Stephen Carr » My work
Newsmaker
2006
Newsmaker is a Learnthings product used by teachers and students to produce school newspapers. It helps young students structure and publish their work.
Again orking with The Guardian Learnthings I designed and developed this Flash based presentation which is used to illustrate how the Newsmaker product is used. The presentation is mainly aimed at motivating young students, inspiring them to become reporters, editors or picture researchers. The presentation uses a mixture of standard Flash animation, FLV video streaming and basic ActionScripting. The presentation was very much a hit and was rolled out nationwide on local installs of the Newsmaker software.
G&T Wise
2006
G&T Wise is a portal for teachers looking to help enable their Gifted and Talented students.
Working with The Guardian Learnthings I helped develop a simple re-design of the existing G&T Wise site. The scope of this project was very straightforward, in a short timeframe I needed to supply several look and feels based on the clients input. The designs I developed were well received by the client and implemented very quickly and easily.
RMG Connect, London
2006
RMG Connect is the vibrant online studio for JWT Advertising. The work at RMG was mainly producing rich media campaigns for blue chip companies such as Shell, HSBC and Vodafone. During my time at RMG I worked on multiple campaigns, the work was fast paced and demanded high quality.
Working for big clients is always exciting and RMG gave me the opportunity to work with some of the best. The clients were always very impressed with the treatments I developed and my ads were seen all over the internet.
ACD Systems, Canada
2005
ACD Systems, based on Vancouver Island, BC, is a highly regarded small software house focusing mainly on their successful ACDSee photo catalog and manipulation software. My role at ACD was to work alongside the existing design and development team to produce a dozen HTML galleries for their upcoming ACDSee Pro Photomanager software.
My experience with ACD was hugely rewarding. Using only XHTML, CSS and small amounts of javascript I produced flexible templates to suit the needs of a pro photographer who wants to quickly put his/her work on the web.
The challenge with the templates was in making them adaptable to the various data that would be thrown at them by the average user. I had to accommodate different thumbnail sizes, photo orientation, various fields of photo related meta data, all this and make the template standards compliant and look good enough for a professional to put on his/her website.
ACD Systems were very happy with how I worked with their team. They found that my natural understanding of how both design and development need to be pluggable made the project run smoothly. Ultimately I delivered on time to specification and the software made its debut in Q4 2005.
Creo, Canada
2005
Creo is one of the largest businesses in BC, they supply a variety of technologies and consumables to the packaging and printing industry. My role at Creo was to help them develop a series of tools to help educate their customers in how to use their new online ordering and stock management tools.
I produced a flat HTML version of their online store that sales could present to customers without the customer having an actual online account. The demo had many restrictions, we had to make something that would run from any sales person's laptop and it had to run offline as many of the sales people would not have an internet connection while presenting.
The other part of the job was to make a short Flash presentation that would encourage existing customers to start using the online ordering instead of the traditional methods. I story boarded, art worked and animated this in a limited time frame.
Creo was very happy with both of the projects, I excelled their expectations and the feedback was very enthusiastic. The animation will be shown at various trade shows on large projections screens. The HTML tool is being distributed throughout the Creo sales team.
Slow Shirts V3
2005
Slow Loris Shirts is an ongoing project, this is the 3rd release of this site and the 2nd that I have been involved with. The new site is pure XHTML and CSS using a 3rd party PHP driven CMS to handle the stock and numerous pages.
It was important to me to bring this t-shirt website up to web standards compliance and to give it a fresh new look which users would find eay to interact with.
Future Shop / Best Buy, Canada
2004/5
I spent several months working for this electronics giant at their head quarters in Burnaby BC. I produced numerous microsites and a large amount of their Christmas MSN/Yahoo! banner campaigns.
I was responsible for managing my own projects, proofing layouts and testing code before it was pushed to the live servers.
Basic Skills Agency, London
2004
Working with Concise Group in London I produced a series of concept mockups for the Basic Skills Agency's (BSA) Welsh language web site. The BSA requires all its content to be fully accessible and web standards compliant.
The thinking behind these concepts was to provide a bold front end that would be easily navigable - I chose tabbed top level navigation and a crumb-trail along with a prominent search bar so the user is never lost.
Basic Skills Agency, London
2004
Again, working with Concise Group and The Basic Skills Agency I developed this front end interface for their Knowledge Management System (KMS). The information in the KMS is for both staff and members who subscribe to BSA, it is part of their extranet.
Again the site needed to be accessible and web standards compliant. The design relies highly on CSS for layout, this allows the information to easily be reformatted, and if need be all non-structural information stripped from the layout. This is great for screen readers and quick reformatting of information.
The "Comic Sans" font was a stipulation of the client. Ban Comic Sans.
British Red Cross, London
2004
The Red Cross wanted to give their rather stagnant UK site a makeover. They asked us to come up with concepts that would use the current data schema but display the data in a more useful way.
The brief was quite tight but I came up with several solutions that made the site much easier to navigate and generally present the information in a more accessible, intelligent way.
Welsh Development Agency, London
2004
Working with Concise in London I produced this Flash based CD Rom for the Welsh Development Agency. The CD-Rom has numerous sections, including a game, providing basic information to anyone who wants to know more about life in Wales.
After a long time in production the CD Rom was eventually printed up and successfully distributed.
British Petroleum, London
2003
Working with Concise in London I produced part of this Flash/Director based CD Rom for the BP.
BP needed a tool to build dynamic presentations with, the end goal being to project custom designed presentations in meetings, explaining how they work, what they do etc. I translated endless Powerpoint maps into a coherent set of BP styled maps and case study notes, the Flash held all this together as a navigable widget embedded in the Director application.
Hewlett Packard, London
2003
Working with Modem Media in London I produced this Flash concept tile for HP to increase brand awareness. This was a short one day project which was fun to work on.
Slowshirts.com
2002
I built this blog/shop/portfolio mish-mash site for a friend of mine who lives in the USA. It uses a mix of flat HTML, Flash and ASP, much of the software it runs on is 3rd party open source. I designed and built the site to be in keeping with Jessica's style and way of working. It is ecelectic and patchy but it works.
CW360.com, London
2002
I worked alongside the senior designer on this re-branding of the ComputerWeekly website. My role was to support the senior designer and provide mockups, concepts and implement HTML code. The end result was a vast improvement on the previous site and well received.
