Fifteen Plus Years
My 15+ year background of success provides expertise in business operations, user testing, and design and digital strategy. I provide consistent evaluation and change management to current e-commerce strategy to develop and execute a roadmap for improved management and optimization of services. My strategy utilizes customer service, UI/UX expertise and knowledge, combining with a business approach rooted in data-driven decision making.
I develop and implement digital frameworks and methodologies while creating and delivering global digital strategy projects, implementing SEO and SEM on a continuous basis through the creation and execution of marketing campaigns.
Graphic Design
I have worked in and for a number of advertising agencies. This is just a small sample of clients I have worked with.
If you do have Flash Player installed you should checkout the old experimental version of my site here. I never finished it as flash is in the past.
-
Booklet for the HardWood Council. Sarah Hornbrook designed this while I illustrated the the forest diagram.
HMA Illustration
-
These two mouse pads are for some of the Internet Cafe systems that Royal Caribbean has on their ships. You can check out a bit of them in my "multimedia" section. I made most of them, and fixed and debugged the rest. The one mouse pad is for ClubCafe and the other is for CrewNections.
Royal Caribbean Mouse Pads
-
Royal Caribbean owns Celebrity Cruises and a few other big names out there. Their IT departments came together after 9/11 to save money during the tourist slump. They call the department UNITE.
Royal Caribbean Unite Logo
-
i worked with John Brady the owner/CEO of Brady Communications to develop this design. The production folks and the printers called me up to tell me how much they liked it.
T.G.I.Fridays FSI
Websites
-
I worked with Scott Riemenschneider's to make this interactive cake creator e-card. It contained every option the stores had on hand so one could print out their cake options and have it made.
Bruster's Cake Creator
-
I worked with David Anderson on this design for GSK's Aquafresh site.
Aquafresh
-
I worked with David Andersons on this site. The company made lasers that can kill people through walls. Rather scary Star Trek stuff - but cool website!
Ionatron
-
I worked with David Anderson on this design. It turned out to be a rather smooth site.
Vanderbilt College
-
This is another design that I worked with Scott Riemenschneider on for the Young Pro's in Pittsburgh. They wanted a guy in a business suit riding a skateboard. TIts pretty nice and represents a trip from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Note that you will only be able to watch the intro once a day (flash based cookie) so I've included it in my demo real.
View Demo Reel.Pittsburgh Young Professionals
-
I worked with David Anderson on this design.
Tepper School of Business Website
-
This company promotion where clients were receiving this small tin can saying the company had just launched the new website and they had 'worked out all the bugs'. We didn't know what to do with all them. You would open the can to find a windup VW Bug with rub on decals. I'm still believe this was not the best way to promote your dev team.
Brady Communications Bug Promo.
-
Now being on fire isn't really that funny to me, but I did my best to keep it light. This is another company promotion/game that basically tells the client they are horrible at putting out fires. That's our job. I'm partial to the Dali reference in it!
View Demo Reel.Brady Communications Fire Promo.
-
I never believed that one should design a whole website in Flash. Still, this one was all in Flash and turned out pretty neat. I dealt with all the video, Flash and Production for this thing. Todd Bronson was the lead designer on it. I had two weeks to do it all Video and Code galore.
Hedstrom's FactorX Flash Site
-
I worked with Bryan Brunsell on this design.
Hedstrom Website Flash
-
Bill Bittner designed this and I made it live. Bill is a great person to work with as he wants to learn and I believed he did a lot of the animation on this piece
Mellon AR 2002 Flash
-
I worked with Bill Bittner on this designed as well. Hitting all the shareholders around the world is hard and meeting print deadlines is also hard. Web Annual Reports make sure the government deadlines are met.
Mylan AR 2002 Flash
-
I worked with Bill Bittner on this Annual Report as well. I built up a sweet little template code to deal with it all.
Mylan AR 2003 Flash
-
I worked with Adam Shoup on this designed. Tao Zhang did backend.
AHA HeartBall
-
I worked with Nick Cobler on this design. It was an invite for a green home back in 2005. For kids... I don't really understand it but it's a fun little intro.
View Demo Reel.Checnet.org event invite
-
We were pitted against 20 or so other firms for a Disney contract for a banner campaign... We lost. Still, I do like the fireworks one alot.
