Linked by Air Internship

For Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, I implemented a revised events calendar. Improvements in the user experience included the ability to filter by semester (in addition to month and day) in the responsive grid view, controlled using the dropdown calendar widget. Filter state and scroll position persist across page loads, preserving the user's context.

I also contributed work to the course catalog pages and search interface, including animating the button pressed state for the submit box button. It's so much fun to click.

I helped to prototype navigation transitions for the WCMA home page. Hovering on a colored box on the homepage hides the rest of the UI to emphasize that box with its associated full-page background image, and clicking fades a solid color that splashes over the whole page to hide and reveal the transitioning UI.

I also prototyped a navigation and search bar. The black dot, which appears across the site, transitions into a hamburger menu icon. The search field and the title text occupy the same space, conserving mass.

I designed a new type setting for the catalog using the existing styles of Printed Matter in order to address the client's request to differentiate the author's name from the title and generally clean up the text.

I also redesigned the item lightbox to unify the type and bring out the bibliographic information more in the hierarchy. The two-column layout keeps the "Add to cart" above the fold, reducing friction to make a purchase.

Changes to search on Printed Matter separated out specific fields into an "Advanced filters" section, accessible from the search bar present on any page in the site. Fields are either freeform text, number ranges, or category selects. The search results display the search in a manner that mirrors the bibliographic information in the item lightbox.

I prototyped ideas for a new Linked by Air iOS app, which we refer to for now as Lettering. One such idea was a generative typeface made out of particles. The typeface is always changing over time based on probabilities, and by tuning those probabilities we can adjust font characteristics like weight and slant. My motivation was to create a parametric typeface that didn't necessarily look descended from Metafont.

Handwriting recognition was a natural input method for an app based on typography, and went toward answering the question of what made this app in particular about letters and not just arbitrary shapes. I created a handwriting recognition demo in Swift running on iOS (the particle typeface samples are also screenshotted from iOS).

Working closely with others in the studio, I implemented the new Linked by Air studio website. In addition to the new design, it now runs the latest version of Economy, the studio's content management system which also serves many of its clients.

I worked on the design and implementation of the site for Bridging Gowanus. The navigation is a fixed following menu that responds to the current section.

I worked on the diagram and created icons to represent types of events in the planning process.

I created a Slack bot to help us decide where to eat lunch. Over the summer, it gradually accumulated a database of food spots near the studio.

Some features were useful, and some not so useful.