James OLIver Senior INTERACTIVE DESIGNER PORTFOLIO & C.V. 2009
Interactive Designer
James Oliver Senior Website
We Are Family Foundation
We Are Family Foundation Website Designer New York The We Are Family Foundation charity (run by Nile Rodgers who wrote the song “We Are Family”) asked us to redesign their website around the concept of a global family. Working as a team with Creative Director Robert Del Principe and Developer Alex Lim, we designed this 50 page website to bring the foundation into the social networking era. The site features a series of touts which invite users to join various intiatives (e.g. joining a team to build a school in Mali) which builds the foundation’s database with qualified leads, and also links them with their presence on Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, Flickr, Goodsearch etc. The grid-based design is unified and clean, allowing the site to function as a photo gallery of the various youth leaders, schools in progress, and celebrity galas.
Interactive Designer
James Oliver Senior Website
Evergreene Music
Evergreene Music Website VISUAL DESIGN, IA NEW YORK This world fusion music label needed a website to release three new records in Q4 2008. Evergreene Music was built around the sucess of their artist Quraishi, whose music was featured in the Paramount Dreamworks adaptation of The Kite Runner. I designed a 3-click site featuring widgets to preview and buy music, as well as serving unique content: photos of the strange and wonderful instruments that the musicans play such as conch shells and the rubab. The color palette was dark grays and white to showcase the photos (using Flash plugin SlideshowPro), and elegant Asian fabric patterns were tiled in the background. The four-column setup allowed for the addition of new musicians and records. I used the new digital distribution service Reverb Nation to showcase the music.
Interactive Designer
James Oliver Senior Interactive Installation
Project Wolff
Project Wolff Interactive Installation CONCEPT, VIDEO, SOUND DESIGN New York The New School Graduate Faculty was set to be demolished in 2008. We needed to document the memories and feel of its most intimate space: “The Wolff Room�. We designed an interactive 2.5D triptych mural in Adobe After-Effects, each third of which could be triggered by opening an electronically-modified book in the room. Users enter the room and encounter a table with three seemingly normal books which secretly contain embedded circuitry. Magnetic switches hidden under the pages wirelessly trigger a patch which projects the huge mural on the wall of fabric. In planning this installation, we asked the users to record their sensory experiences of the storied wood-panelled room and gathered archival photographs of landmark talks given there.
Interactive Designer
James Oliver Senior National Brand
Medisys Health Group
Medisys Health Group National Brand IA, ART DIRECTION Montreal Medisys Health Group is the largest private healthcare provider in Canada with over 800 medical staff. Through a period of rapid expansion their brand had become fragmented and disorganized. As Senior Designer in the central offices in Montreal, working with senior copywriter Micah Locilento and E.V.P. Julie Cloutier, we crafted a written and visual luxury brand which could be rolled-out across the country. Art Direction choices included cementing type choices, a calm color pallette, and professional photography featuring the clinics. The style guides applied to all internal medical documents as well, e.g. standardized cell padding on attending physician statements. For the luxury service “Medisys One�, we introduced black paper and black credit cards.
Interactive Designer
James Oliver Senior E-Commerce Site
Fuel Bank
Fuel Bank E-Commerce Site CONCEPT, UX, IA TORONTO Designed a simple web interface to sell downstream petroleum online, locking-in your price, for later redemption at the pump. As the web interface for a sophisticated back-end which agglomerate orders and purchases NYMEX oil futures, the e-commerce site is designed to be highly usable for the truck-driving customer base. As co-founder responsible for Interaction design, I lead a team of software engineers, designers, oil consultants and collaborated with ExxonMobil, Royal Bank of Canada and NFO Research to design the user experience. We went through 3 rounds of usability testing with our user base. We used the concept of “barrels of oil� to explain how we were keep fuel reserves in a virtual bank account. The fleet manager user sees only the current price of Fuel Bank fuel compared to pump price, and either buys or checks her statement.
Interactive Designer
James Oliver Senior Board Game
Choppa
Choppa Board Game 2007 New York Game Designer, Visual Designer Created an interface that enables children of different social backgrounds and places to interact with each other. The portable game for children, called Choppa, folds into a backpack sized box and opens into a 3 sided game, where each player takes over a role. The aim is to build the largest tower. The mechanic is turn-based using dice and pieces move around a small circle dictating whch card to draw. Instructions are on the card, which benefits or detracts from one of the other players’ tower. I designed the board art using folk toy elements elephants and horses. The cardinal points layout encouraged reflection on origins, and the 3 narrative roles helped the players understand each other’s perspective. We classified our target child user according to Piaget’s theories of deveopment - concrete-operational (ages 7 to 12).
Interactive Designer
James Oliver Senior Mobile Game
Strike! (Nokia)
Strike! (Nokia) Mobile Game 2007 Mumbai, India Game Designer Preserved a layer of history in Girangaon (Mumbai, India), once housing over 600 textile mills and now home to the Phoenix mall and expensive condos. We designed this mobile, locative, role-playing game for the area’s new generation to help them learn the local history of the region around the old mills, women’s rights and industrial action - while shopping! Using python programmed cellphones, the game is run once per hour in the mall. Users can assume the role of worker, union-manager, or mill-owner and play through real historical events, triggered by their GPS location in the district. A series of scruples-style questions are sent to the players who answer according to the role they are playing. Points are awarded for appropriateness of answer and rankings sent back to phone.