For well over two decades I’ve explored the intersection between brands and culture, art, design and technology in internationally awarded client work and art commissions. After eight years exploring creative culture in the UK and US, I returned to Germany in March 2017, as Executive Creative Director for IBM iX [Berlin] and member of the global IBM iX Ambassadorship program to explore creative applications for data-driven experience.
Together with small teams of creative technologists and designers, I've won numerous international awards such as the Art Directors Club New York, Art Directors Club Deutschland, New York Festivals, the One Show, Clio Award, New York Type Directors Club, IF Communication Award and Webby Awards.
In 2015, I received Lifetime Artist status for work included in the permanent collection for Architecture & Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – SFMOMA.
I currently serve as a freelance design consultant, designer, and educator at the REDI School of Digital Integration and Kunsthochschule Berlin - Weissensee, leading workshops on creative organisation and contributing to and developing new Learning Management Systems at a New Zealand based startup, The English Farm.
Lucky to be part of the Hi-ReS! London studio crew starting in 2008, one of my most rewarding projects was a commission to help define and visualise the Watson “thought-process” for the epic IBM Watson Jeopardy challenge in the USA. We had tons of future ideas about virtual personalities, elegant imperfections, voice synthesis and OS that (still) haven't been explored much further. Bummer.
In March 2017, my work with IBM got a whole lot more official: to define and facilitate a new spirit of creative culture and excellence in the second largest IBM Design Studio (ja..) and (my idea) –combine playful design thinking-ish-ness with some artistic abstraction to serious challenges and impossible deadlines with random teams of talented and disenfranchised young people.
After more than two decades of experimenting with emerging technology and designing rich immersive brand and customer experience in and outside rectangular space, new inspiration comes from the how and why tomorrow’s supertools and the ubiquitous internet is evolving and what makes real sense.
"Creative applications for data-driven experience" is how I currently describe my work –using supertools of tomorrow to extend creative vision in ways we couldn’t before. Add value and more memorable experience to everyday life. Nurture native imagination and meaningful interaction with others, with some help from friendly machines.
Or: Make Stuff People Love.
(You, Us, Me, Them. Everyone. Amen.)
• IBM iX Ambassador since May 2017
• Quenching chronic thirst for adventure
• Nurturing creative culture (& stress-testing corporate policies)
• Creative applications and applied art for tomorrow's supertools
• Learning New Stuff
• Having Fun
New Bizz Concepts & Client Work: Adidas, Allianz SE, Barmer, Creative Culture stuff, IBM iX, Ikea, Migros, Nestle+Perugina (Italy), PepsiCo, Phillip Morris International, Sonepar, Volkswagen We
Just a little over a decade after IBM's Deep Blue beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov in an infamous first serious showdown between humans and computers, Watson, the latest IBM supercomputer was scheduled to play two new world champions at the game of Jeopardy! Our task: visualize how Watson "thought" and find a simple way to show the decision-making process behind each answer.
After several weeks of intense research, including a meeting with the principal investigator behind Watson, David Ferrucci, we developed a unique visual language to simplify the intensely complex analytic process behind every Watson decision into the most fundamental components and highlighting the awesomeness of IBM's achievement.
An important component to the award-winning global Watson campaign in 2011 with key elements of the visualization shared across broadcast and digital promotions around the world.
The IBM Watson project was part of a team collaboration with Ogilvy New York to promote the now infamous reincarnation of the DeepBlue project: Watson, the first computer to challenge human players on a televised game of Jeopardy!
Creators of the most played online multiplayer online battle arena game in history: League of Legends.
Over 16 months, we teamed up with Warsaw's Ars Thanea, completing 12 different R&D projects for Riot Games over the span of 16 months, ranging from Corporate Identity and Brand Strategy, Game Design, Print, Website, Mobile Apps, Community Boards, Data-Visualization, and Intranet Tools for Rioters around the world.
Made in the USA, conceived at Hi-ReS! New York. The concept (initially a response to redesign a new platform for music events) was later adopted by the German headquarters for implementation by Hi-ReS! Hamburg, embellished and refined, then applied to all global sites and replacing the purely flash driven predecessor.
At the heart of the USA concept: a flexible, highly adaptive content system connected to a central hub designed to post and update the website(s) as well as all relevant Social Channels from a single custom-built CMS. Our vision was to connect all digital publishing through a single visual concept and a simplified content strategy that could easily adapt to different digital formats, devices, feeds from live events and mobile applications (games) enabling participation through simple and entertaining themes relevant to club and nightlife.
