Digest
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Sometime in 2017, my wife and I shut down MINKY to work on an idea that had been nagging us for years: Digest. My wife, the CEO, worked on the back-end—some 20 AWS services tied together to provide blazing-fast feeds. I built on the front-end: a Swift and Obj-C app that tried to keep up with the blazing-fast feeds. We designed every aspect of Digest together: from its social architecture to its interface. Like many things, Digest stalled after a successful private beta due to the COVID pandemic. Something tells us that it may still make a comeback one day. Until then, it’ll continue to live in an AWS data center.
momhascovid.com
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On April 19, 2021, my mom contracted COVID-19 in Pune, India. My family helped her beat it alone, at home. On this site we share everything we learned caring for her from across the world in the U.S.: from our high-level approach to our virtual patient chart to her blood test results.
Microsoft Docs v1
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MINKY was hired by Microsoft to create a unified, cross-platform, cross-device documentation and content system for the company. The project involved working with various internal teams to understand the company’s diverse documentation needs and deliver something that could fully replace hundreds of homegrown systems hosting tens of millions of pages, including MSDN. We collaborated with Jeff Sandquist to design, code, and pilot Microsoft Docs v1 for a handful of products. Today, Docs is Microsoft’s defacto home for documentation and learning resources.
Microsoft Build '13
MINKY served as the creative agency for the Build 2013 conference. This included overseeing and producing everything from content and online strategy to signage and printed material.
Microsoft Build '12
I served as the Experience Director for Build 2012, and was responsible for the all-up conference experience: everything from keynote to collateral. In collaboration with Paravel, Inc. we were able to sell Build out in 53 minutes (beating the prior record by 5 weeks).
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Microsoft.com Home Page
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I advocated for Microsoft.com to go responsive, and then served as the advisor for the redesign process once the project was greenlit. The redesign was a hit with the press, customers, and the web community alike, and often cited at the time as setting the bar for modern, corporate web design (even apple.com was not responsive then). The Story of the New Microsoft.com, the backstory of the redesign that I published on my blog, made it to the Hacker News podium (and almost brought down my site at the time). In subsequent years most of Microsoft’s web properties adopted responsive design as a part of their web strategy.
MoreThe Story of the New Microsoft.com Paravel, Inc.’s Case Study CSS Squirrel Feature (squeee!)
The <picture/> Element
<picture/> Element
Championed the <picture/> element proposal within Microsoft. The specification was cowritten by Mat Marquis and Adrian Bateman, making the Responsive Images Community Group the first W3C CG to get major traction for an element proposal.
Rainypixels Letterpress Cards
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My first attempt at hand-illustrated letterpress business cards. I just like them, OK.
Grid-Positioning Module
Commissioned Aaron Gustafson to create a cross-browser implementation of the Grid Positioning Module as an eCSStender plugin. The module helped the Grid specification gain traction.
10K Apart: Responsive Edition
Led the launch, creative, and execution of the second 10K Apart contest in partnership with Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer. The 10K Apart site, designed in partnership with Paravel, Inc., marked the first responsive site from Microsoft.
Lost World’s Fairs
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Commissioned Jason Santa Maria to run with this typographic expoloration. The original idea I commissioned was to present poetry with glorious web type. He volleyed with a whimsical tweak to the subject matter. Sold! An all-star team consisting of Frank Chimero, Naz Hamid, Trent Walton, and Dave Rupert breathed life into the concept. The project was tweeted over 20,000 times in a week, and became an inflection point in demonstrating the power of web typography.
10K Apart
Cofounded the 10K Apart contest in partnership with Joshua Allen, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Eric Meyer. Matt Brown and Tiffani Jones worked with us to build a gorgeous site. The contest was a hit with the web community. Over 350 entries were submitted in less than a month, it was tweeted over 20,000 times, but most importantly, got web developers to look at Internet Explorer in a new light.
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Archived siteMy post on MIX OnlineJeffrey Zeldman’s post
Bill Buxton’s MIX10 Closing Keynote Address
I helped write and choreograph Bill Buxton’s closing keynote address at MIX10 to an audience of 2500 people (and tens of thousands more online). Bill was the highest rated keynote speaker at MIX10 (but that was probably mostly thanks to Bill being Bill).
A Website Named Desire
What does it take to get a web site off the ground? A Website Named Desire, a poster Erik Saltwell and I conceptualized, answers that question. I served as Creative Director, and the talented Jason Robards at XPlane produced it. We originally printed a thousand to give away at a conference. They were such a big hit that we had to do a few more print runs—the final count was somewhere around 20,000 (sans the hundred or so that are still sitting in my garage).
MIX Online 2.0
I led the redesign of MIX Online. The team included Matt Brown and Tiffani Jones, Evan Sharp (who went on to cofound Pinterest), and members of the MIX Online team. It won “Best of 2009” on the now discontinued Paul Scrivens' Drawar CSS Showcase, beating over 1500 sites from some of the best known designers and design agencies at the time (including IDEO).
Channel 9 Redesign
I led the redesign of Channel 9, Microsoft’s most vibrant developer community hosting thousands of hours of video content. It was the first redesign of the site ever, and required navigating a complicated web of internal politics, and a very opinionated and vocal community. The team included Nick Finck, the principal of Blue Flavor at the time, Kevin Tamura, Matt Brown, and members of the Channel 9 engineering team.
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MIX09 Keynote Addresses
I helped write and choreograph Bill Buxton’s opening keynote address at MIX09. I also championed a closing keynote address by Deborah Adler, the designer who revolutionized the prescription pill bottle. They ended up being the highest rated talks at MIX09, and helped steer Microsoft’s standing with the design community in a positive direction for the first time in many years.
MIX Online
I cofounded MIX Online: a community for web designers and web developers. Over the next three years, the site grew to become Microsoft’s unofficial web professional community, helped shape the MIX conference, contributed hundreds of articles and open source projects to the world, and put Microsoft on the design and web community map for the first time since IE6.
Artists in Residence
Cofounded and ran a program known as Artists in Residence (AIR). Its goal was to train the world’s top design agencies in Silverlight and Expression. Close to 300 designers and developers from around 100 agencies passed through the program.
Kindle Direct Publishing v1
I served as the Lead Program Manager for Kindle Direct Publishing, a service that helps authors publish their books directly on the Kindle Store. I was responsible for its user experience and launch.
Amazon Instant Video
I served as the Lead Program Manager for Amazon’s 35th product category: Instant Video (now known as Prime Video). My role involved driving all aspects of the product: user experience, feature prioritization, schedule, management of cross-team dependencies, testing, etc. I cut my teeth on this project learning both, how to build (and also not build) products, but also how integral people, communication, and process are to delivering anything. Close to 100% of our team quit after launch but I suspect we all look back at those then-intense days and nights as defining the rest of our careers.
SIGGRAPH 2005 Web Program Chair
After fulfilling several SIGGRAPH jury and committee positions, I was invited to create and chair the SIGGRAPH 2005’s Web Graphics Program. The program introduded web graphics to the SIGGRAPH conference through a diverse prgram that included folks like Casey Raes and Ze Frank. 2005 was a uniquely special year for the week-long, 40K attendee conference as it featured a rare keynote address by George Lucas (whose hand I got to shake).
MoreArchived site
Coauthored Flash MX: Advanced Actionscript
A research assistantship turned writing job for my mentor and professor, James Mohler, I ended up writing half of this book in the summer of my Junior year. The book was used as the textbook for a class I had to take the subsequent semester. I was awarded credit for serving as lecturer and teaching the class instead of taking it.
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