The Art of Film & TV Title Design by PBS’ Off Book.

I was tipped-off to a great digital series PBS creates called ‘Off Book’ by @tjlull. The Title Design video above hooked me (who doesn’t love a good opening title sequence?). Like I did, you’ll end up watching most of their other videos, too.

A few great ones:

• The Impact of Kickstarter, Creative Commons & Creators Project
• Lego Art
• Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium

Have some time to kill? Check out my YouTube faves feed (see also Vimeo, Netflix, Ted Talks, etc.).

The Difference Between UX and UI: Subtleties Explained in Cereal (design.org)

Ever met someone who uses UX and UI interchangeably? Ed Lea created this photographic infographic to visually define the differences between user experience and user interface design and how they relate to a product.

There’s a few things interesting about this, but specifically:
- the acknowledgement of the increasing trend for riders with tablets—mostly iPads—that we’ve all noticed over the last year or so.
- the choice to display white headphones instantly signals ubiquitous ‘Apple product’ to viewers (well-played, Apple).

“

And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.

Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

Pretty cool timeline + Google Image mashup for any search term over any period of time.

I think the print ads are kinda sexy.

An Axe fragrance for men and women? Supported by an Axe campaign that isn’t aggressively, compulsively misogynistic? The world must be coming to an end.

In fact, that’s exactly what seems to be happening in Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s launch spot for Axe Anarchy, the first fragrance in the brand’s history with a version for ladies as well as dudes. Axe has long been known, and relentlessly bashed, for “giving men the edge in the mating game” (their words)—which in the advertising has always meant portraying women as brainless, sex-driven fools unable to resist throwing themselves at the Axe-using men in their midst. The introduction of a women’s fragrance levels the playing field, and lets BBH finally portray both sexes as sex-crazed imbeciles, free to objectify each other equally in willfully mutual attraction—in what turns out to be the most absurdly romantic campaign Axe has ever produced.

via Adweek

Here’s the video spot:

Stopped by General Assembly’s first ever Career Fair, mostly out of curiosity. (They also had a pretty impressive lineup of NY tech companies like Facebook, Tumblr, Etsy, Meetup, Pivotal Labs, and more.)

I found it to be something between a hipster résumé stacking contest and a nerd tech feeding frenzy. There’s clearly a huge demand for something done well like this. I’d love to see the next one have more space so people aren’t climbing over each other. I’d also recommend it to tech companies looking to find talent.

What thread connects the ’90s trip-hop band Air, Tom Hanks, and the movie Hugo? A French filmmaker named Georges Méliès.

I was just starting to wonder why Air’s cd was a little boring. Turns out it’s the soundtrack to a digital remastering of the classic film also featured prominantly in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, as well as the fantastic HBO miniseries produced by Tom Hanks called From the Earth to the Moon. (Tom Hanks’ only appearance in the miniseries is to actually play Mr. Méliès himself.)

I’ve been a longtime fan of Air’s tunes (also AirTunes) — which also spurred a brilliant inside joke where my boyfriend thought their breakout hit, “Sexy Boy,” was actually chanting “sexy pudding.” (Go head and listen to the chorus: you can understand his hysterical mondegreen.)

Hugo is a brilliant and gorgeous movie that I can’t wait to see again.

And if you’re a space buff whom enjoys a little cinematic historical drama, add the From the Earth to the Moon miniseries to your Netflix queue immediately.

…but back to George:

Presented in its fully restored original 1902 colors (and featuring a new, kinetic soundtrack by AIR), Georges Méliès’ classic adventure tale of a lunar voyage is now as beautiful as ever. Come see the restoration that premiered at Cannes 2011 and was hailed by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott as “surely a cinematic highlight of the year, maybe the century.” Winner of the 2011 National Society of Film Critics’ Best Film Restoration Award.
— American Cinematheque

Who wants to go see this with me at Lincoln Center? I’m pretty excited. Restoration documentary to follow.

I’m not sure how I stumbled across it, but I’m sure glad I did. At the end of January, YouTube released some pretty mind-boggling stats around popularity and upload rate. But they celebrated it with a wonderfully immersive microsite.

Every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube. That’s 24 hours every 24 seconds… or a decade every single day. Discover more time-bending stats at http://www.onehourpersecond.com.

