WalkPittsburgh.org is a project of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, Oakland Transportation Management Association and the Airport Corridor Transportation Association. The goal of the project is to promote walking as an alternative commuting method in Pittsburgh. In addition to the website, I designed a pedometer mobile app that will allow people to track steps and report walking metrics back to the website.
PizzaRev is a California-based fast-casual pizza restaurant. Basically Chipotle for pizza. After their initial store proved to be a great success, PizzaRev prepared for expansion with a new website, and a new brand identity provided by Vance Wright Adams. People loved sharing their pizza creations on Instagram, so we turned that into a feature of the website.
The Directory of Design and Marketing was an application I built with a friend as an attempt to make some fast cash selling SEO to marketing agencies. This project taught us a valuable lesson, just because you build it, doesn’t mean anyone will come. In other words, customer acquisition was much more difficult than anticipated!
During my time at the Penn Hills CDC, we operated the Penn Hebron Garden Club, using it as a home-base and also managing rentals. I built a quick and easy website for the club to support events and rentals.
One of the more memorable projects in my career was building two trade show attractions for mining safety company, Jennmar. Jennmar needed unique ideas to bring people into their booth, and our solution was to build a custom Dig Dug arcade game branded with JennMar logos and slogans along with a slots machine kiosk with custom icons on the spinners. The slots game had a USB button that when pressed, would trigger a jackpot for a valued client. It was a project that got me out of the office and assembling arcade cabinets in a warehouse.
I spent two years with the Penn Hills Community Development Corporation between 2012 and 2013. During that time I created a new logo and brand for the organization, a new website, and many print materials. As chair of the communications committee, I published a bi-weekly email newsletter and performed outreach via social media. I even spent some time as a board member.
Scioto Downs was the first responsive website I created. Launched in early 2012, we were way ahead of the curve in the web design industry! This project ran far over budget, but it was for a casino – a simple tweak of a slot machine would pay for any overage!
Caveman Fuel was a company that sold paleo diet approved products such as beef jerky and coffee creamer. I think the plan was to expand the brand into a wide range of products, but despite a killer logo and brand designed by Gino at VWA, it never really sold a lot of product. It was a very high-end product and pretty pricy for beef jerky.
They say the hardest website to build is your own. And that was absolutely the case for Vance Wright Adams. After numerous design concepts, and even a possible rebranding of the company – we, in the end, produced a professional website indicative of the work we created at VWA. Even if it wasn’t blue.
As a hockey player, I was pretty excited about this project. Synthetic ice could allow ice hockey players to skate in more rinks, any time of year, indoor or outdoor. I designed a site that reflected the colors and textures of a hockey rink, with bold calls-to-action for pricing and contact cues. And I did get to skate on it several times at demos for my client, which was a lot of fun.