Power of Libraries Logo and Store

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This project began with a simple logo, which I designed:

It was the theme of our biggest conference of the year. We put it on our slides, in our brochures, and on our company button-downs. It was such a huge hit that customers were sneaking into our supply room to coif extra shirts. By the end of the conference our CMO had promised to make Power of Libraries merchandise available for sale to anybody who wanted it. Thus the project bounced back to my desk, and after extensive research my team and I released shop.sirsidynix.com

The shop site relies on a shopify theme, so it’s not entirely my design, but I did the headers, and various other bits in Illustrator, and then I selected and created the merchandise.

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Release Party Banners

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These banners were made for SirsiDynix’s annual release party. Each year the theme and design were totally up to me. They were printed off huge and all the developers that worked on those releases signed it. It was then hung up in the engineering lab. When I sent the 2013 design to the CTO for approval his emailed response was “*jaw drops*.”

BLUEcloud Campus Booklet

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The sheer size of this little booklet put it high on my list of favorite projects. I had access to lots of high-quality photography and the permission to give the text plenty of room to breath. The end result was 30 beautiful pages, saddle-stitched. The entire booklet can be seen here:  BLUEcloud  Campus. The format was used as a template by another SD designer to create a companion booklet you can see here: BLUEcloud LSP.

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Librarian’s Guide to Web Services eBook

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This was the first ebook in a series. Along with creating the ebook itself, I knew my work would become a template for the rest of the series. I spent a lot of time developing the concept before I made any significant progress on the layout of content.

I wanted the template to have a signature cover, one that would make each addition to the series easily identifiable. However, inside the cover I wanted lots of flexibility. I also wanted the cover to appeal to my audience: public, academic, and special librarians. Therefore, I decided to lean upon every librarian’s love for beautiful, leather-bound books, and use a faux peek-hole in the cover to visually separate one book in the series from the next. This created a sort of dual-branding opportunity… the series having one brand, while each individual installment is allowed unique color schemes and symbols.

Once I established the concept for the series, I fleshed out the concept for this first installment. Web Services is not the most visually inspiring topic. There is a sort of design anthology connecting web services to images of clouds, but I didn’t want to lean too heavily upon that. So, I settled on a line-and-node figure as the basic motif, symbolizing how web services connects information across different databases in the internet ether. I combined this symbol with a sunrise illustration for the title-image. I feel this combination was visually interesting, hopeful, and calming (we didn’t want anybody running away because it looked to technical), while also tipping a hat to the “cloud” anthology.

I created the illustrations in Illustrator, but the interactive PDF was made in InDesign.

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SirsiDynix Website

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I survived multiple revisions of the SirsiDynix Website. This was the latest revision, finished in the summer of 2016, and I think it’s been the best so far. As of today, it is still being used. There are several elements here that I’m proud of. First of all, the page is very text heavy, but the groupings I employed keep it light-looking and reader-friendly. I also think that the color combination adds to the light, easy, but professional feel of the whole.

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Library Cataloging User Interface

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Perhaps one of my most complicated projects, this series of wireframes for the BLUEcloud Cataloging web app took about a year to create, from winter 2012-fall of 2013. Part of what made it so complicated is the subject matter. In case you’ve never had the pleasure, MARC records (used to catalog library materials) are incredibly convoluted. With 999 different information fields, and rampant custom uses, they are hard to make, hard to use, and hard to maintain. Most people get a masters degree to learn how to use them, and I had to pick it up in the sub-context of 100+ meetings. This project was further complicated by the long list of undefined expectations various customers and shareholders had for the product. To top it all off, I came at this project as an emergency transplant. The sole user interface designer quit and they lured me from marketing to engineering with the promise of a company phone. Therefore, for the first little while I was trying to fill UI needs for 60+ developers completely alone. You can therefore imagine my elation at the success of this product, as you can see by it’s reception on Twitter when unveiled at the SirsiDynix COSUGI conference.

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API Infographic

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Have you ever needed to visually communicate the significance of quality APIs? For a long time SirsiDynix was the only company in the Library Automation Industry that offered database access. A few years back, one of SD’s competitors decided to make some APIs of their own available, but their APIs were lackluster, allowing “read-only” access alone. They also launched an email campaign targeting SD customers and mocking SD’s claim to “open” software. When customers started forwarding these marketing emails to us we decided to answer, and this was the answer we crafted. They told me to make an infographic about our APIs. I did the research and design myself and I used Illustrator during creation.