The problem with statistics like this lies in its stickiness and comprehensibility factor. (Yes, I made that last term up.) Just reading the rate above as text, anyone would have hard time wrapping his mind around what ‘24hrs of uploaded video every 24 seconds’ really means. Is that a lot? It sounds like a lot, right? Luckily, Google (and lots of other smart companies) are starting to leverage the powers of HTML5 and CSS to create sites that go well beyond that of a boring stat or embedded video.

Give a look at the One Hour Per Second site and you’ll see what I mean. They coupled a strong artistic representation and mental extension of this rate applied to other (somewhat) tangible things that help you draw comparisons to comprehending this data:

• “In 1.5 seconds of uploads to YouTube, the International Space Station completes one orbit of the earth. [1.5 seconds of uploads =] 91 minutes of video”
• “In 36 seconds of uploads to YouTube, the Byrd Glacier in Antarctica moves 14.76 feet. 36hrs of video”
• “In 1 minute 36 seconds of uploads to YouTube, the Sahara Desert expands by 500 feet. 4 days of video”

You get the idea. But it’s this light interaction and seamless transition between animated elements and an almost a cappella soundtrack that creates a joyous interactive experience. It’s really the audio that does it for me. It’s like the teacher in Charlie Brown meets a beatbox extraordinaire.

Want some other neat examples I’ve seen recently? Check out Google’s Zeitgeist 2011, a beautiful HTML5 representation of their popular search data. Really, it’s gorgeous. (But keep in mind that it’s basically a Keynote presentation of data made interactive and exciting.) Or even check out Kickstarter’s Annual Report / Year in Review. Stats, popular videos, and project recaps have never been so interesting. Do sexy infographics make your pulse quicken? GOOD is for you.

Hey Tumblr — I haven’t heard anything back from you loverly folks in over a week.

I’ve been Googling “tumblr backdated posts ordering issue” (or some derivation) for the last few weeks hoping something would arise, but I’m not having much luck. I found a few posts describing post backdating working or not, but nothing along the lines of the pagination ordering issue I’ve been seeing. I figure there’s got to be a few other people experiencing a similar issue, so why not write it up?

As I’m sure my few followers have noticed, I’ve been putting a bit of work into finally filling out my portfolio over the past few weeks. In an effort to keep things simple, I’m just using a tag #portfolio to create that section of my site.

As I was planning the best strategy to overhaul my digital existence, it eventually came down to a WordPress vs. Tumblr scenario. I’ve had a lot of WordPress work experience, so I know how powerful and customizable it can be, but I know it can also be a good amount of work to publish simple posts — especially on the go. And although they’ve got some improved apps, nothing really compares to the simplicity of the Tumblr suite. And let’s be honest, the themes are way sexier. So I thought I’d keep it as simple as possible for as long as viable. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that the easier it is to create the content, the more likely I will be to do it.

I had one requirement that I wasn’t sure Tumblr could fulfill: backdated posts. I needed a way to create an ordered portfolio section. With a bit of poking and experimentation, I found that Tumblr supported this. Whew. And tag pages even support RSS feeds to match, which would be nice if I ever want to display a feed of only portfolio items, like on the next version of MattLeiker.com. The RSS feed even displays the backdated post date correctly.

As I’ve created posts related to the projects I’ve worked on over the last 8 years, I started to notice something was funky with the post ordering between pages. Since I started with cataloging more recent projects and worked my way backward (for the most part), I’ve ended up creating posts for some of my oldest projects last. Yet those newer posts have the oldest (backdated) post dates.

If you look at my portfolio page, you’ll notice that all the posts on the first page are appear to be ordered by date. Glorious. Perfect. Wonderful.

But if you go to the second page of posts with the #portfolio tag and examine the dates, you’ll see that the posts are indeed in chronological order, but they aren’t necessarily older than the posts on the first page.

Crap.