Disney Spec. Banners
-
Very warm banners I worked with David Anderson on. This turned out rather nice and clean. I think they were up for awards somewhere.
Water Wonder Works Banners
-
This won Platinum in some big international tourism award thingy. One of 20 in the world so I'm proud of that.
VisitPA banner - Roadtrip
-
This is the same as the previous one, different concept. PointRoll framed it. Don't understand why.
VisitPA banner - Leaves
-
The big selling point is the panel with the interactive maps on them.
Spring 2005 VisitPA banners
-
I made endless banners for XM over a year and a half - you name it I made it for them. The celebrites tended to be slightly difficult to deal with. These are the only two I sort of like.
XM banners
Multimedia
-
This one is SWEET!!! The president of the company was on the board for the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, so our company did the new logo pro-bono. We made 18 million logo's, the office was covered in them! The trick was selling the one we wanted to. So this piece was made to show a bunch logo's and focus on the one.
View Demo Reel.CMP Logo Presentation
-
So all I got was, "Phil, make a presetation of this... you got one day". It was for revealing the logo to the company employees.
View Demo Reel.Hedstrom Logo Presentation
-
This is the teen version of the adult internet cafe systems. The adult internet cafe systems didn't really market to kids of any age. The test cruise had 70 kids on it and brought it more then seven thousand dollars in one week. They shot this into full production and gave tons of money for new systems.
RCCL ClubCafe System
-
The Crew members were using the internet cafe systems and not letting the passengers in. To solve this we worked with Royal Caribban to develop this easy system for them on their own. It is also a way of building a community between all crew members on all ships, training them and giving them internet access. As soon as it was on the test ship, they had to push it to all the other ships fast because all the other crew's were tring to get transfered to the test ship.
RCCL CrewNection System
-
This is a training module for the CrewNection system. I think it's user friendly and I don't think it warranted making this but hey, this worked out pretty well.
RCCL CrewNection Training
-
Kids on cruises liked the internet cafe systems as well! So we created this system for the small ones addicted to the IMing and surfing. So we made this fun little interface for them to play with, everything on it was completely adminable, everything down to the last period.
Royal Caribbean SurfStation
-
I worked with Brian Moore on this design. It is for convincing investors to do business in PA.
New Pa site.
-
I honestly can't remember I worked with on this design. It was either Brian Moore or David Anderson. It was a eCard sent to get millions donated -- it worked. Of course, that's easy to do when you send it to millionaires from the begining. PMI shot the video and I worked the thing together, graphs and all.
Tepper School of Business
-
There were four of these for different schools in EDMC's system. I'm only posting the one. The interface is controlled with sin curves which I'm still rather proud of. Yes, I'm a bit of a nerd. I believe Aart Balk designed this.
EDMC online school tours
The benefit of an agency is that you combine the experience, wisdom and talent of all those working on your project. I find it unfortunate when some don't acknowledge they were part of a team. While sometimes I was the sole designer/developer on a project, that is rarely how it works in an agency. Still, every project I have shown here I was an integral part in.
Video Production
Television commercials, trade show attractors, stadium wraps and Youtube videos. I've greatly enjoyed including video production in many facets of my career. I usually used AfterEffects and Premiere mixed with animations created in Flash and Edge Animate.
I put together a bit of a demo reel of the videos below right here. Please forgive the low quality, A better version is in the works.
Video
-
Ok so I call them screensavers but the fancy word to use with a client is "Attractor". That is until I was on a Royal Caribbean Ship(they get mad if you call them boats). I saw a room full of these one minute videos playing away. I was attracted to it, I wanted to play! This is the basic story, We had made an attractor for the one Royal Caribbean internet Cafe, it had this dolphin that swam around and talked to you. It was the tour guide through the system. Granted, she did sound kinda like a street walker - if you know what I mean. This was something everyone pointed out. Royal Caribbean didn't want to say that to us I guess and instead said "kids don't like dolphins".
View Demo Reel.Royal Caribbean Attractor
-
The project turned out great. It was this 15 minute sales video for Hedstrom Toys. I lived on beds made of various pillows in the office for a 7 days while producing and rendering it.
View Demo Reel.Hedstrom Toy Fair Video
-
A week long project for GNC that kicked it! GNC went all goofy with this thing and used it a million times.
