AgentCenter and OriginatorNetwork

AgentCenter and OriginatorNetwork

AgentCenter (AC) and OriginatorNetwork (ON) were the “back office” program that allowed Myers clients to control their websites and their listings. Most of my work for MGIC was on AC and ON, and on related items (like the internal admin site for AC/ON). Here’s a small sample of what I did there:

The first project in the overarching “Flexible Design” project was to give people a free-form landing page for their site, per client request. Part of that involved writing a color picker that would accept any color but only offered a web-safe palette. I wrote that from scratch in javascript (not jQuery), and here’s a screenshot of it:

The controls in AC/ON were based on a wizard approach. Here’s a shot from the middle of the Landing Page wizard:

Fairly early into my time there, I got the go-ahead to update the logos and “spruce up” the design a little. The upper left of each is the “newer” version, the lower right is a little updated from where it was when I took over the sites, but still basically the old design:

And here are the updated logos I created:

Images

Images

In addition to creating user interfaces, many of my photographs were featured in template headers and in the Image Library that was available to users. Here are a few of them:

Seelund’s Winning Entry to the Cataclysm Beta Guild Contest

Blizzard had an essay contest to select guilds to participate in the Cataclysm Beta. Rules were, guild leaders only, less that 250 words, tell them why our guild deserves a spot in the beta. Simple enough.

And my essay won! Here’s what I sent:

We bring a lot to the table. We number several professional interface developers and system engineers with stress testing and QA experience. We’re committed to giving the new systems a serious shakedown. We can promise that our bug reports will have the kind of information the developers need to reproduce and diagnose the problems. I can personally promise you a professional user interface evaluation from a fresh non-Blizzard perspective.

But mostly? I want to do something awesome for the best guildmates a person could ever hope to be blessed with. My guild’s members make me more than I am. They’re the kind of family you can’t be born into and few ever find. I could wax poetic about the several families who joined to play together, or the fact that some of us have been guildmates for nearly five years. I would put my life or my honor on the line for any one of them. Every single day, they find a new way to amaze me. I can never give back as much as they give me. Compared to that, the coveted Beta key is barely a blip on the radar.

Help me give them the kind of reward they deserve for being the most inspiring people I’ve ever known. In return, you’ll get the most useful and broad beta testing, from a full range of computer familiarity and ages, that you could hope to get from any of the guilds who’ve entered.

Color Wheels with only CSS3 and Primary Colors

There are no images above, nothing but css (half of it vendor propriety, sadly), and this was entirely created with primary colors: Red Yellow and Blue. Why? Because I wanted to see how well you could create other colors using additive color mixing methods like you would with paint through overlayed rgba semi-transparent colors. A standard color wheel with secondary and tertiary colors was the obvious test. This works in Firefox, webkit browsers and even, yes, Internet Explorer. Well, the curved edge that makes it a circle doesn’t work in IE. But the semi-transparent color overlays to simulate additive color mixing that I was wondering about? Works like a charm! Continue reading

Milwaukee City Hall

Milwaukee's City Hall On A Stormy Day
Milwaukee’s City Hall On A Stormy Day

Digital manipulation based on a photo I took of Milwaukee’s City Hall in Sept. 2009. I used the same original image as the basis for my Photoshop tutorial on Vignetting/Depth of Field with Smart Objects CS4/CS5