Here’s what I think is going on:

• Tumblr supports backdated posts. Glorious. 
• … but before they started supporting it, I think their system was probably set up to display posts ordered by post ID.
• Post IDs get larger as the post gets newer. I suspect post IDs are probably unique across the entire Tumblr system.
• This is likely what each users’ dashboard uses to order whatever posts are coming in from their “Follow” list. (It would probably be too complicated for the Tumblr servers to order a Dashboard by date — and that would defeat the purpose.) I don’t mind if my backdated posts show up in the Dashboard, but I do expect them to be in order on my site.
• When Tumblr renders a site, I suspect it looks at the list of posts ordered by post ID, grabs the first 15 (or whatever you have it set to display), calls that “Page 1”, then reshuffles them by post date before finally displaying them.
• When you click “page 2”, it grabs the next 15 posts in the system ordered by post ID, and then reshuffles ‘em by post date. Wash, rinse, repeat for each page.
• (Displaying only posts with a particular tag behaves the same way as the main loop.)

So, what can I do? Is this a bug you’re working on Tumblr? Do you ever expect to support this properly? Or do I have to move to WordPress to get true backdated post support?

I’d really like to not have to remake all the posts in a chronological order before backdating them just as a workaround. 

And I’d like to recreate some posts from my old blog here on Tumblr — which has to be a manual process since you don’t support much in the way of importing content. All of those posts would need to be backdated. But I don’t dare if it’s going to wreak havoc on anyone attempting to peruse my archives in a normal fashion.

Please help. 

Vimeo has announced that their 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards are open to submissions. I completely missed it in 2010, but their award ceremony was incredibly well done. Hosted by early internet comedy vlogger Ze Frank, the real star of the show was their incredible ‘architectural projection’ set. If you do nothing else, watch a few seconds of the video above around the 7:00 mark and then again at the very end.

It reminds me a lot of the Amon Tobin ‘Isam’ show I saw last year. Wild.

Curious to see what the hubbub is all about here at the New York Tech Meetup. There’s 800 attendees and yet tix originally sold out in 2 mins. @nytm #nerd

MattLeiker.com, v4.0

Retired January 2012, you were simple, clean, and served me well. But you weren’t very easy to update and had no dynamic qualities. Shame on you. Rest in peace.

View the archived version. (My apologies in advance for any broken links.)

The Pioneer Woman

Voce Communications; site redesign launched July 2010, updates through year end

One of my favorite examples of a self-made blogger (empire?), The Pioneer Woman blog — arguably better titled a ‘portal’ — showcases Ree Drummond’s life on the ranch. Her incredibly regular reporting spans the gamut from her personal life, cooking, photography, home & garden, and even tales of homeschooling her kids. She has a rabid avid fan base, where any one of her weekly KitchenAid Mixer or iPad giveaways will garner tens of thousands of comments, often in the course of a few minutes. (It’s a constant headache for our SysAdmin to keep her giveaways from melting servers or imploding WordPress.)

As one of the team’s hands-down favorite and most consistent clients over the years, we’ve been incredibly proud to watch Ree’s self-made success grow into her second (sure to be) best-selling cookbook and an amazing new show on The Food Network. (Yes, she really is as genuine and sweet as she seems.) Just read a few of her posts. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll be back (well, after about 40 minutes disappear into thin air).

The 2010 major redesign was one of my first projects when I officially joined the Voce team. The design was (mostly) approved and it needed to be executed. As Ree was a seasoned blogger and WordPress extraordinaire, we took the opportunity to leverage the automated and hierarchical goodies that WP has to offer, creating some simple automated “super widgets” that automatically display content from different areas, categories, time periods, or tags. We made the archives and category pages easier to browse. Her luscious photos are now featured even bigger (and more automated for her Flickr process). Check out Ree’s “new blog” announcement post for more information (she even thanks us all by name halfway through).

project management, created requirements documents, development QA, post-launch support, authored tutorials

AOL’s AIM Pages Social Network

AOL; 2006-2007

Considered an evolution of “the first ever social network” — AOL’s Member Directory —AIM Pages was more than just a social network tied to your AIM Buddy List. While only AOL employees really considered Member Directory the first social network, it was clear that AOL was a bit behind the curve to only just be considering investing in the social networking space in 2005/2006. (Remember that Friendster was on its last breath, Facebook was still private-ish, and MySpace was king.)