A central goal to the USA concept was to bring strangers in a bar together over a single shot (or more...after all, how much time is invested over a shot with a stranger, unless it gets interesting?) and connect fans as well as non-fans to each other, opening up a far broader positioning of the Jägermeister brand, music genres, and audiences in the USA.
A global music experience, unlocked through a bag of Doritos Late Night crisps and localized for 32 territories.
Featuring 5 music videos from popular regional bands around the world, we shot using a 360º camera system, placing the viewer in the center of the performance in locations as diverse as Toronto, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Istanbul and London.
A headliner video with Rihanna was shot with Jonas Åkerlund in Los Angeles in one day on 2 different sets, allowing viewers on the website later to switch between the videos using a marker on their crisp bag.
For a series of site improvements and holiday promotions leading up to the 2015/16 holiday season, David Yurman commissioned Huge to design a series of interactive promotions and site improvements working within tight restrictions of the existing site backend and template structure.
With some creative workarounds within the existing template system and a simplification of the grid structure, we were able to create a more immersive top-level experience by enabling full-screen takeovers coupled with a more dynamic grid system for more engaging promotional teasers and contextual relevance to the visitor.
All that inside a 10 week (total) series of sprints from concept and production oversight.
Incorporating new video reveals and interactive teasers designed to react to visitor clicks and browsing paths for longer site visits, higher sales and a more elegant brand experience leading to the shopping cart.
Credits: Jarrod Bull (VP, Client Services), Adrienne DeGemmis (Senior Project Manager), David Linderman (Croup Creative Director) Heiko Wächter (Group Experience Director), Tiffany Pan (Associate Creative Director), Mike Zuckerman (Associate Creative Director, Copy), Julia Guo (Senior Visual Designer)
Commissioned to imagine the future of Real Estate, examine industry trends and products relevant to both the agent and their clients in the digital age, a team of Huge visual designers, product designers and strategists spent a little over 3 weeks putting together a rebranding of this iconic market leader and explored new paradigms for property searches and tools to aid agent/client communications.
By coupling the many disparate agent-side organizational tools and nodes for data entry into a new data hub and enabling a new level of personalization we were able to envision a new form of property search: a psycho-social profiling of properties using softer variables and visual aids to help clients identify core values quicker.
The resulting study spanned a simplified elegant rebranding to signal the new Elliman and a near complete set of tools for more seamless interactions and visualizations of powerful proprietary datasets into a singular hub.
Credits: Jarrod Bull (VP, Client Services), Beth Lind (GVP, Business Development), Chris Koller & Megan Crowley (Directors, Brand Experience), David Linderman (Group Creative Director), Howard Myint (Creative Director, Copy) Nicklesh Soni (Senior Art Director), Myhra Minz (Senior Visual Designer), MK Loomis (Senior Product Designer)
An adaptive environment built for constantly changing youtube channel demands, for longevity, elegance and brand image producing high-quality content for younger audiences.
Commissioned by Team Detroit and in collaboration with Hudson Rouge, we re-interpreted the Lincoln Motors brand for YouTube placement and conceived a simple and elegant user-interface that complimented the existing campaign as well as a huge and expanding catalog for the new content strategy as well as a solid link back to the official Lincoln online presence and nearby dealers.
In 2006 Helmut Lang was acquired by Link Theory Holdings (developer of the theory fashion label) and the only official website was taken offline.
Shortly thereafter, two A-list designers (Michael & Nicole Colovos) were installed as Creative Directors for the new Helmut Lang collections and, besides creating a first-ever E-Commerce shop, Helmut Lang needed a new brand identity and lens through which to position the brand.
Our brief was to invent an E-Commerce platform and interface that complimented the minimalistic reduction of the brand with a respectful nod to its roots, but avoiding too much historical nostalgia.
Our solution was to create a custom E-Commerce platform with plenty of room for future in-house development, provide photo direction and comprehensive style-guides for product and featurette production and a bold new fresh look for a modern classic, with a respectful nod to its rich heritage.
What started out as a simple blog for designer Olivier Theyskens, turned into a veritable website and inspiration for later E-commerce relaunch.
Launched in February 2012, our relaunch was constructed as a simple and highly reductive official blog for the Olivier Theyskens collections, archives, inspirations, and biography. The interface was mindfully designed to "vanish" into the background for a more immersive experience and content browsing, void of interface until necessary, always keeping a sharp focus on the garments, imagery and brand orchestrated by the Theyskens team.
The blog was built to accommodate a disparate photo and video submissions from a variety of social media channels, devices and team members, easily adapting to the imminent migration of the fashion audience from desktop or laptop browsing to mobile.
