phones. The primary demographic for the product was the ‘internet mom’ — mothers in their 30’s who are internet savvy and have lots of picture sharing needs.

The design goal was to create a stylized identity that appealed to a female audience and communicated the speed of the service. The Sharpcast Photos bunny became so popular that our users requested T-shirts and other merchandise emblazoned with the mark. we also organized a very successful Alice-in-Wonderland themed product launch party which prominently featured the bunny.

Eye-Fi creates an SD card that wirelessly uploads photos taken on a digital camera to online sharing sites or to your computer.

The assignment was to create an icon for the Eye-Fi software that communicated the wow factor of the Eye-Fi SD card. Since the most defining aspect of using an Eye-Fi SD card on your digital camera is no longer having to mess with cables to transfer photos from a camera to a PC, I blended the wireless characteristic of the card with the distinctive orange from the Eye-Fi corporate identity to create an eye-catching icon.

When I originally designed the brand for Sharpcast Photos, I wanted to create a mark that was memorable, but also had personality. I wanted the brand to be a sort of mascot for the product. After considering many different options, I finally settled on the rabbit.

The rabbit mark became such an iconic symbol for our application, not only for the employees, but also for the users, that we decided to call our SugarSync alpha ‘Hummingbird’. When it came time to brand and name Hummingbird, I felt that the Hummingbird really embodied the spirit of the application — light, fast and magical. Both application icons were derived from the logotype for the product.

In keeping with the friendly and clean aesthetic of the Sharpcast Photos desktop and web applications, I designed a series of icons for photo editing and sharing. The colors were created to jump out and encourage exploration against the understated chrome background of the desktop application.

These are few of a series of icon illustrations designed for the Sharpcast Photos desktop application. They accompanied various interactions such as importing contacts, adding photos to the application, and sharing albums. The ones pictured here are more decorative than informative, but I often used this space to convey additional information or to highlight tips and tricks.

This illustration is adapted from one originally done for a Threadless t-shirt and under the influence of too many cups of coffee.

My partners and I at Duck Duck Moose decided to launch a talent contest to help promote our first interactive children’s app for the iPhone, Wheels on the Bus. This ad appeared on our Facebook and our blog and was designed to drive viewers to our website for more contest information. The bear is a favorite character from our app.

This illustration was done as part of a set of commissioned illustrations for a child’s room.

This illustration was created for an information sheet given to game developers. It uses a softer color palette and the Mochi mascot.

Illustrations done for the NY Farm Viability Institute and the NY Center for Dairy Excellence logotype.

I was particularly interested at the time I was working on my thesis of exploring a way in which I could empower young women. To that end, I decided to produce a line of books for women in their early 20’s that focused on things like using tools and basic automotive tasks and safety. I wrote and illustrated the first book myself, appropriately named AutoChic (not chick). The line of books came with a host of ancillary products like t-shirts with spark plugs and pistons and a fashionable tool belt.

A couple of friends and I noticed how kids gravitated naturally to the iPhone touch screen and how parents were surprisingly willing to let kids play with their iPhones. So, together we formed Duck Duck Moose and released our first iPhone app “Wheels on the Bus”, an interactive, musical app which I designed and illustrated.

The application is targeted at kids 2 to 5 years old (short attention spans!), so my goal was to create engaging, colorful, illustrations representing the verses in the song and give kids the ability to act out the the song using gestures on the touch screen. We also added surprising interactions and fun sound effects within the context of the song which kids find delightful. Kids also have the ability to record their own soundtrack to the song or play one of the pre-recorded options in multiple languages, including a version in gibberish — a popular choice!

Wheels on the Bus has consistently held the #1 spot in the education category of the AppStore, was picked as Apple Staff Favorite and has been featured in MSNBC, Wired, Daily Candy Kids, USA Today and SF Chronicle, among others.

The SugarSync iPhone app allows SugarSync users to access and share all their backed up files via their iPhone.

I designed the application interface from soup to nuts, starting with sketches and prototype testing to the final design aesthetic. Since typing on a mobile device can be a challenge for most people, a key design challenge was to enable access to any file with the fewest number of clicks. One of the solutions we designed to address this problem was the device ring, pictured in the graphic to the left. The user could access the device ring from any page and click on icons corresponding to his computers (“My Home Computer”) or predefined shortcuts that were automatically populated with the appropriate files (“Recent Documents”) to quickly navigate to any folder or file.

I also wanted the design to evoke some of the wow factor of files wirelessly appearing on your iPhone from your PC, which we accomplished through striking visual design and slick animation effects.

SkyData is a mobile CRM application. I was responsible for the visual design of the application. The client wanted the product not to be constrained by the look and feel limitations of Windows Mobile, so I worked with the developers to skin the application and design visual elements like light boxes that gave the application a more slick user experience.

We discovered that most of our users found managing their photos online to be a real pain. Since SugarSync automatically backed up photos from any computer online, we designed a separate tab in the SugarSync web client for users to view and manage those photos. Any photo backed up by SugarSync would automatically appear under the online photos tab as albums, ready for sharing.

The design goal of this page was to make the photo the real star, so most of the real estate was dedicated to the actual image. I worked with the engineers to automatically detect display settings and serve larger or smaller images appropriately. We also enabled a rich sharing experience by allowing users to share from their email address books, comment on photos, download full resolution images, etc.

