The Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art is host to artists from all walks of life, from live performance and guerrila installation to painting and new media. In addition to other courses, the entire department (sophomore - senior) meets once per week to share and critique eachothers' latest work in sessions arranged by fellow students, which requires a considerable amount of planning and coordination. In recent years, it became clear that pre-existing methods were not going to accomodate the department's exploding growth. What were once simple activities with a smaller group had become a time sink, so more efficient ways of keeping students informed and connected had to be found: enter the web. The SIM web site is an ambitious, long term project developed with future expansion in mind and has been revised many times in accordance with the unique needs of students and faculty. The first of its kind at MassArt, it immediately became an indispensable tool, bringing the community closer together by encouraging extended discussion after hours and providing permanent, accessible records for information that was originally only available on physical bulletin boards and calendars.

Tech: PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS (black theme courtesy of Matt Moore)

Highlights:

• >> 100% custom, MySQL driven content management system (CMS):
• • * News
  • * Categorized discussion forum
  • * Personal profiles
  • * Student/Faculty Directory (by face or name)
  • * Session calendar with student presentation history
• >> "Skinable" UI via CSS
• >> Community friendly self moderation
• >> Mix of public/private content

GameLogic is a significant force in multi-platform online gaming, offering robust client-server software and related support systems. I worked primarily with their client development team programming a proprietary library of ActionScript 2.0 classes and building modular Flash templates for an assortment of online lottery and casino games. I also assisted the creative team with new sounds and graphics, in addition to optimizing pre-existing assets in an effort to improve application performance, loading times and the time required for future changes. Thanks to everyone's hard work, this young company has a new product portfolio that will surely blow away the competition!

Tech: Flash MX 2004 Professional (AS 2.0), PHP, XML