View Demo Reel.GNC Arnold Classic Attractor
-
These are the pieces I did for the 2004 Back to School Fashion show for WeatherVane Jeans. I did them, made them a DVD, sent them and never heard back from the company... the next Monday I found out they didn't get back because they filed bankruptcy and all parties involved had be let go.
View Demo Reel.WeatherVane Fashion Show
-
Vince Vernet designed story boarded this. I created it. A campaign for gift cards that FCB - worked rather well.
FCB Commercial
-
Brain Bronough designed this. I created them. The big thing was to make an 'adlet' in 2 hours. This is what I did. (I didn't count rendering time since I could leave)
View Demo Reel.Foodland Commercials
-
I made a few of these for FCB to be played on those lcd screens that wrap around the inside of stadiums. Go Pitt! Right? It's crazy difficult to create videos thart are 4000 pixels by 32 pixels.
View Demo Reel.Pitt/FCB LCD video
-
These are like the last ones except for at Pens games. Very cool to go see these and get distracted by a game.
View Demo Reel.Pens/Highmark LCD video
Video really is the future of the internet and development. Recently I started a Youtube channel, Clean Phil Wanted, where I take on all sides of planning, filming, sound, editing, marketing. I've centered it around another passion of mine, woodworking with handtools. Check it out here: Clean Phil Wanted.
Web Development
I have been asked many times, “Do you think designer should code?” My answer is, “Yes I do”. While you should never hold a creative team from exploring as far out of the box as they can, I do feel one should know as much as you can fit in the box that is their head. Especially as it relates to your chosen career.
I’ve believed in this idea since before my career started and it is why all of my career has included development in some form. During the past 15 years I’ve worked on simple single page mini-sites, WordPress sites, complex Singe-page applications and massive E-commerce that sold thousands of products. More recently this has included Agile/Scrum to produce minimum viable products that also adhere to my beliefs that a site/project should be a ‘living’ document ,driven by key metrics from analytics, that can change as needed to properly reach a client’s demographics.
Please check out more details on my abilities and technologies I've used in my career, please download and read through my Resume/CV
Site Optimization
The truth is you probably don’t need to redesign your website… yet again. Changing your website too frequently will sometimes turn away as many repeat customers as you gain in new visitors. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t actively declutter your site to help clarify your message as well as simplify your funnel. Most of the time the answer to improve your conversion rates revolves around your sites analytics. These analytics will help you find where customers are bouncing and allow you to test the best way to keep them around. Usually, it’s a bit more complicated than this but a simple change in the colour of a button from red to green or vice-versa will improve you conversion or make it worse.
Your message or product may not alter but your demographics and how to reach your audience will always be changing. It can change seasonally. Rain, sun or snow could affect the outcome. As well as any economic events no matter the size. I feel a website should be considered ‘living’. Building a new site isn’t always the answer but in this day and age keeping it static is no longer an option.
At General Nutrion Centers I was the Manager of Web Optimization. In this position I combined my background in Graphic Design, UX/UI development and my abilites to incorporate analytical results to improve various conversions on our site. The duties of this postion include:
- Analyzed data pulled from Adobe Analytics (Omniture) and Google Analytics to evaluate current business goals, social media efforts and digital business strategy, resulting in brand growth, product positioning and lead generation.
- Ran A/B testing of Desktop, Tablet and Mobile sites via Monetate and Google Analytics.
- Developed “Experiences” in Monetate to fix third-party vendor issues on our site.
- Managed and guided creation of product guides and content tools, while assisting with relationship and vendor management for the GNC Mobile site.
- Developed and implemented online marketing strategy planning to improve virtual presence and enhance corporate profitability and client retention.
- Spearheaded inventive operation development and change management programming, ushering in cross-functional involvement, organizational change, and accountability for new products and services company-wide.
- Created and executed annual digital marketing plan/strategy based on corporate goals, current market and business forecasting, allowing the company to offer a continuous online-to-offline engagement experience.
- Introduced continually modified digital campaign strategies, enabling client communication through daily social media channels.
- Conducted business analysis to determine trends and consumption, collaborating teams to determine brand positioning and media effectiveness.
- Monitored product and services, ensuring innovative design and allowing for an effective and interactive UX/UI experience.
