My name is James and i’m a motion designer based in Manhattan. For the past eight years I’ve animated promotional videos, company logos, icons and brought characters to life. I also boast a background in web design, illustration, and audio engineering. Below is a collection of my recent work. I look forward to connecting with you!
Clover Video Style Guide
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Clover Component Catalog
The component catalog was an idea I created to simplify requests between our design team and onboarding managers. The majority of our restaurant operators are unfamiliar with proper web terminology and things often get lost in translation. By categorizing all of our components, I was able to speed up the kickoff call process and minimize design revisions.
Bento Overview Storyboard
This is a storyboard that served as the preliminary round of one of my long format videos. In every video I start with a simple wireframe and show how placeholder visuals line up with copy and voice overs. This particular storyboard was largely approved and its transformation can be seen in the BentoBox Overview video below.
This video is a general overview of all the different product offerings from our company. I was tasked with creating the storyboard (seen above) and visual concepts to present to my CEO. After getting approval I cut any dead air from the voice over and leveled the audio. In After Effects I added in a logo reveal GIF that I had created previously and animated the corresponding images and devices to line up with the highlighted talking points.
Following the visual example I set from the previous video, I animated this promo to introduce our new online ordering add-on. In addition to creating the storyboard, I also illustrated each asset in Illustrator. Then I threaded each concept together using some exciting transitions in After Effects. We did not use a voice over for this project so all touch points appeared on the screen in text and were accompanied by background music of my choosing.
After the merger, my CEO shot a walkthrough video on her phone of our software working in a Clover point of sales system. This video was a completely different process as it was needed day of and used branding I was new to. I first color corrected the phone footage to increase the quality and framed it around a space we could add bulleted text. I then took the opportunity to animate our new logo for the intro/outro. Finally I edited the voice over and added a backing track.
Old Salt
Old salt is a consultant group that hired me to animate their logo for a digital kiosk. Their request was to have the topographic lines move and loop seamlessly. I was able to achieve this in After Effects with the fractal noise effect. I then took it a step further by adding a keyframe expression to randomly rotate their compass logo mark and connected it to the changing values of the coordinates.
Maelstrom
Maelstrom is a crypto portfolio that commissioned a looping animation of their blurred organic shapes interacting with each other for their website. In After Effects I animated three separate translucent gradients with a wave expression and then contained them inside a gilded frame.
Verifi
Verifi is a digital media company that wanted me to animate their DNA strand to rotate in a three dimensional loop inside of the hero image on their website. They provided me with five different illustrations that lived on each page that I took into illustrator and rotated along the z-axis.
Narragansett Beer
This was a passion project that I gifted to Narragansett Beer. I illustrated a safari window VW T1 bus (my dream car) with a surfboard and a classic green Coleman cooler on the roof rack. I framed their slogan around and imported it into After Effects. I made the body rock over the uneven ground while the shadow contracting underneath it. I also got the window and tires to roll and had the cooler jump (complete with sticker).
Squatch & Learn
During a design conference in Portland, OR my team and I attended an accessibility class. After we returned we hosted a Bigfoot-themed happy hour to educate our coworkers on what we had learned. I came up with the clever name and illustrated a Sasquatch with color blind simulation glasses and a flowing beverage. On the invite I used puppet pins and layer masks to give this character life.
Websites are created to engage users and entice them to use your product. Animation is a super effective way to immerse potential customers in your brand. Web and motion design are very powerful tools, especially when used together to tell a story. Additionally, each website I design is accessible and responsive.
Rainforest Cafe
With 23 locations, the Rainforest Cafe had many brand guidelines to follow. It was my job to manipulate all of their assets using Photoshop and add them to the site via CSS. I found some exciting ways to frame content with foliage, added parallax animal prints to the site background, and included some gradients to modernize the jungle theme. In addition to the reveal animations on load, I also was entrusted with making their frog mascot ‘Cha! Cha!’ wave and blink with layer masks and puppet pins in After Effects.
Bathtub Gin
Since Bathtub Gin is marketed as a speakeasy, I decided to lean heavily on the theme of Prohibition. The 1920s style graphics and dark site helped to deliver this message. I added in sprawling photo arches, sunburst button ornaments and spiral heading accents. You can feel the natural flow of the content even with the beautiful art deco borders dividing each box into a grid. I again was allowed to animate their logo which I achieved by separating the flapper girl’s appendages into different layers and moving them behind the bathtub.
Naya
As one of the most prominent Middle Eastern chains on the East Coast, Naya came to me with high expectations. Before I even started designing the site I was tasked with creating a new code recipe for our platform that transformed hero galleries into split overlays. From there I used rounded borders, drop shadows and color blocks to make things feel polished and professional. They even opted to use my illustrated dietary icon library, which I worked side by side with engineering to make accessible to screen readers.