Launched in late November 2012, this holiday Guide to Giving was developed in a matter of weeks to re-skin the VENDA-based VINCE.COM e-commerce site for a holiday feature promotion.
Blocked by a less-than-collaborative in-house technical department (a la: "You can't do anything with the site. Template redesign is out of the question.") we simply scraped the public html files right down to high-resolution product imagery, availability, and related items and prototyped a completely new front-end skin for the holiday promotion.
After essentially redesigning the site through simple appropriation of existing public content and a new algorithm for cropping photos and user interface for full-screen browsing (as well as re-inventing an information architecture deep-linked with the existing venda backend that better suited holiday themes and shopping) we were granted API access to the venda backend, including suggestions for more frequent availability queries to avoid what seemed like obvious future issues approaching the holiday season.
The branding for the holiday feature was also adopted for brick & mortar shop displays and on-going digital communications.
A new fragrance by the Dolce group created around the major arcana of Tarot cards (but, according to the briefing, avoid using any visual references to Tarot visual language.)
Concept, Interactive-, Social- and Design Concept for what was later conspicuously similar to The Art of The Trench (a far simpler website focusing on the Burberry Classic.)
One of the most exhilarating project experiences over the last years: the migration of the classic Burberry brand (and its structured collection offerings) to a more sophisticated and appropriate marketing strategy online and through social channels.
Over the course of a few weeks, we broke down the core elements of how we experienced the brand, devised simple (yet not intrusive) applications for sharing and collecting favorited items.
For the flagship destination site, we built a googlemaps-like interface to enable a top-level overview of the entire platform, analogue to the real-life experience of walking through a real store and and gravitating towards your intended destination (or finding something else along the way) and, using the same conceptual metaphor of zooming in or out, built the entire site as an large "printed" catalog test sheet before binding.
The result was a landscape of beautiful spreads, similar to a glossy magazine experience, unfolded and unbound, observed as a whole piece with larger editorial features drawing browsers to key sections (or departments in an analog store metaphor.)
Zooming in or out, expanding a section or opening interactive features was conceived to be that something between street view on google and the real-life store experience. A universal search tool allowed visitors to instantly redraw this map and narrow their landscape or search via keywords, visualized via popularity, availability or relevance to given search results.
Created by an unusual artist/perfumier collaboration in Berlin, Germany. Marc Buxton designed this exclusive fragrance for the Elternhaus concept for a fragrance founded on religious tolerance and recognition.
Interested in exploring the semantic relationships to religion, family and unity, we created an interactive layer linked to the Princeton Wordnet Database enabling visitors to explore the many links between cultural roles and references.
Second only to Amazon in german-speaking regions, this was my first foray into an e-commerce platform to support millions of diverse products, from household items to fashion and electronics (just to name a few.)
I was expecting a difficult and conservative client, instead their in-house production team followed my style guides to a T and invited the studio to attend their year-end party, inviting us to the stage for an official “Thank You!” and celebration of the redesign launched several months earlier.
Long before responsive design was an established concept, we conceived a dynamic environment for the relaunch of Adidas Tennis, creating content layout algorithms that designed specifically for variation in presentation right from the start.
The concepts behind the interface and resulting content display was also created to compliment the game itself: a steady back and forth of elegant arching trajectories (sometimes shorter, sometimes longer) and reshuffling of the main stage on which the action happened.
True to a good interface concept, Adidas Tennis incorporated a UI that, in essence, also became part of the overall branding behind the product line, and not just a smoke and mirrors effect or gimmic.
Pitch presentation screens for new model features and interactive web applications between car and drivers.
An initiative from Der Spiegel, a leading german weekly news magazine and leading german news site (since forever) to collect and enable readers to upload and document their memories in text, video, or images surrounding monthly themes (the fall of the Berlin Wall, JFK assasination, John Lennon.. etc.)
The leading Berlin newspaper and winner of several design awards through the years. This was my first experience designing for a purely news-driven website with scores of updates four times a day and heavily populated with video, audio and image content parallel to the written articles and reader interactions and surveys.
Commissioned from Wired Magazine, we were given an open-ended theme of Location and asked to design an interactive art piece around it. Fork Unstable Media was paired with Future Farmers to illustrate two different concepts of Location.
This first (ever?) full-screen interaction (opened in a Java applet and from our genius-in-residence, Jan-Michael Studt) was the first of many java experiments before Flash was out of beta.
View an archived demo (from 1998) on vimeo.
Miscellaneous media, experiments and documentation of work over the years.
Many of these pieces are the result of being around such good talent. Great designers, technologists, producers and some of the nicest people under one roof led to great collaboration and inspiration.
A selection of some of the bigger and better press articles and accolades from the industry.