Weighing in on the AIM Pages team’s efforts from the perspective of my position with AOL Music, I was young and opinionated and of the impression that the great majority of executives working on the project hadn’t really even used MySpace, Friendster or Facebook the same way teens and college students had. Frustrated with what I was seeing, I eventually shot a 4 page “Matt’s Guide to What AIM Pages Should Be” document off to a listserv. Not twenty minutes later, I got a call from the head of Product Management, asking if I’ve ever heard of it. I hadn’t. Thus began my career as a Product Manager.

Tasked with the typical duties of a ProdM, I managed the product requirements, task tracking, bugs, UX/UI development, and overall progress of pieces or subcomponents of the overall initiative. I was responsible for Search, friends component (Buddy Gallery), the Buddy Feed (an early response to Facebook’s News Feed), settings pages, privacy and rostering, and the media modules. Working with operations, marketing, programming, legal, advertising, and corporate communications, I gathered feedback from various executive stakeholders as well as integrated focus group and user testing feedback. As one of the more rewarding aspects, I managed teams of developers in the US, Ireland, and Bangalore, getting to visit them regularly. I also travelled to train and support AOL’s various help desks and call centers.

AIM Pages featured a robust AJAX drag-and-drop modular publishing system, intending to grant publishing freedom to users stuck with a typical form-field layout like MySpace and Facebook. While ultimately a bit too ambitious (read: buggy) for a first- or second-iteration product on such a massive scale, AIM Pages was eventually abandoned and profiles were migrated to AOL’s costly 2008 acquisition, Bebo. I think mine even still exists there in some Frankenstein form.

Press:

• Mashable
• ReadWriteWeb
• TechCrunch

product manager, managed international dev teams (US, Ireland, India), focus groups & user testing

For those of you viewing this portfolio feed on my personal landing page, MattLeiker.com:

I recommend clicking here to view my portfolio and all it’s rich formatting on Tumblr. 

For those of you viewing this portfolio feed on Tumblr:

Tumblr seems to be experiencing some big bugs with regards to pagination and backdated posts. There are just shy of 30 portfolio entries, only 15 of which on the first page (and even those aren’t necessarily the newest). Please see page 2 for additional entries until I’ve got this resolved.

MattLeiker.com, v4.0

Retired January 2012, you were simple, clean, and served me well. But you weren’t very easy to update and had no dynamic qualities. Shame on you. Rest in peace.

View the archived version. (My apologies in advance for any broken links.)

ABC News

Voce Communications; launched August 2011

ABC News was interested in moving all of their channel-level blogs to WordPress. They needed an enterprise-grade, dependable solution to incorporate their new designs, as well as simplify their publishing process. As the political season was just heating up, it all needed a carefully choreographed late-night switchover so as to minimize the disruption. Voce worked in coordination with ABC News’ design department, sales team, support staff, and QA groups to make the migration and switchover possible.

project management, on-site client meetings & presentations

Disney Properties Newsroom Network

Voce Communications; rolling launches began June 2011

One of the loftiest and most challenging projects during my time at Voce was the task of creating a unified, simple, and powerful Newsroom platform that could be utilized and customized by all the Disney Parks news properties. The project serviced the public relations and public affairs departments for Disney Parks, Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, Disney Sports, Disney Vacation Club, and Adventures by Disney.

This long-term project required collecting a set of unified requirements from numerous stakeholders and a changing team of corporate representatives. It required interfacing Disney’s legal teams, incorporating various rounds of feedback and approvals. It also demanded that we leapfrog Disney’s internal IT department, while satisfying audit requests. The Newsroom project also required designing a template-based system that could be adjusted and customized to each newsroom’s individual brands and needs. As the project neared launch, it necessitated that I create a dynamic digital set of training tutorials that could be continuously updated as we added and refined features. Ensuring that all the Disney stakeholders understood the new system and the intricacies of the custom elements we created especially for their needs, I visited the various teams on both coasts, performing presentations and training sessions. 

