duke houston portfolio

Portfolio

Duke Houston 6468 Scotts Valley DriveScotts Valley, CA [email protected] | 831-440-9396 office | 831-818-6336 mobile

Superb skills in visual design, fluent in story, color, composition and typography. Function-centric adaptive stylist. Fast. Focused. Intelligent. Creative problem solver. Responsive team leader. Exceptional time estimating skills. Deadline maker. Effective communicator—bridges marketing, engineering and end user. Sees the big picture; steeps in the details. Excellent writing skills. Long-term experience in creative concept generation, visual design, UI/UX design, photography, and design, illustration and production for web, print, and motion graphics.

Expert in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, Powerpoint.

Founder / Creative Director Houston Graphics Santa Cruz, CALead designer for UI/UX, web, multimedia, and print projects. Clients include Apple, Borland, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nokia and Symantec. Lead client contact. Project manager. Team leader for employees and contractors.

Senior Designer Conteneo Mountain View, CARedesigned the Innovation Games suite and Common Ground for Action—web apps for driving team & crowd-sourced collaboration in complex business and political issues. Lead visual design, lead UI/UX design, information visualization, branding.

User Interface Architect Callidus Software San Jose, CASenior UI architect for enterprise software maker. Designed look-and-feel—icons, banners, splash screens, and layouts for traditional and web-based SaaS apps. Collaborated with engineers and product managers to design workflow processes and feature sets for large multi-user applications.

Art Director PriceRadar (acquired by eBay 2001) San Jose, CADeveloped look-and-feel of proprietary corporate and consumer-facing web sites, including visual design, content development and UI design. Created corporate identity design. Responsible for print and web advertising design and production. Directed four-member web team in design and maintenance of sites and worked with engineering to develop UI for database-intensive back end.

Consulting Art Director EON Interactive Design Santa Cruz, CALead designer for CD-interactive and web projects for corporate clients including 3Com, Cisco, Lucent, Octel, and Sun Microsystems. Directed production teams. Met with clients to determine objectives, present designs.

Cofounder Data Transforms Denver, COUI development and feature design for a suite of early desktop publishing programs. Developed and directed company’s advertising and marketing programs. Developed font collections. Font design. Advertising production: concept, design, layout, and illustration. Packaging design.

Undergraduate Louisiana State University New Orleans, LAMedia Communications—minors in Psychology and English. Dean’s List.

Fine Arts Birmingham Museum of Art Birmingham, ALFive years of study under Edgar Parrish, nephew & pupil of Maxfield Parrish —drawing, painting, color theory, and design.

References and portfolio available upon request.

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experience1989-now

2013-2014

2001-2008

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education:

resumé:

mailto:dhouston%40houstongraphics.com?subject=about%20your%202014%20portfolio...

[email protected] Duke Houston Portfolio 831.818.6336

Zwamy: Artkick Mobile App Visual + UI Design

In 2014, Duke worked with Zwamy as lead visual and UI designer on their Artkick mobile app for iPad, iPhone and Android. Artkick, winner of “best social/lifestyle mobile app” award from the BMA, lets users display art & photography on a network connected TV screen, controled from a smart device. Duke also provided visual design and copywriting for the Artkick marketing web site. get the app: iOS Android

home page - iPhone

detail page - iPhone

detail page - iPad


https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/artkick/id711576101?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.artkick.artkick&hl=en


Clifford Henderson Author’s Web Site Design

In 2014, Duke designed this WordPress site for author Clifford Henderson.Duke contributed visual design, custom photography, copy writing and information design. view live site


http://cliffordhenderson.net/


Conteneo Visual & UI Design: Serious Games for Business

From 2013-2014, Duke worked as Lead UI/Visual Designer with Conteneo, an Agile software developer that creates serious games for solving business and political problems. During this time, Duke redesigned two of Conteneo’s browser-based software platforms—Innovation Games Online and Visual Collaboration Games—and helped them create a new one, the Conteneo Strategy Engine. visit Conteneo web site

Innovation Games Onlineallows business groups to collaboratively prioritize projects, feature sets, etc.The City of San Jose uses this product to plan their annual city budget.

Visual Collaboration Games (Speed Boat

shown here) let product managers poll groups

of users to quickly identify the strengths

and weaknesses of their products or services.


http://conteneo.co/


The Conteneo Strategy Engine (shown here co-branded as Common Ground for Action, for the Kettering Foundation) is an online collaboration platform that improves the outcomes of complex decisions by guiding organizations through proven

problem-solving processes.Unlike ad-hoc decision making, Strategy Engine frames choices and builds the foundation for collective action through distributed team engagement.



Meltwater Corporate Web Site Design

In 2012, Duke helped Meltwater, developers of marketing and PR software solutions, create a mini-site for attracting quality sales talent to their HR department. Lead visual & UI design. Project manager. view live site


http://www.meltwater.com/careers/


Callidus Software Enterprise Software UI/UX Design

Callidus Software, a leading provider of Sales Performance Management and Incentive Compensation Management software and services, makes solutions that allow the world’s largest companies to strategically manage incentive payments to employees, distributors, brokers and channel partners.

Duke worked for Callidus Software as lead UI Architect from 2001 to 2008, where he designed SaaS and rich client software interfaces for the detail-driven Fortune 500 Sales Performance Management domain. Duke helped Callidus solve the immense UI design challenges provided by the need for simplification and organization of very complex information systems. Duke also provided creative direction to keep the look&feel of the software and its components up to date.

