Selected works of Bryan J Swift

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Freelance Client Work

1. MyCrysis

   

   I was contracted by Doug Smith in the Washington, D.C. offices of AKQA to handle the front end development of the Crysis project they had won. I worked from New York with the D.C. based team to translate design PSDs into a functional front end. The client side code I created was made into templates by the Drupal developers in the D.C. office. Once the initial template creation and Drupal configuration was completed I worked directly in the PHP files, editing the template code along with the CSS and JavaScript.

2. Ask the Professionals

   

   Amanada Schultz, formerly at Droga5, brought me on board for a couple of weeks to clean up the code and fix some critical bugs on a short timeline just before the delivery to Suave of this site. The bulk of the front end work is not mine but I want to include this project because it highlights my ability to come into a project and quickly be productive fixing show stopper bugs on an unfamiliar code base. The majority of the issues I needed to address were problems getting IE6 to render elements correctly and getting the JavaScript components to behave properly.

Client Work at AKQA

1. Smirnoff Gateway

   

   Diageo was having trouble with an abnormally high dropoff rate at the age validation step prior to gaining access to the site and felt the dropoff was related to the Gateway being in Flash. So they asked AKQA to redesign and rebuild it for them.

   Once the creative department had finished creating an updated look in psd format it was handed off to me for top to bottom implementation. One of the more interesting challenges of this was backporting a number of MooTools plugins (which I had previously written) for use with a legacy version which broke plugin compatibility in a bunch of ways. The most enjoyable part of this project was finally getting to add better keyboard support for the MooTools dropdown replacement script I wrote.

2. Motorola

   

   AKQA was commissioned to help Motorola rebrand, rearchitect, redesign and rebuild their global website and with the recently launched redesign my front end work is featured prominently on many of the templates/pages.

   I created most of the JavaScript classes and components which control the interactions between the user and the site. These elements were created in JavaScript utilizing an object oriented approach in order to facilitate code re-use on subsequent endeavors with Motorola. This project was interesting and exciting in a lot of ways because it pushed me to create lots of flexible UI components many of which replaced standard browser controls without compromising keyboard accessibility.

   Some of the pages I am most pleased with are the phones, accessories and the product comparison page. As with anything finished work there are some things I would like to change or tweak but all things considered I believe these turned out well.

3. Benjamin Moore Extranet

   

   The extranet project was another piece of work AKQA was commissioned to do, this time for Benjamin Moore. I'm sure by now this site is live, however as it is private all I can link to is the mock-up we delivered to them so they could integrate it with their back-end architecture. I was not as heavily involved in the coding of this project as I was in the Motorola or Smirnoff projects. I was, however, responsible for overseeing the front-end development as well as the bulk of the JavaScript work.

   I enjoyed this project because it required me to really dive into jQuery whereas much of my other work utilizes the MooTools framework. I'm the type of person who wants to grok a framework or tool and it's best practices before using it heavily and this design and interaction required heavy scripting and the client required jQuery.