• http://wdwnews.com
• http://disneylandnews.com
• http://dclnews.com
• http://disneysportsnews.com

account management, primary client contact, project management, drafted & maintained SOWs, created product requirements documents, rough UX/design mocks, content migration, initial template & site setups, development QA, post-launch support, on-site client meetings & presentations, authored extensive tutorials, conducted on-site training

ESPN Front Row

Voce Communications; launched April 2011, upkeep through 2012

Lifting language from my announcement post on Voce’s blog:

The Voce Connect Platforms team is pleased to announce the launch of ESPNFrontRow.com, a WordPress-based corporate platform for ESPN’s communications department to offer “news about ESPN, employees at ESPN and behind-the-scenes activity at the sports media empire”, as Technorati aptly put it. Mike Soltys, ESPN’s vice president of communications, was quoted earlier in SportsBusiness Daily saying, “This is a way for us to speak directly with consumers.”

Seeing the incredible success of the work we’d done on the Disney Parks Blog, ESPN was eager and excited to finally have an official platform on which they could respond to issues, promote events, and give fans the behind-the-scenes look that they crave. We helped give them a simple and manageable set of tools to tell their tales. It also doesn’t hurt that the site is mantastically sexy.

account management, primary client contact, project management, on-site client meetings & presentations, drafted SOW, created business / product requirements documents, development QA, post-launch support

∂isney Creative Lab

Voce Communications; launched Jan. 2011, ongoing support/updates throughout year

The Creative Lab is an internal brainstorming and “cool sharing” site that allows cast members the opportunity to share “buzz” with the Imagineering team, executives, and peers. This could include internet memes, humorous YouTube videos, or outlandish images. Employees can then create an “idea” from a buzz by sharing a suggestion or concept as to how it could be similarly actioned or modified by the company. Fellow users can comment, vote up their favorites, and engage in discussions around ideas and concepts.

Similar to sharing a link on Facebook, the system would automatically grab text and images from a link to a website or video. Ideas and buzz could be sorted by a popularity metric. Users could even be ranked against each other by an engagement metric. The Lab also featured some great editorial tools for idea generation such as a homepage carousel, blog, a moderated Brainstorm area, bookmarklet, and a live feed of activity across the site that could be monitored. It even further integrated with various systems by incorporating hooks into the company authentication system and internal share tools. 

primary client contact, project management, drafted & maintained SOWs, created product & technical requirements documents, development QA, post-launch support, on-site client meetings & presentations

eBay Ink Blog

Voce Communications; ongoing 2010/2011

eBay Ink is the corporate mouthpiece for eBay as told through Richard Brewer-Hay. It showcases major corporate news, public appearances and presentations, featured sellers, and other various eBay-related tidbits. The site features a custom mobile presentation, heavily-integrated twitter components, and a beautifully polished design.

Originally designed and developed by Voce’s Platforms team, I was charged with maintaining feature requests, bug fixes, and support for Voce’s Social Media Marketing / PR teams.

primary client contact, project management, on-site support, development QA, rough UX mocks

National Center for Family Literacy’s Wonderopolis.org

Voce Communications; launched Oct. 2010, ongoing support/updates through 2011

Voted one of Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2011, Wonderopolis — “Where the wonders never cease!” — is a site targeted at families, teachers, and children to promote reading and learning in their daily lives. Funded by Verizon Foundation and created by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), the site’s main draw is the Wonder of the Day post. Be sure to check out one of my favorite posts, featuring Emmy-winning writer and co-executive producer of The Simpsons, Michael Price: “Wonder #205: How Do You Write a TV Script?”. (The site also won awards from places of which I’ve never heard. Snazzy.)

Working in collaboration with the creative geniuses (and all-around awesome people) at Brains on Fire, Voce turned the delicious design pixels and Wonderopolis concept into web reality. Launched in Fall 2010 and ongoing through my time at Voce, this project was a personal favorite and especially rewarding partnership with the wonder-full ladies at NCFL. Beyond simply bringing the site to life and supporting ongoing new features and endeavors, we spent many occasions strategizing and planning the roadmap and future of Wonderopolis. I was also involved in executive discussions and negotiations with their funder, Verizon.

account management, primary client contact, strategic executive advisement, project management, drafted & maintained SOWs, created product requirements documents, development QA, post-launch support, on-site client meetings & presentations, mobile theme / iOS / Android app planning

The Pioneer Woman

Voce Communications; site redesign launched July 2010, updates through year end

One of my favorite examples of a self-made blogger (empire?), The Pioneer Woman blog — arguably better titled a ‘portal’ — showcases Ree Drummond’s life on the ranch. Her incredibly regular reporting spans the gamut from her personal life, cooking, photography, home & garden, and even tales of homeschooling her kids. She has a rabid avid fan base, where any one of her weekly KitchenAid Mixer or iPad giveaways will garner tens of thousands of comments, often in the course of a few minutes. (It’s a constant headache for our SysAdmin to keep her giveaways from melting servers or imploding WordPress.)