His first project at Callidus was to restructure—from the ground up—the architecture of their flagship application, TrueComp. When Duke joined Callidus, TrueComp was powerful, complex, and capable of solving their users’ business needs—provided they could navigate successfully through the software’s labyrinthine engineering-centric UI. Training users was a bottleneck. Support center costs were high.

Duke diagnosed the pain by interviewing dozens of users for real-world UX feedback, then alleviated it by creating a new UI archetecture, working with Domain Experts, Product Management and Engineering to completely restructure the software so that information was gathered, organized and displayed in more intuitive fashion, and added best-practices based workflow processes to the UI that guided users quickly and efficiently through complex tasks.

During his tenure at Callidus, Duke was lead UI Architect for TrueComp plus four new products, seeing them through several revisions—including migration to cloud-based delivery—always seeking to improve the balance of ease and power for the user.



top The Titanium release of TrueComp, Duke’s last rev of the UI, Q1’08

centerA data collection wizard from the Titanium release

bottomThe Quartz release of TrueComp, an earlier Q1’05 rev, rendered in Sun Microsystems “metal” UI style



Information Visualization TrueComp tracks hundreds of user-definable financial data for orders, transactions, credits, incentives and other business measurements. TrueComp’s modeling features allow users to apply statistical modeling paradigms and variable forcasting parameters to entire periods of collected data.

Duke created this dynamically updating diagram to help users visualize complex modeling structures.

As the user enters data into the model, the diagram automatically reconfigures to display their custom data structure.



TrueComp splash screen

Icons for the more than 60 workspaces contained within the massive TrueComp

application

TrueComp toolbar icons


Helpstream B2B Web Site Design

in 2008, Duke produced a complete redesign of Helpstream’s existing B2B web presence. Working with Helpstream’s marketing and products executives, and a market research specialist in Amsterdam, Duke helped to refocus the site’s image and tone to speak directly to their target market, and restructure the site’s information for effective top-down messaging and easy access. Duke designed the interactive Flash components; provided visual design, UI design and art production, plus creative direction for Helpstream’s Los Angeles based web engineers who coded the 40 page site. To Helpstream’s great happiness—they were in a hurry—the project was completed in under eight weeks.




Helpstream home page

Helpstream Product landing page



Behind the ScenesUsing Moodboards to Target Visual Design

To arrive at the final look and feel of the Helpstream web site, Duke worked with Helpstream executives to identify key corporate attributes that would be used to inform the underlying tone of the design: visionary, web-smart, modern, engaging.

Then, with the help of a market research specialist, we generated a list of companies to which Helpstream’s target demographic reacted favorably and who produced lifestyle products with similar key attributes to those chosen by Helpstream.

Moodboards were collaged from these companies’ advertisements. Then Duke distilled look and feel attributes for the web site’s palette, texture, icon style and ambience from the moodboards (see next page).

Moodboard 1Organized Perfectionist

Moodboard 2Centered Free Thinker



top - Visual Design Profile - analysis of the moodboards

bottom - Color Analysis of the moodboards, used to generate the palette for the web site



Plantronics B2C Web Site Design

Goals:

1. Create a bolder, more colorful, consumer-oriented corporate image targeted to the 20-to-50-something upwardly-mobile professional’s taste.

2. Provide more emotional affinity for the viewer by adding story context to the page. This was addressed using lifestyle photography instead of plain product shots in the main feature panel, and choosing support images based on movement, palette and style.

3. Promote feelings of freedom, grace and competence via the design itself. Duke introduced more fluid lines to break the rectilinear regimentation of the current site, while keeping the rhythm of the current five column grid. Freedom to move about, ease-of-use and quality are all hallmarks of their product line. The web site design should sing the same tune, or at least provide good back-up harmonies.

4. Improve the layout’s ability to direct the viewer’s eye through the page to help sequence the messaging hierarchy. The current site had too many elements with roughly the same visual weight and size, giving the eye too little guidance, which is stressful on a subliminal level.

5. Rescue the Plantronics logo from its enclosing blue box and give it some room to breathe.6. And, while Duke was under the hood, he also gave more room to the news ticker to accommodate longer

lines of copy, and did a tune-up to the header structure / menus to help reduce clutter at the top of the page.

As an experiment, Duke produced a facelift of the Plantronics consumer-facing web site. The constraints for this experiment were to keep Plantronics’ existing messaging and HTML/Javascript structure, while improving the site’s visual presence and fine-tuning its ability to communicate core messages to their target market.



top Plantronics existing North America home page circa June 2010

bottomDuke’s facelift



Nokia Booklet Design

The Nokia Point & Find VAR Training Manual and Reference Guide was done in Adobe InDesign. Duke designed layout, typography and palette to Nokia’s corporate publication guidelines, and selected photography from existing Nokia images. The finished 96 page manual was printed as an A4 size color booklet, and also distributed in PDF soft copy.



One World Children’s Fund Branding: Non-Profit Print Materials & Web Site

One World Children’s Fund is a non-profit charity organization serving at-risk children and their families around the world. Duke has donated design to the organization for several years, helping them create a visual brand that extends from their newsletter across their whole range of printed materials, and their web site—a joint production by One World, Duke and web engineers from Yahoo.



top 6 x 4.25” notecards

bottomNewsletter spread



Website design


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