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.

For Svedka Vodka, I led the design and development of a Facebook application (which I installed to their fan page) promoting a dance competition in LA hosted by Kim and Kourtney (yes, spell checker, you’re right, that is spelled wrong) Kardashian.

The ability to handle significant amounts of burst traffic generated by the “celebrity” endorsements was a key concern of everyone involved, but the VPS I provisioned and configured held strong.

The app featured a custom-built AJAX voting system, Flash video, and the ability for users to share through their news feed.

For Pedigree, I built (and installed to their fan page) a Facebook application designed to help people spread the word that for each new Facebook fan, Pedigree would donate a bowl of dog food to a dog shelter. A cause close to my heart.

In addition to tools for posting to a user’s own Facebook and Twitter feeds, the Pedigree Facebook app features a custom-built AJAX / jQuery auto-fill friend selector dialog, designed to post invitations to friends’ walls, rather than bury spammy invites into their notifications inbox as is usually done.

CHECK IT OUT HERE!

So it’s not the prettiest site to look at, but it’s got some of my best code under the hood.

Butler Sourcing, a manufacturer in China, approached me through recommendation in December of 2009. They had a very complex vision that they were having trouble realizing with their outsource teams. They wanted to create a template for a series of websites for specific products. The template would need to be tweaked visually for each site of course, but it also needed to feature an interactive quote wizard that a user could use to “build” a customized product.

I developed a custom Wordpress plugin and a Wordpress theme to achieve this. The plugin allows Butler to set up an arbitrary number of “steps” for each site, and then an arbitrary number of options for each step, each with an image. The design will automatically flex for any combination, and accommodate option images of wildly varying shapes and sizes. Butler has the ability to let a step accept only one selected option, or multiple options.

I also developed a custom Wordpress plugin to display a dynamic jQuery slideshow of examples for each site.

I delivered all of this to Butler in less than one month.

Try my wizard out on a live site here.

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

I helped launch the official Febreze Home Collection’s Facebook page by developing a Facebook application that added a custom-built interactive Flash widget to a “Design Tips” tab.

Check it out here!

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

I was a bit of a swiss army knife on this project. I built the initial HTML/CSS shell (please view my work here; the live version has been hacked apart a bit since, but I’m proud of the code I delivered). I also did some extensive AJAX work on the Drink Recipes page, and I built the hybrid HTML/video jQuery feature panel, which was a strangely complex custom order; The client wanted it to open with a Flash video, play through that video only once, and then seamlessly begin sliding through a series of panels assembled dynamically from the contents of flagged WordPress posts.

I helped The Visionaire Group develop a ridiculously audacious, envelope-pushing Facebook Application to help support the theatrical release of the Lion’s Gate film Crank 2.

Going far beyond the typical boundaries of promotional Facebook Applications, we set up a series of fourteen complex obstacle courses. Users would get a new one each day for the two weeks leading up to the movie’s opening day. Any brave users who completed all fourteen challenges would be entered into a drawing to win a cash prize.

At any time, you could see which of your friends were playing the game, and how many challenges they had successfully completed.

When a user would accept a challenge, the game would go through a series of shocking Facebook updates of various types; different combinations of status updates, photo uploads, photo tagging, video embeds, friend adding & group joining.

Everything was done according to Facebook’s terms of service, with all necessary user confirmation & permissions granting.

The challenges ranged from the relatively tame, such as posting a shocking viral video, to the disruptive, such as announcing via status update that you “hooked up” with a randomly selected member of the opposite sex from your friends list, all the way up to some downright offensive ones I’ll let you find on your own.

(MOSTLY) FUNCTIONAL DEMO

Since the game was built for a relatively short, very time-sensitive run, many of the features broke after the campaign ended. However, I’ve set up a demo for perpetuity, with those parts disabled. Feel free to take on any of the challenges, if you dare. Those still work.

I did this in one day. The idea was silly- maybe even dumb- but sometimes, those are the best kinds of ideas. I was working on location at Gorilla Nation at the time, and we came up with the concept during a brainstorm session with the sales team, who were pitching ideas to promote the would-be cult classic film Snakes On A Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson.

It was a huge hit- G4 talked about it on their Attack Of The Show TV program, and it was featured as an outstanding campaign in a Gorilla Nation company profile published in the July 2007 issue of Business 2.0 magazine.

It went over so well with the client, they did a sequel to the game (also designed and developed by me) when the DVD came out. I’ve archived both versions here:

http://iamskwerl.com/misc/soab/theatrical-release.html
http://iamskwerl.com/misc/soab/dvd-release.html

I’ve only told a couple of friends this secret, but I baked into both games secret codes that would remove all the snakes. Try typing naughty words while playing to see if you can find them.