As one of the team’s hands-down favorite and most consistent clients over the years, we’ve been incredibly proud to watch Ree’s self-made success grow into her second (sure to be) best-selling cookbook and an amazing new show on The Food Network. (Yes, she really is as genuine and sweet as she seems.) Just read a few of her posts. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll be back (well, after about 40 minutes disappear into thin air).

The 2010 major redesign was one of my first projects when I officially joined the Voce team. The design was (mostly) approved and it needed to be executed. As Ree was a seasoned blogger and WordPress extraordinaire, we took the opportunity to leverage the automated and hierarchical goodies that WP has to offer, creating some simple automated “super widgets” that automatically display content from different areas, categories, time periods, or tags. We made the archives and category pages easier to browse. Her luscious photos are now featured even bigger (and more automated for her Flickr process). Check out Ree’s “new blog” announcement post for more information (she even thanks us all by name halfway through).

project management, created requirements documents, development QA, post-launch support, authored tutorials

CBS Radio Interactive Music Group

RocketFuel, Inc.; 2009-2010

Under the strategic leadership of RocketFuel, Inc. and with a variety of partner vendors, we created a WordPress-based content bureau delivery engine and ecosystem of interconnected websites of 100+ radio stations across the US for CBS Radio Interactive Music Group (CBSiMG). This large-scale project spanned the course of 3 major phases over 2009 and 2010:

Phase 1: discovery, comparative analysis, requirements, strategy, schedule, vendors secured
Phase 2: content & programming plans, sales materials, org chart & job descriptions, marketing strategy, system design
Phase 3: finalized build, testing, training, launch rollout

KROQ.com was the first station to go live, with the remaining stations launching on a 2-week cycle throughout 2009 and early 2010. Additionally, we defined the vision for the Radio.com syndicated content portal to sit above the different genre and geographic categories of station sites. In one year the system doubled UVs and quintupled PVs / ad impressions.

Acting as both lead project manager and product manager, I tracked timelines and dependencies, managed scope, drove client decisions and development progress, defined deliverables and project requirements (PRDs), as well as managed eight distinct vendors. I also standardized and facilitated the rollout, content migration, and staff training (via nationwide training tour) of the station sites.

Examples of materials I created:

• Ownership of Master Project Requirements doc
• Executive presentation materials: sample 1, sample 2, sample 3, sample 4
• Defined suite of storytelling modules for publishing tools
• Extensive interactive training tutorials

Sample sites:

• KROQ (LA)
• Fresh 102.7 (NY)
• Kiss951 (Charlotte)
• AMP Radio (LA)
• 93•XRT (Chicago)
• B96 (Chicago)
• Radio.com

project management, product management, created business / product requirements documents, publishing strategy, development QA, post-launch support, on-site client meetings & presentations, led on-site training across US, authored robust training site documentation

National Hockey League’s NHL.com

RocketFuel, Inc.; launched September 2008

Nominated for a Webby Award (for whatever that’s worth), our work on the NHL.com redesign is still in production, faithfully serving a slew of hockey fanatics. RocketFuel was brought in to rethink the NHL web experience, improve the editorial toolsets for the newsroom, as well as increase sales and analytics opportunities throughout the site. We worked in partnership with vendors such as AKQA (design), CISCO, and NeuLion.

As my first major project with RocketFuel, I was quickly thrown into the pool. Working mostly on-site with the NHL internal staff I led the project management efforts for the redesign during its six month gestation period. Beyond typical PjM duties of timeline tracking, deliverables management, and constant dev task prioritization, I also produced product comparative analyses, evaluating potential integration partners on various offerings. I also worked on the team site and social network integrations, as well as on content and partner relationships for NHL’s mobile offering in the US and Canada.

