Made by Rhino — Handmade Websites

Laughing Rhino provided me a with a great start into my freelance career. However, the new year has made me re think my strategy and the overall positioning of the company for the year ahead. As a result, I have decided to realign the company and the way I present a selection of my work and services that I provide. I also wanted to design the website to use HTML5 and to show how far myself (and the web) have come in a bid to attract a particular breed of forward thinking clientele.

As the user base for eCampus grew, so did the feature request list. In a matter of months the development team found themselves swamped with incoming requests and no way to manage it. I stepped up and volunteered to create a simple feature request system which allowed the business owners and sales team to add requests when it hit them. This worked well because they had access to it in the office and on the road. Coupled with the Agile development process that I pushed forward made this the ideal system for the development team to manage requests and act on them after discussion at the weekly development meetings with the business owners.

Once eCampus gained momentum and we began adding new features to the system, I saw a prime opportunity to get back in touch with our users to get some feedback and learn how they were using the LMS in their everyday work. The results from the usability study was well received by the business owners and the case for a redesign was made and accepted. I worked on the entire interface from scratch starting with only paper and pen mocks, constantly iterating and organizing the content based on our results; crafting a new user experience which was more inline with the results we got. I also worked closely with the development team integrating my work into the application, learning CodeIgniter and PHP along the way.

eCampus launched successfully in July 2009 and noticing that there was already quite a buzz in the job networks across Australia, I was given a fun project to work on which was the Leap Learning blog, The Young and the Rendered. The blog follows the lives of the eCampus characters as they weave, intersect and collide. Once again, with only 2 days to complete a design I accepted this mammoth task and dazzled them with some illustrations and custom web fonts delivered using Typekit. The business owners were over the moon when they saw the end product and the job network consultants found themselves constantly checking the blog, "tuning in" to the latest instalment of gossip and humour.

Leap Learning hired me in June 2009 as their lead front end developer to help them translate designs that were created by an external company, Thirst Creative into a web friendly, standards savvy and accessible website for their learning management system (LMS), eCampus. Putting the icing on the cake, they requested that I complete the development within a month and make sure that the LMS worked seamlessly across different browsers. Always up for a challenge, I accepted the position and amazed them with an interface that not only worked on desktop browsers, but also on the iPhone.

Aboriginal Fine Art approached me in September 2008 to create a simple, easy to use and immersive experience for their aboriginal art gallery in Brisbane, Queensland. Servicing clients both nationally and internationally, the challenge was to create an overall experience that appealed to different types of clientele, at the same time allowing them to feel at ease and take their time to peruse through different artist profiles, learn about aboriginal art and search for different types of paintings based on size or budget. In addition to that, AFA also required an easy to use content management system (CMS) that allowed them to easily add new artists, create new videos and manage their paintings.

As a young designer I was interested in the freelance world and the chaos that came along with it. I started Laughing Rhino in 2008 in a bid to offer my user experience & web development services to the masses. Since its launch in 2008, Laughing Rhino has seen me through some tough times and graced me with some very nice clients and partnerships, teaching me all along the way the ins and outs of managing a business, interacting with clients and the dynamics of working with teams both large and small.

Since I started designing websites, the urge to have a personal website that I could use as a playground to test techniques out and to show potential clients what I could do just grew and grew, and that itch didnt go away until I scratched it. Sushimonstr was crafted using HTML5 and a combination of CSS2.1 and CSS3. The feedback from the design community has been overwhelming and I am happy that it was received so well. Since the launch early 2009, Sushimonstr has been featured in many CSS galleries, made to the front page of Smashing Magazine and even made it on the shortlist for the McFarlane prize for excellence in Australian web design, which was also made into a book.