STEFAN FIELDING-ISAACS

Being that this site is largely about my history as a project manager and web designer, rather than a technical writer, this portfolio is devoted to Web-related work. I have also authored over a hundred technical manuals (both hardware and software). What follows here is a selection of Web sites for which I have designed the information architecture or the user experience or both. I was project manager on all of these sites except for BugleBoy Jeans.

My then business partner (Steve Rapport) and I built this site (much larger in its first incarnation) in about eight frenzied weeks of 70-80hrs/wk. I wrote all the code and he did the lion's share of the Photoshop work since I was still learning it at the time. We broke all kinds of new ground with this site design and were recognized with one of the first Clios awarded to a Web site. This image is from the main entry tunnel to the site. The current site (not my work) may be found here. This whole page (designed for 28.8 modems) was no more than 35kb in size. We pioneered a number of new ideas with this site, including the first billboard connected live to a World Wide Web site.

This was the first project by my company, Art & Science W³ Development. Ten of us built what was at the time the largest site on the Web (over a million documents were eventually stored in its database) in the course of twelve weeks. The site is still up and running serving the American Association of Neurosurgeons.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAS COMPANY (1995)

This was a long-term project for us. I put together a project team of over a dozen people and we had to marshal the resources of every division of SoCal Gas to contribute to this project. Our schedule for the project was sixteen weeks and we completed it on time and within budget. The work on this project was profiled in a Forbes article on return on investment from Internet sites (by SoCal Gas' estimate, they had a 1775% return on investment in the first year of the site's operation).

We built this site pro-bono. It was a very large project that we built at cost because we all believed that the company should give something back to the community. This site is the No. 1 resource for AIDS/HIV education and information in the world. It is hosted and directed by the University of California at San Francisco, and was paid for by donations from companies like Merck and Kaiser Permanente (who gave us the original funding).

It took us a year to build. I'm very proud of it—the story of its building is related in the book, "Secret of Successful Web Sites"—itself a best-seller. The image here is of the original home page design and the current site (which still uses the same information design and database) may be found here. The original design permitted the user to navigate the site from within a single page (using dynamic HTML).

My firm did a lot of work for Mercedes-Benz's US advertising agency (Lowe & Partners, NY). I just found the original source to the push channel technology that I built for them (I designed it and wrote the code). It was pretty much state to the art when built and I think it still holds up pretty well today (providing you use Internet Explorer). Contact me for password access to the online version.

We built this award-winning site for Bugle Boy Jeans in 1996. The entire site was driven by Javascript, and the pages built on-the-fly, as the user requested them from the server. This was required because we had logic in the site that altered the pages you saw as you played the game. Each player could pick their playing piece and punishment for wrong moves was having to read company marketing collateral. The game allowed users to save their position, and grand winners collected a variety of prizes from Bugle Boy. The site survived for several years on the Web, finally getting pulled down when Bugle Boy ran into financial difficulties a couple of years ago. This is an image of the mouse pad we created for them using the game art. User retention averaged over fifteen (15) minutes - a record for a Web site at the time. Here is an image of the main game screen.

Sun Microsystems came us to build a site to support their new Java toolkit (this is before they formed a division solely to support Java). We built the site in about ten weeks. I art-directed the design of the site and was trying for a French cafe-style look and feel, hence the art and typestyle try to reflect this.

I was the Director of Web Services for for the fifty-person Asimba.com. For a couple of years I worked in the fitness industry (online) and played a significant role in the development and strategy of two online fitness startups (Asimba.com and GetFit.com). Asimba.com was purchased by Joe Weider shortly after I was hired away from them to work at GetFit.com (their chief competitor) and no longer exists as a separate entity. But I learned a lot about marketing working there.

I was the Vice President of Web Development for for the sixty-person GetFit.com. GetFit had a lot of promise but sadly we ran out of funding in early 2001. However, I saved the home page design I did for them as a representative sample. I like its simplicity. When one rolled over any of the duotone (blue) images, they reversed into a full-color version and a little pop-up came up under the cursor telling you more about that area of the site.

Coremetrics is the leading provider of Web analytics software (a fairly new category). Their software allows firms to track and segment user populations with a high degree of accuracy and is most useful for commercial clients like Eddie Bauer, Victoria's Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Intel and AT&T. I co-designed (along with the now-defunct Phoenix Pop), developed the page templates, and maintained this site.

Just before taking a sabbatical year, I designed a Web site for a friend's biotech firm, JG Perpich, LLC. It's a small site to announce the launching of this new startup. The entire design process took something like twenty-five hours with their cooperation (they were easy clients with whom to work).

This was a crash project for the State of Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. I had to do the IA for the site, design the UX, go through user tests, and have my team build it in less than seven weeks. We launched on-time, on-budget, and the client came back to us for a lot more work in the 2007 fiscal year. The site is DHTML/CSS driven and uses no Flash in order to be Section 508 compliant. The site is up at: SmokingStopsHere

Yet another crash project. I designed both the information architecture and user experience for this site as well. This was a challenging project both because of the short time frame and our building it on top of a proprietary CMS. At the very last moment we had to add an ecommerce implementation to the site. The site is DHTML/CSS and is driven using a proprietary CMS that allows the client to change navigation, content, and images at will. See it at: Martek.

Good Samaritan Hospital came to us to design a CD/DVD that would promote their rehabilitation services. I worked with them to leverage some of our existing campaign creative into a format that would work well on a CD. I crafted both the information architecture and user experience for this project. I also art directed the project. This project is still being built.