The SugarSync personal home page allows a user to view his/her recent activity, storage quota and quickly navigate to files backed up from any of his/her computers. Since user education is always a challenge, I used this page to expose new features, tips and tricks, etc.

My goal in designing this page was to be informative without overwhelming the user.

The SugarSync web client enables users to access and share their backed-up files on-the-go.

Since users tend to back up a ton of files from multiple computers, one of the key design objectives for this application interface was to have a clean look and feel, with easy ways to filter and navigate through files on various computers. Also, since sharing is an important use case for the SugarSync online web client, the application allowed users easy workflows to share files or collaborate on documents.

In addition to designing the look and feel and various icons for the SugarSync web client, I routinely led user tests to optimize the interaction design of new and existing features.

When we launched SugarSync we needed a whole new brand and look and feel for the product and marketing materials. Our initial user base was a predominantly male, early-adopter market and since sync was not inherently a sexy concept, I wanted to give the product and website an exciting aesthetic that would appeal to our users, while at the same time communicating the key product messages and differentiation without using geeky sync arrows.

I did significant amount of user testing on the look and feel & imagery, as well as A/B testing on the messaging and layout of the actual modules on the homepage. Multiple design blogs recognized the SugarSync corporate website as one of the top designed websites.

When we launched SugarSync we needed a whole new brand and look and feel for the product and marketing materials. Our user base was comprised of the predominantly male, early-adopter market and since sync was not inherently a sexy concept at the time, I wanted to give the product an exciting aesthetic that would appeal to our user base.

From user testing, I discovered that users were worried about the security of their files online which made security a priority for us in our messaging and imagery.

The photos application was the first product launched by Sharpcast in 2005. It was designed to make sharing and backing up photos a delightful experience. My role as Creative Lead was to define the look and feel of the software and guide the interaction design.

Sharpcast Photos was unique in that it added synchronization and back-up to the traditional photo management work flow. We felt it was extremely important for the differentiation to come through the first time a user experienced the product. To this end, we decided to ’skin’ the application frame to make it stand apart from the traditional Windows XP look and feel.

Synchronization is not a familiar concept to the mainstream user, and thus we focused on making the interface very simple and friendly.

This template was created to showcase PowerPoint photo editing and layout features. The design is clean and modern and has a variety of different layouts including photo corners, slide film and Polaroids. The template also displays some fun photo animation capabilities.

I shot all the photos in these layouts to help cut down on costs for the client.

I designed this template to communicate the capabilities of Powerpoint. I used timed animations and transitions to help illustrate some of the more complex offerings. Since many of the features are new, the template has a spring theme with a focus on illustration, animation and design.

After the previous two holiday cards, I was under a lot of pressure to produce something equally as memorable. It had become kind of a ritual for the employees and those on our mailing list to start asking about it months in advance. The ‘N Sync boy band was a fun idea, but it couldn’t be more perfect than a real ‘N Sync album entitled “No Strings Attached”. I changed the title to “No Cables Attached” and solicited some willing and not-so-willing volunteers from our engineering department to stand in as boy band members.

We had so many positive comments about our holiday card the previous year, I decided I wanted to do something even more dramatic. We had just launched an early version of SugarSync and it was my mission to re-brand the word sync. The iconic ‘Think Different’ Apple ads of the late 90’s came to mind.

I had my heart set on doing a “Sync Different” campaign, but I wasn’t sure how to pull it off. Since our team was far too big to feature everyone in the card, I picked 5 memorable photos to recreate — Jim Henson, Yoko and John, Amelia Earhart, Lucy and Desi, and Frank Sinatra. I purchased all the costumes, and art directed the shoot along with photographer, Adam Tow. I composited all the photos manually in Photoshop after the shoot to make them look as close to the original as possible.

This holiday card was designed to be sent out with a small, branded gift to our press list. I wanted the card to focus on the new sharing feature of our recently-launched Sharpcast Photos and emphasize the power of our small team. While we were shooting the photos, I asked the photographer to shoot one of every team member jumping. The photos were so funny that I couldn’t help but use them on the card.

Eye-Fi had a large booth at CES ‘09. The goal of the design was to promote the Eye-Fi brand, but also to reveal some of the new features being released at CES and MacWorld. I designed 6 panels of signs for a large booth, each one focusing on different messages from the release of the Eye-Fi iPhone app to a series of how-it-works illustrations.

This ad was designed for the DigitalLife conference in NYC. DigitalLife is primarily a consumer electronics show and so it is difficult for software companies to get too much foot traffic. I wanted to design something that would be eye-catching, cheeky and draw people to our booth. We came up with the tag line “Sync, because uploading blows” — an edgy statement that I softened with an illustration of a boy blowing bubbles. The design was turned into magnets, print ads and a booth-sized sign that was effective in drawing people into our booth for a demo.

This package was designed as a sales incentive for the Informatica sales team. As a reward for outstanding performance in sales, the top salespeople were given an all expenses-paid trip to Hawaii. In the months leading up to the trip, we produced three ‘kits’ designed to get the sales people excited about the competition. Each one had a different theme focusing on Hawaii. This kit was the ‘Hawaiian Nights’ kit which contained a box of chocolates, a small jar of Kona coffee and a candle packaged in a small brown box tied with a green leaf.

This shirt was designed for a NetApp company outing that took place at a brew pub. I decided to do a colorful riff on a microbrew label.