Tugboat Group

These projects below represent some of my work at Tugboat Group. It shouln't need mentioning that these were all team projects, and involved many people at different stages. Other designers, developers, team leads, project managers, and client reps were part of the mix.

Each project had some unique challenge (for me, at the time), and while old work makes all of us grimmace, each one has at least a couple of details that still make me smile.

Just Ask Baby | justaskbaby.com [no longer active]

One of the largest projects I’ve worked on, Just Ask Baby features a complex user membership model, monthly payment for access to video hosted externally on a content delivery network, a multi-currency subscription system, and advanced analytics. It was also a lot of fun to help make. Built in Drupal, it combines a lot of custom content types with user-created image galleries, blogs, all kinds of things. We may have lost some hair over this one.

Roles

Project manager, client rep, developer

Tools

Drupal, HTML/CSS/jQuery

Smile

A lot of theming was done to add some commonly used features just where users would need them the most. We knew that new parents (I was just one at the time) of all user types didn’t want to get lost in widgets and complex tools, so we really tried to streamline the tools as best we could.

BC Association of Magazine Publishers | bcamp.bc.ca

To begin this website, I researched and wrote a comprehensive survey of similar websites across Canada, and tried to define several “best in class” features that should be incorporated into this new site. Having time to analyze what others were doing in this detail really helped set the challenge, not to copy what was going on, but to answer it, in a somewhat cheeky fashion.

Roles

Project manager, client rep, developer

Tools

Drupal, HTML/CSS/jQuery

Smile

The skewed magazines in the background (design by the incomparable Jeff Waterfall) always make me happy. As does my souvenir issue of Goats Across Canada.

Windset Farms | windsetfarms.com

This site was rebuilt as part of large-scale overhaul that moved it away from hard-coded pages and content towards a much more extensible Drupal framework. There’s a lot of Flash, jQuery, dynamic typesetting, classifications, and multi-stage workflows, maybe a bit like a greenhouse itself.

Roles

Developer (front-end HTML/CSS, back-end Drupal configurations and custom programming)

Tools

Drupal, HTML/CSS/jQuery

Smile

How can you not rate something three out of five tomatoes? I just wish you could mix and match, to rate a recipe two tomatoes and half a cucumber.

School District 42 | sd42.ca

Not long after Tugboat Media started using Drupal as its main production tool, we had a couple of new clients ask us specifically to use Drupal in their new websites. It seemed a strange term to be in the zeitgeist. This site has a pretty extensive range of user types, each of which can interact with the site in different ways.

Roles

Project manager, client rep, developer

Tools

Drupal, HTML/CSS/jQuery

Smile

Much of the navigation consists of “Where you looking for...” links, which are actually based on user activity, the thinking being that if most people are looking for something, you might be too. The navigation will thus constantly modify itself as the site gets used more and more.

Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver | rebgv.org

Another situation where the client asked for Drupal by name, this one was proving a bit of a stumper design-wise until I brought in some childrens’ books designed by the inestimable Molly Leach, where the typography really popped off the page, and I asked if we could push the scale of on screen type like that. We started to....

Roles

Project manager, client rep, developer

Tools

Drupal, HTML/CSS/jQuery

Smile

Now I can't look at the title without thinking “ ‘I’m in,’ said the mynah bird.” You’ll have to read the book....

New Media BC | newmediabc.com

This is actually the second visual overhaul of the site, but it’s based on a codebase I wrote which was one of my earlier attempts at a full-on content management system. It was based around a unique tool we built to collect membership profile information and display visualizations of changes to the industry year over year. I had to brush up on my MySQL for this one.

Roles

Project manager, client rep, developer

Tools

PHP, MySQL

Smile

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was adding something much like Drupal’s Pathauto module, which makes for much more readable URLs than things like “page.php?id=1225” by taking a title as entered and making it web friendly.

Sisu | sisu.com

Although I had no input into the final site (built in JSP), I did prototype much of the front- and back-end displays, and tried to push the development team away from nested tables within tables as a templating system towards a lean, mean, modern XHTML. I did get a little frustrated by some browsers’ need to refer to typefaces as “Helvetica Neue Light”, others as “HelveticaNeue Light”, and still others as “HelveticaNeue-Light”. Can’t we just all work together?

Roles

Front-end designer, front-end developer, prototyping

Tools

HTML/CSS, custom JavaScript

Smile

The at the time insane-seeming image-map/transparent-PNG system that makes up the storefinder may have aged me, but it is kind of cool.