Work
I've taken a lot of classes, designed a lot of sites, edited a lot of video, written a lot of stories and generally just done a lot of stuff over the past 10 years. Here's some of my work that I'm most proud of.
Sites
VPNFinder.com
As North American ISPs continue to shape the traffic on their networks and governments abroad continue to censor the Internet access of their citizens, more and more are turning to third-party VPN servers to route their traffic. VPNFinder.com was designed to help consumers find the best VPN provider by submitting and reading reviews of dozens of services.
Chicago Filmmakers
Me and the rest of the Medill New Media Publishing Project approached the Chicago Filmmakers with an idea to bring their aging website up to date by adding community and social media features. We used Drupal to build a community site that lets CF members share video, chat on forums and connect with each other.
New Harvey Rising
A journalistic look at the rise and fall of the south suburban city of Harvey, conducted in the context of the city's 2007 mayoral election. Made for Medill's New Media Storytelling class, three of my classmates did the reporting and writing and I did all of the coding, graphics and design.
A Brief History of CTA's Purple Line
An all-Flash project exploring the history of the CTA Purple Line, created for Advanced New Media Storytelling at Medill. Designed to be modular, all text in the movie is pulled in from an external PHP script.
Dance Dance Rehab REBIRTH
A Dance Dance Revolution fansite I've been running since 2001 (minus a four-year hiatus from 2003-2007). At its peak it had more than 1000 members and dozens of message board posts daily. Now I'm bringing it back as an exercise in webmastering, PHP programming and SEO.
Video
Car Sharing: Catching On
A news report for the Medill News Service on the two major environmentally-conscious 'car sharing' services in Chicago, i-go and Zipcar.1:44 (10.91MB)
Green Lightbulbs Save Energy...And Green Too
Replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs is just one of the ways that consumers can save electricity—and money—in the home.3:33 (22.55MB)
Rizzo's TV Spot
A :30 spot made for a TV production class promoting Rizzo's, a hot new Naperville restaurant, bar and night spot. Created for an undergraduate television production class and positively received by the owner of the club. :32 (3.29MB)
Designed/Edited Publications
Gender Studies—Undergraduate
Gender Studies—Undergraduate is a yearly compilation of Benedictine University student papers relating to a topic in gender studies. The 2006 theme was "Images of Italians in Film" and yielded four papers, which were presented by their authors at an academic conference on gender studies at Purdue University Calumet in Spring 2006.
Download PDF (633k)
benLIFE
An comp for a university lifestyle magazine created in one of my undergraduate print layout classes. Contains stories written by other students about the various paths of study available at Benedictine University. Most of the advertisements were designed by my classmates, as well. The physical printed version looks much better but the PDF still does it justice.
Download PDF (1.08MB)
Published clips
- “Spamming as popular as ever”
- A look at the economics of the e-mail spam industry, what some innovators are doing to stop it and what administrators and legal professionals see as its future.
Northwest Indiana Times (03/03/2007) | Uncut at Medill Reports (03/06/2007)
- “Libraries checking out new ways to thwart thieves”
- Suburban Chicago libraries are taking increasingly complex steps to stop theft from their collections, including increased video surveillance and installation of RFID tags in materials to track their whereabouts.
Northwest Indiana Times (02/22/2007) | Medill Reports (02/20/2007)
- “As Web evolves, blind left behind”
- Web 2.0 has brought multimedia and community to the Internet, but for those who can't see, the new design philosophy behind the trend is making it more difficult to get around the net.
Chicago Defender (02/14/2007) | Northwest Indiana Times (cut, 02/19/2007)
Medill Reports (02/08/2007) - “No excuse to forget to buy roses this Valentine's day”
- The deep freeze that hit California in early 2007 may have stunted the growth of some crops, but flowers were still in plentiful supply.
Northwest Indiana Times (01/25/2007) | Medill Reports (01/23/2007)
- “Simple measures can save cash on power”
- The print story that accompanied this video package, reported by myself and Elyse Eisenberg.
Northwest Indiana Times (01/14/2007) | Medill Reports (01/10/2007)
- “iPhone may boost Cingular's reach”
- An analysis of what Apple's exclusive iPhone distribution contract with Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) would mean for the mobile phone industry. Written on the day of the iPhone's announcement, the article also explores the phone's undoubtable "cool" factor as a way to drive sales.
Northwest Indiana Times (01/13/2007) | Medill Reports (01/11/2007)