Graham Huber.

I was approached through a referral to redesign the website of MyEscapades, an online travel partner.

Because of my travel experience, the client saw me as someone who could understood their product as someone who had "been there". They specialize in ultra-luxury and adventure tours, as well as private game lodges and African safaris. The client was dissatisfied with how poorly their product was presented online. It became clear through talking with the client about their business challenges that more than a redesign was required.

The Challenge

As a first step, I executed a detailed strategic analysis. Through a series of in-depth workshops with the client, I generated an analysis that documented the key insights we had revealed. We discussed the key opportunities in moving their business model forward online. I challenged them with key questions on how they could best position their digital strategy.

Next, we conducted a detailed brand audit. We looked at the company's business profile as a whole, starting with the company. We discussed client streams, sales, values, customer relations, and marketing & promotion.

We found that the client had a good sense of who they wanted to be, but they were failing to represent it online. The product is excellent; there was no problem there. It's some of the most incredible experiences you can imagine. But no one knows about it. Visitors were coming to the site and leaving. There was a problem of distinction. The product itself is not that unique. There's literally hundreds of other agents who can offer exactly the same destinations.

The Process

We wanted to know who we were up against. I started with a benchmark study of the primary competitors. We wanted to know who they were going after, and what their product was all about. To understand the market dynamics, I mapped the market space in terms of pricing versus planning – on one axis, pricing was represented by polarities of luxury vs value, and on the other axis, planning was represented by fixed vs flexible – to see how the captured markets broke down in our analysis.

Now we could talk about target demographics. On one side, we had G.A.P. Adventures, in the 18-35 age bracket. On the other side, we had Abercrombie & Kent, in the 55+ age bracket. Right in between was where my client wanted to be, in the 35-55 age bracket. There was a problem though. This market is very crowded. Nearly every single one of our competitors was offering a product within this range. To beat our competitors, we needed to discuss value proposition. I learned that the profit margins in the travel industry are extremely tight. If it comes down to a price war, everyone loses.

To better understand where the open markets might be, I mapped the value propositions of the competitors by polarities of Appeal vs Tone. To reposition the company in between alignment with its customers, we had to understand their needs. To do that, we needed to understand our customer's behaviour. I ran an online survey. We were curious about the driving factors behind a customer's decision-making. Words factored in – but not as #1. While written content is unique content, we needed to know what really meant the most to the customer. The results indicated that being inspired by the beauty of the world is the leading factor of persuasion while researching a travel destination.

How could we use this insight in our solution? It turned out that the client had a huge pool of resources that they simply weren't using. There was a divide between the customer and the product. I saw it as a challenge of leveraging the gap between the product as information, and making that information access to the customer.

And here was our secret weapon – literally thousands of unique and high-quality travel images from suppliers around the world. The client had over 20GB of stunning, high-resolution photography.

To handle the image content, I used Slideshow Pro Director, a PHP-based content management system designed to work server-side in conjunction with Slideshow Pro, the Flash-based slideshow application I used to present the images on the site. Slideshow Pro pulls the images into galleries on the site through Director's API by XML. We use it to a handle a pretty massive library of over 6,000 of the client's image assets. I created galleries for each of the site's major section. Galleries are collections of albums, with each album containing individual images.

In 2008, the CBC adapted Douglas Coupland's
best-selling novel jPod into a television series.

It was an ambitious project to translate Coupland's narrative wit into live action. Like Woody Allen's Annie Hall, which he had originally written as a murder mystery, the book became less a story about technology, and more about how the character use technology to relate to one another. As a commentary of the lives of modern worker bees in a technological hive of corporate inanity, it was a natural extension to promote the series through the very same tools that the characters reveled in: social media.

The Challenge

I was approached to join a team of social media experts to breathe an extended life into the characters of jPod online. This was no easy task. It meant stepping into the shoes of the man himself, Douglas Coupland, to produce original creative content that fit with his characteristic wit. It was necessary to understand the characters as Doug had created them: real people. In a sense, a literary character and a brand are quiet similar – both are fictional abstractions of a personified ideal. To be real meant identifying relevant digital strategy for each of the characters.

The Process

We started with Facebook. Each character was given a profile. I explored the characters' personalities through the parameters of the Facebook profiles. Some facts could be verified from the book or scripts, but it was necessary to expand. Simple fields became loaded questions for original creative content. What are Kaitlin's favourite books? What is John Doe listening to? The characters became alive in social media, as a two-way channel, not just a one-way static fiction. This was the life – a new voice for the characters.

To bring the characters to life online required new, original creative. I was permitted to be the creative source.

Most visible were the status updates. They chronicled the inane minutiae of everyday life, through the lens of a particular character. In total, I wrote over 360 status updates, in the voices of four characters. I based the content of the updates on the chronological events that unfolded over the course of the series in the show. For those following the show, the seemingly random updates actually made a lot of sense. This created continuity between episodes, and gave the fans a chance to interact with their favourite characters online.

Besides the status updates, some characters were interesting enough to warrant in-depth treatment...

Balance for Blind Adults needed to update their visual identity to better emphasize friendly, community-based service, resulting in this corporate identity solution, developed in part with the active participation of blind and vision-impaired clients.

Balance for Blind Adults is a non-profit agency assisting people with vision loss to lead healthy, independent and active lifestyles. The organization offers a personal and caring approach to rehabilitation and support programs, with a strong focus on community, as a direct alternative to the services of larger national agencies. By working one-on-one with professional mobility & orientation instructors, Balance teaches community and independent living skills.

The Challenge

Balance sought to represent the collaborative nature of their service with a visual identity that would resonate emotionally with those who are blind or vision-impaired. I was challenged to consider the aesthetic value of visual communication through the perspective of the intended audience — in some cases, those who have never had vision. This meant communicating the core values of the organization's service in a visual form that would be equally relevant to those who are sighted or not.

Canadian astronaut Dr. Steven MacLean approached with the honourable challenge of designing the official patch for NASA mission STS-115 to the International Space Station.

Following NASA tradition, the crew of each mission is granted the creative control over its mission patch. As a York University alumnus (and the sole Canadian representative on the mission), Dr. MacLean sought the opportunity to give back to his alma mater. The challenge to design the next official NASA mission patch was presented to students of the York / Sheridan Joint Program in Design.

The Challenge

I was invited to submit designs as part of a creative team consisting of fellow designers Peter Hui, Gigi Lui, and myself. The competition was fierce. Dozens of designs from teams of students were submitted to Dr. MacLean, who oversaw the competition in person, and presented to the other five crew members at Mission Control in Houston, TX. In addition to the York / Sheridan contributions, several teams of American designers also submitted designs.

The Process

Ultimately, our team's designs were those chosen by the crew. With the competition resolved, I served as the liaison with Dr. MacLean and NASA, communicating the crew's creative feedback from Houston, TX, with our team in Toronto.

Over the course of several weeks, we refined the patch design to completion under the advisory of the Design Program Chair Don Newgren and Dr. MacLean. We made technical adjustments for accuracy or reproduction in thread, and honoured requests for revision to the concept to accommodate each crew member's personal investment in the design.