The Art Department is a boutique consultancy built on the idea that finely-tuned experiences are shaped by innovative thinking, experimentation, and collaboration. As Creative Consultant, I work with a talented and experienced team of Strategists, UX designers, Art Directors and Storytellers to help organizations solve problems, innovate, and move audiences with great digital experiences.

bv02 was an exciting agency. In my role as Creative Director, I provided coaching, guidance, and direction for a team of 35, and directly managed a team of 10 UX/UI designers, graphic/motion designers, and digital / marketing strategists through complex projects in the Arts & Culture, Health, Higher Education, and Transit sectors.

But the reason I got out of bed in the morning was the project work. Day-to-day, l played any number of roles: Lead Strategist, Product Owner, UX/UI Designer, or Art Director. On some days I could be found leading discovery sessions and workshops with C-Suite stakeholders. On others I designed user stories, customer experience journey maps, wireframes, or interactive prototypes. Occasionally, you’d even find me knee-deep in code, producing HTML and CSS markup.

And while it may sound like it was just a crazy agency life, the only reason I could even touch the kind of work I did was the process I helped develop. Over my four years at the agency I managed to help streamline delivery by bringing pattern design, rapid prototyping and Agile into a longstanding Waterfall shop. The team got more done, faster, and with fewer mistakes, which gave me more time to get my hands dirty.

I designed the first prototype for Clicko at the end of 2011. Soon after, the company realized they needed me to build a team and carry the vision through development. My role as Director of Product Development was born.

As the Product Owner of our flagship product, I worked with a small but talented team of designers, developers, project managers, and marketers to devise a working process based in Lean Startup, Agile, and Scrum. We developed a rhythm of one-week sprints capped by monthly user tests. And as always, I worked hands-on on design (and at times on markup).

Clicko was a complicated project: a marketing platform for social influencers to form advertising partnerships with small-businesses. As the field was fairly new (and our audience relatively inexperienced), we spent a good deal of time ensuring users could navigate the app. We tested and iterated on everything from the most complex analytics views to the tiniest naming conventions for almost two years, when we finally launched a public Beta. Thanks to frequent testing, the initial release went very well — within three days saw 600 people start using the platform with almost no intervention from our support team.

After years working on-and-off as a freelance designer, I finally decided to take the plunge and start a boutique agency in 2007. Notable Design was a small, multidisciplinary team of designer/developers — with a single project manager who also ran operations — but we managed to build a good set of clients in both Canada and the U.S. And we produced some great work.

As the Creative Director, President, and Founder, I was naturally our source for new business, so I used my own network to win contracts primarily in entertainment (a personal preference). I ran pitches and directed the team, but as we were a small agency, I was also right there working on designs and polishing code.

Our work spanned web, branding, product development, graphic design, motion, and marketing. And over the years, Notable Design managed to build a respectable portfolio of brands including Marvel, Tetris, Deal or No Deal, Curtis, RCA, Proscan, Steve Patterson, Jay Malone, Goldrush Entertainment, Intuitive Pictures, and Zikera Groove.

As niche products go, there are few I’ve seen as narrow as those we developed at ContactPilot. I co-founded the company with one of my clients as a means to solve a small but annoying problem in the call-centre industry: agents were unable to instantly hand-off calls to one another while maintaining continuity. At a time when VOIP was beginning to take over and other media-rich web technologies had reached maturity, it seemed like a simple enough problem to address.

And it was. It also spawned a whole series of products for our small company. We managed to identify several gaps in the market, and ultimately designed a three platform ecosystem of call-centre applications: a CRM for call continuity, a quality-control application for call recordings, and our most successful endeavour, a white labeled payment processing hub designed to connect to
multiple gateways at once.

As a long-time Flash designer and developer, I chose the path of least resistance, and built our products on Adobe Flex and Air alongside PHP developers who wrote our controllers. After a few missteps we started testing our designs with users as we went, and ultimately all three apps served the call centre industry until 2010.