Matt Hornsby

I worked alongside the rest of the product and development teams to plan, design, and produce production-ready front-end code. We’ve been working to move beyond the initial use of basic Bootstrap components towards a more bespoke, user- and task-focused design that is both more attractive and future-focused as we work to develop new markets and offerings.

I created a new, refined, identity and associated collatteral. I then incorporated the new identity into a fresh website design with a focus on large images and clean typography.

This site was created as part of an effort to differentiate them from the crop of smaller, less-supportive competitors. While sales is still a very in-person transaction, they are now able to get their foot in the door by showcasing their range of products and services online.

In particular, I drove the overall site design on thirtyonegifts.com across several revisions and a significant update to the responsive category and product pages.

During my time at Thirty-One we increased our usage data collection in hopes of informing incremental updates; the updated hosting page, which I developed, tripled user-initiated contacts.

The previous version of the site didn’t offer much information for visitors about upcoming events, and wasn’t as accessible to an audience which was increasingly visiting from mobile devices.

My new design put a focus on events through a grid on the homepage and new dedicated event pages would could be bookmarked or shared as direct links for the first time.

The new responsive design made this new information more accessible to attendees with CMS customizations to make it maintainable. This was, of course, before they replaced the former – more event-focused – venue with the new education focused memorial.

The content was focused around the movie information and ticket-buying, first showing the visitor the currently playing page features the day’s upcoming showtimes. Individual movie pages included a synopsis, trailer and additional showtimes.

It’s become generally accepted that hiding menus by default, behind a hamburger icon for instance, can dampen discoverability and therefore engagement. Priority Navigation is a new take on the Priority+ Navigation pattern.

The primary feature that sets it apart from other examples, is support for prioritization independent from menu ordering.

Have a look at the demo, on GitHub.

It leveraged the data available from race timing companies and pushed updates to runners’ Twitter (and later Facebook) accounts during the race and was often the quickest way for the user to get their race result.

I first thought of TweetMyTime a week or two before Peter Wilkinson made news manually tweeting his way through the 2009 London Marathon. TweetMyTime launched with the 2009 Columbus marathon, helping 1,787 users share over 7000 tweets on race morning; #cbusmarathon was a nationally trending topic on twitter for most of the morning. By the 2011 Columbus Marathon, I’d added direct Facebook support, sharing 9,870 status updates along with 5,443 tweets for 3,934 runners. In the end TweetMyTime was used by tens-of-thousands of runners during races in four states.

We got a lot of praise from our users and little bit of press, if you’re interested:

• Marathon runners can tweet on their feet
  The Columbus Dispatch
• Tweeting racers could raise profile of marathon in social media test
  Business First

I worked for a number of years as, primarily, a print designer so I have plenty of other samples to share, if that is the kind of thing you are interested in.