Examples of materials I created:

• CMS editorial module requirements
• Executive presentation materials: sample 1, sample 2, sample 3, sample 4
• Rough UX mocks to illustrate requirements
• Flow diagrams

project management, technical liaison to analytics lead, assisted mobile partner integrations, development QA, post-launch support, on-site client meetings & presentations

Absolut / Live Earth Short Film Series

Great Works, America; Winter/Spring 2008

From the release:

Sponsored by ABSOLUT Vodka, the Live Earth Short Film Series – which debuted in July 2007 – will tour major film festivals in 2008 throughout the U.S. to generate a legacy of inspiration that will further underscore the need to act now.

To illustrate what an ABSOLUT World would look like, we harnessed some of the world’s most creative minds to create our Short Film Series to inform and inspire people across the globe to help solve the climate crisis. Partnered with Live Earth, we’ve created an experience where you can view these films in the digital ways which you’re most accustomed. Launching one film per week, all on the subject of climate change, and ranging from factual and dramatic to fictional and comedic, these films are directed by many of the industry’s most prominent filmmakers. 

As the digital lead for this project, I developed the overall concept, execution plan, created the technical requirements, as well as hired and managed the necessary contractors. Utilizing the WordPress platform as the editorial foundation for this weekly series, I tracked traffic stats through Feedburner, YouTube and Google Analytics. In a time before the value of YouTube had really caught on with corporate America, I urged Absolut to republish the 30 winning Live Earth short films on their own branded YouTube channel. Users could subscribe to the microsite, YouTube channel or even an iTunes podcast. I managed the designers, developers, copywriters and client approvals from Absolut and partner Live Earth.

I’m especially proud of this wacky job posting that landed me some wonderful talent for the WordPress development and maintenance.

project management, microsite publishing, drafted SOW & scope documents, on-site client meetings & presentations (east+west coast), managed development vendors in US & Sweden, contractor acquisition and management

AOL’s AIM Pages Social Network

AOL; 2006-2007

Considered an evolution of “the first ever social network” — AOL’s Member Directory —AIM Pages was more than just a social network tied to your AIM Buddy List. While only AOL employees really considered Member Directory the first social network, it was clear that AOL was a bit behind the curve to only just be considering investing in the social networking space in 2005/2006. (Remember that Friendster was on its last breath, Facebook was still private-ish, and MySpace was king.)

Weighing in on the AIM Pages team’s efforts from the perspective of my position with AOL Music, I was young and opinionated and of the impression that the great majority of executives working on the project hadn’t really even used MySpace, Friendster or Facebook the same way teens and college students had. Frustrated with what I was seeing, I eventually shot a 4 page “Matt’s Guide to What AIM Pages Should Be” document off to a listserv. Not twenty minutes later, I got a call from the head of Product Management, asking if I’ve ever heard of it. I hadn’t. Thus began my career as a Product Manager.

Tasked with the typical duties of a ProdM, I managed the product requirements, task tracking, bugs, UX/UI development, and overall progress of pieces or subcomponents of the overall initiative. I was responsible for Search, friends component (Buddy Gallery), the Buddy Feed (an early response to Facebook’s News Feed), settings pages, privacy and rostering, and the media modules. Working with operations, marketing, programming, legal, advertising, and corporate communications, I gathered feedback from various executive stakeholders as well as integrated focus group and user testing feedback. As one of the more rewarding aspects, I managed teams of developers in the US, Ireland, and Bangalore, getting to visit them regularly. I also travelled to train and support AOL’s various help desks and call centers.

AIM Pages featured a robust AJAX drag-and-drop modular publishing system, intending to grant publishing freedom to users stuck with a typical form-field layout like MySpace and Facebook. While ultimately a bit too ambitious (read: buggy) for a first- or second-iteration product on such a massive scale, AIM Pages was eventually abandoned and profiles were migrated to AOL’s costly 2008 acquisition, Bebo. I think mine even still exists there in some Frankenstein form.

