Between 2003-2005, I was senior creative at mobile firm, Digital Orchid. Using our proprietary platform, I designed several applications for major national and international brands, such as MLB.com, ESPN, NHL, Quiksilver, NASCAR, and more. It was a great challenge not only to steward partner brands, but to do so on very small, feature-limited mobile devices.
In the nascent mobile app market, a designer had to be resourceful. Assets had to be small in both pixel dimension and file size. It was not uncommon to need to create an entire navigation screen at say, 96 x 65 pixels, while staying under 5 kilobytes. Many feature phones had two screens, the main screen and an outer, informational screen that was a fraction of the size.
Animated Ringtones
During this time, I created a fair number of animated ringtones. It gave me the freedom to inject my sense of humor and fun into the brand. I also created animations for Britney Spears, NHL teams, and lifestyle brands like Quiksilver and Reef.
I also worked on our flagship product, Nascar.com To Go – which used real-time race telemetry to keep fans engaged during race days. Our other major products were wallpaper and ringtone content apps, in which we sold branded content around the world. Partner brands included ESPN, the Vatican Art Library, NBA star Manu Ginobli, Star Trek, Hawaiian Tropic, and soccer properties like Cruz Azul and Maradona. We launched the apps through our platform, “Todomo,” to service all content providers in Latin America. I created the identity and brand marketing for Todomo as well.
In addition to my brand work on the creative side, I was also saw each app through from concept to completion. I wrote markup to achieve the front end display. Then I assisted QA to assure that carrier submissions were successful.
In the end, I produced quite a lot, from trade show assets, magazine ads, and corporate identity, to print marketing and mobile multimedia. Prior to the start of the Todomo app platform, I single-handedly created our first revenue-producing mobile content workflow and managed it myself while the rest of the team worked on the backend of our Nascar product.
