Caffeine is a new social broadcasting site featuring simple clean design and easy to use tools.
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YouTube TV is a paid subscription based streaming that offers over 40 premium networks for your mobile device, tablet and computer.
My responsibilities included visual design, production design, and prepared redlines for engineering.
YouTube TV was a great experience working with UX Designers, taking their flows and establishing the final visual look for YouTube TV. My key contributions included establishing the font system, layout and defining key components like tabs, dialogs, bottom sheets and cards. Lastly, my responsibility was to make sure that the visual systems that were established were consistent throughout Android and iOS.
Feature screens: Network Portal, Player and Search.
During my tenure at YouTube, I helped a variety of teams including: YouTube Red, YouTube Music, Subscriptions and the Infrastructure team, to name a few. My contributions included visual design, UI/UX, illustration and production design, including the creation of red-lines.
My Process:
Before I start any project, I have to understand the product, the users and the design goals. I begin by setting up a meeting up with product, engineering and other designers to discuss the design goals and address any key concerns early in the process.
Following those discussions, I begin to define and analyze the problem, start my research and sketch out my ideas.
I developed a series of low-fidelity mocks using Sketch and address any key issues. Once I have a series of designs, I reach out to other team members and gather feedback; iterating and developing new designs. With each successful pass, I refined my designs more and begin incorporating to Material Design.
This process continues until the initial design problem has been solved and the final design is approved by the stakeholders. I also provided support during implementation in case there are any additional items that need to be addressed.
I served as the main designer responsible for developing a new embedded player for publishers. I worked closely with product and engineering teams to develop this new player for 3rd party publisher sites.
Scope:
The idea behind the DNI: Player for Publishers was to develop a “new” embedded player that was designed to meet publisher’s needs (hosting and branding) while incorporating YouTube embedded features and branding. The player itself had to be configurable to meet a variety of embedded video categories, for example news sites, video portals, forums and media/marketing sites.
I began to research other embedded video players, reviewing and comparing the design aesthetics and shape language. Upon gathering and reviewing my research I began developing some basic wireframes exploring variations on the new embedded player. I explored layout and new iconography. Through these explorations and syncing up with the product and engineering teams we discovered that developing a new player would be too costly and out of scope given the time frame. The solution moving forward was to utilize the current YouTube player and functionality but to incorporate publisher's customizations and branding.
From the research and discussions with the product and engineering teams, I began to develop wireframes and low-fidelity mocks. Initially, the team wanted to develop a new looking player, however we discovered early on that this idea was beyond the scope of this project.
I had to come up with other visual solutions. I focused on adding color to a number of UI elements based off the publisher’s branding. I also had some flexibility with the play button in the queue state too; so I explored a number of different play buttons options including shape, size and color. And finally, I had to incorporate the YouTube logo.
Here are the final results for the development of the new embedded player. The final added the publisher's branding color to the main UI elements, specifically the nav bar and play button. Subtle, YouTube branding is incorporated into the nav bar as well.
As a contractor designer at YouTube, I was fortunate to have the ability to design for so many great teams and features. In this particular case, I was responsible to develop the mobile visual designs for the BandPage migration to YouTube. Here I explored the overall visual look while surfacing the message to the user that they had to log onto their account via the desktop application in order to complete their migration.
Recently, users were faced with blank screens when their YouTube channel failed to load. I was given the design task to help develop an engaging illustration for this particular instance. Through a series of sketches and referencing Google’s Material Design, I designed this image that was thought provoking and made this experience a little more enjoyable for the user.
In a few cases, users would come across a YouTube channel that was closed. There was no notification and no opportunity to unsubscribe from a channel that no longer existed. Collaborating with the lead designer and copywriter, we came up with the message and illustration to reinforce this idea and created a opportunity for the user to unsubscribe from a channel that was closed.
I began working at Zynga as a 2D Artist on Frontierville’s The Pioneer Trail. I created illustrations and animations for weekly features and bold beats for the fun and engaging game about establishing your homestead in the Old West. I also took interim art director duties and worked with overseas partners to maintain weekly deliverables making sure that the assets were on brand and on time.
A couple of years later, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to work on Farmville 2 as a UI/UX Designer. I was responsible for developing the visual design and UX for it’s weekly features and bold beats. I maintained good UX principles, keeping the visuals to brand and helped onboard new members to the Farmville franchise.
I was the lead designer on this feature and oversaw the user experience, UI and painted the background art for this collection mechanic feature for Farmville 2. The experience behind the mechanic was to collect as many ice cubes with a given time frame. The more ice cubes the user collected the more prizes they won, with the main prize being a baby cow. It was a very successful feature both as mechanic and overall user experience.
These dialogs were designed to notify the user of the different stages of their games progression; the first dialog explained the mechanic, the second was a reminder to collect more ice cubes, and the remainder were the rewards dialog.
For this Goat Cheesery mechanic the user crafts goat cheese or collects cheese by feeding goats. Each cheese collected allows the user to take a "churn" in collecting one of 3 artisan cheeses. Once all the cheeses were filled the user was rewarded with a baby duck. I was the lead designer for this feature and created the UI, oversaw the user experience and painted the background art.
These illustrations were design specifically for weekly features for Frontierville. The great thing about working on Frontierville was the continuing narrative of the game, it was a story was always progressing, in turn the game and the mechanics were always evolving.
I started these illustrations the same... I would interpret a small statement regarding the narrative for the week. I sketched out 3-6 thumbnails, working out the composition and design, once approved I moved on to the final vector illustrations. The challenge when developing these images was the small canvas size to work with.
A buddy of mine wanted a new image to promote his mixtapes on various social networks, like Soundcloud and YouTube. I've done designs for him in the past and this time I wanted to update his look with some current design trends of today. I tried a number of different type faces before I settled with Rubik One. I wanted something bold that stood out and was still legible over the image. Next I explored a variety of different color variations for him to choose from.
This illustration was inspired by Powell Peralta's iconic skate film "The Search for Animal Chin".