Press:

• Mashable
• ReadWriteWeb
• TechCrunch

product manager, managed international dev teams (US, Ireland, India), focus groups & user testing

multiplidentity: iterations of self
senior thesis project, 2005

From the original release:

Visual Studies senior Matt Leiker explores the interaction of identity and self through creative repetition and duplication. His artwork is a realistic digital manipulation touching on the themes of multiple personalities, self-projection and interaction, the nocturnal self, mindless clones, homoeroticism, imaginary friends, schizophrenia, personal space, and anything else you can read into it. He exploits these interactions to comment on society & social acceptability, identity, industry, relationships, personal space, fantasy and reality.

All of these images were originally displayed as a digital composite on photo paper (~54” by 36”). They required a painstaking rotoscopic process performed in photoshop, as well as the addition of some deft shading and shadows for realism.

Check out the archived microsite. Curious how I made it? Peer behind-the-scenes if you dare.

The Art of Film & TV Title Design by PBS’ Off Book.

I was tipped-off to a great digital series PBS creates called ‘Off Book’ by @tjlull. The Title Design video above hooked me (who doesn’t love a good opening title sequence?). Like I did, you’ll end up watching most of their other videos, too.

A few great ones:

• The Impact of Kickstarter, Creative Commons & Creators Project
• Lego Art
• Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium

Have some time to kill? Check out my YouTube faves feed (see also Vimeo, Netflix, Ted Talks, etc.).

I think I’m going to make this my avatar everywhere and freak everyone out.

Either garden beer pong or giving the tomatoes a bigger home. You decide.

Building things with power tools. Obviously very manly-like.

The Difference Between UX and UI: Subtleties Explained in Cereal (design.org)

Ever met someone who uses UX and UI interchangeably? Ed Lea created this photographic infographic to visually define the differences between user experience and user interface design and how they relate to a product.

Sam Sparro at Highline Ballroom.

Saturday Brooklyn Afternoon.

There’s a few things interesting about this, but specifically:
- the acknowledgement of the increasing trend for riders with tablets—mostly iPads—that we’ve all noticed over the last year or so.
- the choice to display white headphones instantly signals ubiquitous ‘Apple product’ to viewers (well-played, Apple).

Client meetings at Crayola in Easton, PA. Seeing how the little waxies are made.

Sun is shining and the windows are open wide. Live jazz from Bar Tabac and a cool breeze blowing through. This is a Sunday.

“

And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.

Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

skylor:

#whitepeople

Yes.

Pretty cool timeline + Google Image mashup for any search term over any period of time.

She’s got my taste in sockery. (Taken with instagram)

Basically two of the most adorable things I know. (Taken with instagram)

Great NYC apartment rental infographic via NakedApartments.

I think the print ads are kinda sexy.

An Axe fragrance for men and women? Supported by an Axe campaign that isn’t aggressively, compulsively misogynistic? The world must be coming to an end.

In fact, that’s exactly what seems to be happening in Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s launch spot for Axe Anarchy, the first fragrance in the brand’s history with a version for ladies as well as dudes. Axe has long been known, and relentlessly bashed, for “giving men the edge in the mating game” (their words)—which in the advertising has always meant portraying women as brainless, sex-driven fools unable to resist throwing themselves at the Axe-using men in their midst. The introduction of a women’s fragrance levels the playing field, and lets BBH finally portray both sexes as sex-crazed imbeciles, free to objectify each other equally in willfully mutual attraction—in what turns out to be the most absurdly romantic campaign Axe has ever produced.

via Adweek

Here’s the video spot:

Smart use of Tumblr to showcase users’ creations to encourage uptake and growth. Their promo video is especially gorgeous, too.

9-bits:

madewithpaper:

Shinbashi Dori

Paper is the hot new drawing app for the iPad, and with good reason. The app features an elegant, minimal interface, gorgeous transitions, and intuitive gestures throughout. For me, the app also hits the perfect balance between simplicity and power: While it doesn’t feature the multitude of drawing tools/options that apps like Sketchbook Pro have, it offers much more than “simple” sketching apps like Penultimate. As you can see from the sketch above, the limited toolset is still quite capable of creating beautiful sketches.

The app is free to download and try, but comes with limited drawing tools. Each extra tool is $1.99 via an in-app purchase, or you can buy them all for $6.99. Interestingly, you can also try each too, in-app, before making a purchase.

You should also check out their Tumblog, where they have been posting sketches from users, showing everything from artistic sketches to application wireframes.