Earlier this year, I started making applications to diversify projects and gain some momentum. Soon after, I discovered that my regular resume just wouldn’t cut it. I felt that I had to pep it up so it’s noticed.

Given my background in architecture and diverse skills, it was diffcult to translate that into visuals. It was clear that I had to make separate timelines for academic and professional milestones, since they overlapped. A joint timeline would be just too much noise.

Here are a couple of first drafts:

Once I had the timeline figured out, the geography needed to be worked in. That’s where the vertical staggering came into picture. I assigned red tones for professional milestones and green tones with academic. Blue toned milestones are internships, so contrast to both (professional/academic).

Other information like interests and key skills had to be worked in since it helps understand what my primary skills are, without having to go through a list of 20 skills. Here’s the resume mini-site for the final product. I intend to revisit this sometime around mid-2011, based on new projects and feedback on this infographic.

Inspirations: Michael Anderson’s resume, Stephen Gates’ resume

Communities Standing Together is a coalition of educators, clergy, civic, labor, and other leaders, working to denounce a slew of smear campaigns, factual distortions, and ugly attacks on various community organizations for social and economic justice.

They came to me a day before their site launch and press release date. Work began with purchasing a domain name. We breezed through logo options, sketched site wireframes, and pulling together the FTP information. The content was streamlined to two minimalist pages and published. From sketch to site in a mind-blowing 8 hours. Here’s their website.

ONStor decided to give their website a retake. The home page had gotten cluttered and their primary need was to edit content on the fly, which the Mentorware CMS provided with very sophisticatedly. The basic branding and site layout remained the same on the home page. The inner pages underwent a major restructuring with most of them now having a structured right hand side as well as left hand side column. The right hand column provided with a convenient associated file download for each inner page.

The first thumbnail gives a brief insight to what the website looked like before we redesigned it. The thumbnails below give different looks the home page has hosted. Eventually, these images were all condensed into one Flash clip that rotated marketing messages. Other marketing collateral included newsletters and e-mail campaigns. Catch the real-thing at onstor.com

Edit: July 31, 2009 – ONStor was acquired by LSI Technologies. Here’s an updated take-a-bow-styled image that ONStor now boasts on the home page. The website might get dissolved into the LSI brand, in which case I’ll post entire-page screenshots.

ChangeUp: LA is an intense, community event with the goal of making great strides toward improving the effectiveness of five non-profit organizations.
In one weekend, a few dozen design, marketing, and web professionals meet with representatives from organizations. The organizations present their design challenges (a new brochure, updated branding, a website refresh, etc.) and the participants form groups and work to complete projects… all by the end of a weekend!

North East Trees (NET) is a community-based nonprofit organization. The founder, Mr. Wilson’s pledge to plant a tree a day for the rest of his life, and his parallel commitment to helping local youth find meaningful employment in the green industry, have resulted in a non-profit organization delivering effective training and environmental restoration programs to under served communities in the Greater Los Angeles Area.

A combined effort by Jay Stakelon, Joshua Jabbour, Liz Hale, Rob Gale, Sarah Kalbeitzer, Saurabh Dutta, and me. After (the almost neverending) discussions, designers went to their drawing boards (or Photoshop windows, in this case) and created one mock each within an hour and a half. At the end of the 2 hours, we had 4 very unique mocks. Here’s a quick rundown on the four options, in no specific order.

High-fives and cheers followed. Four mocks in 2 hours! We picked the best from each of the prototypes and went headstrong into development. Photoshop windows closed and each one of us sprung up our own fancy coding tools. It was indeed an enriching and satisfying experience. Goes without saying that I got to work with some very bright minds and talented skills. Here’s the final website mocks. You can always just visit the site and get the complete experience.

Virident started up in 2006 and their website was (and probably still is) in it’s juvenile states. However, they needed to boost their image and make their website scalable to accomodate a lot more information. This involved moving to a 960-pixels-wide layout, using a robust CMS (the Mentorware proprietary CMS in this case) and simplifying their existing content. A resource library was added to further structure the site.

The project run featured an exciting design review where I was given creative freedom to do what I felt right with the home page. Four options were given (click thru the thumbnails below) and the final mock-up was a mix and match of these options.

The Virident website was deployed about the same time as the ONStor website making these few weeks with 12 to 15 hour days. Left me with a huge sigh of relief and more grateful for the consequent weekends thereafter. Catch the real thing at virident.com.