David Kaloyanides, certified specialist in criminal law and defender of alleged federal criminals, is one of the most badass people I’ve ever met. When I did meet him, however, his website just didn’t do him justice. We fixed that.

I worked with him to design and build a site that would effectively display his record, his approach, and perhaps most importantly, his commanding personality.

Check out the live site at federalcrimesdefender.com.

I am so proud of this project. When the video production company Enjoy Human decided they wanted to radically revamp their site for 2010, we sat down together and planned everything out thoroughly. They knew they wanted something sleek, clean, and designed for widescreen monitors. But beyond that, they didn’t get too hung up on the trivial aesthetics like a lot of clients do (“Can we get the icons in cornflower blue?”), and instead focused on how to effectively present their impressive body of work. There were no last minute direction changes, no jumping from a horse to an elephant in mid-stride so to speak. The clear focus of all parties resulted in a clean, intuitively usable design, and some of the most beautifully efficient code I’ve ever produced.

In addition to designing and coding the site templates, I set up a high definition Flash video player that would handle varying aspect ratios. This player is integrated into the surrounding page in such a way that the page will adapt to the dynamic size and shape of the player. The video library is powered by wordTube, a Wordpress plugin I co-developed.

I created a custom Wordpress plugin to power the homepage featured content slideshow, which is a Flash AS3 application I built from scratch. Enjoy Human 2010 also uses a thumbnail generation plugin I built, originally for Antiquiet.

Check out the live site at enjoyhuman.com.

Justin Dettle reviews extreme heavy metal music for Antiquiet. He’s got so much to say, we decided to give him his own blog dedicated to metal. I threw this together one weekend, after commissioning a badass logo from the very talented Wes DeSoto. Designing this site was so fun. The stone texture is a photograph I took in my backyard.

Visit Heavy Dettle

It’s about time I add this one. I created Antiquiet in 2007 with Johnny Firecloud. I designed it (we’re on our fourth version), I built it, I write for it, I shoot video for it, I edit video for it, I record and edit live sound for it, I throw events, design flyers, design ads, sell ads, traffic ads, I manage our SEO- which is great- I do business development, I administer the server, the works. I don’t know why this wasn’t the first thing into my portfolio, but when I say I can do it all, Antiquiet backs it up.

View Antiquiet Live

Antiquiet’s a passion project of mine, and there’s not much to these banners. But I’m proud of them, because they all feature classic quotes from one on one conversations we had with headlining artists. They really capture the rock n’ roll attitude and energy that I would like to consider my specialty.

(DOT) SQUIRRELS is my LLC. For the corporate image, I wanted somehow to play off the idea of industrious worker squirrels building stuff, without being too literal. In my head, I was picturing the old boxes of screws and nails in my Dad’s basement growing up.

Am I weird for being inspired by a box of nails? The nail is just so iconic to me. So simple, so direct, so effective. That’s the kind of work I want to be known for.

Anyway, the cardboard texture (box of nails idea) worked great for the business cards, but for the website, I didn’t like it. So I put together the tiling wood texture you see above, and deteriorated and sliced the logo subtly to make it look like it was painted on the side of a toolshed. Same concept, different angle.

For a minute, I got sidetracked by a more squirrel-centric idea, inspired by those ancient National Geographic documentaries my high school science teachers made us watch. They still used reel-to-reel projectors in my school, through the 1990s. Ghetto, but I wouldn’t trade the experience / point of reference for anything.

http://dotsquirrels.com

I realize there are two ways to spell the word: flier, and flyer. Both apparently are valid. Since I’m a hockey fan from Philadelphia, I’m most comfortable with the latter.

I designed this flyer for a party Antiquiet threw at Enjoy Human downtown. I also hired the bands (8mm and Pop Levi), helped build the stage, and did live sound with Pro Tools multitrack recording with the help of Alex Schneiderman.

It was quite a night.

I did two slightly different versions of this microsite. I don’t think the finished product looked quite as cool as the mocks, no thanks to a tight timeline on the client’s part and slammed front-end coders. Wish they’d have told me; I would have done the HTML myself for free, just to make sure that my efforts weren’t wasted!

What a ridiculous project, from start to finish. The concept came from Gorilla Nation CEO Brian Fitzgerald. We thought it was a joke for a second… And then we fell in love with it.

I hired my friend Lisa Kurbansade to do the photography. We had very little time, and ran into problems when the row of urinals in the Culver City Pacific 12 movie theater men’s room looked absolutely nothing like the way we swore they looked when we planned the shoot. We wound up across the street, in a Trader Joe’s. We took some photos of their single urinal, and I then assembled the ad’s scenery piece by piece in Photoshop. The floor, walls, urinals, and guys are all from completely separate photo shoots.

Crave has recycled this ad so many times, it’s almost not even funny anymore.

Oh yeah, I designed Crave’s logo, too.

Almost forgot about this one… Not everything I do is loud and in your face