Refinery29
Interactive Sites
During my time at Refinery29, I worked on a team called “Bespoke” situated in R29’s Product and Engineering department. The Bespoke team developed custom interactive websites and experiences for special R29 features, clients and events. In my role as Senior Design Technologist, I drove concept-development, design and prototyping across various VR experiences, experiential installations and interactive micro-sites. Below are two of my favorites.
29 Rooms:
Official Website.
Every New York Fashion Week, starting in 2015, Refinery29 unleashes 29Rooms: an immersive funhouse of style, culture, and technology. More than an event, 29Rooms is a megaphone for imagination, inclusivity, and possibility in the form of 29 installations.
The Refinery29 Product team was tasked with creating the online component of the 29 Rooms experience. We faced the challenge of helping remote users experience a connection to the magic of 29 Rooms. The resultant site is a combination of 3D space capture by Matterport, hyper-curated media snippets in stylized formatting, teaser video, and event billing.
Role: Senior Design Technologist
Responsibilities: user experience design, visual and interface design, user flow wireframing, front-end prototyping
Press: Billboard | Ad Week | New York Magazine | Wall Street Journal | VICE Creators Project
VR29: Refinery29’s WebVR Viewer.
VR29 is a stylized, proprietary WebVR screening room for Refinery29, a women-focused digital-media company with a global audience of over 500 million. The room features a selection of 360 video content and a light-weight onboarding process. It was built using A-Frame and designed in a mixture of Cinema4D, Unity and Photoshop.
Key challenge was translating the strong, aesthetically-driven Refinery29 brand into an entirely new forum; to build a beautiful space within the performance restrictions of poly counts and video storage in WebVR. All while creating an experience simple enough for majority first-time VR users.
Role: Senior Design Technologist
Responsibilities: user experience (in-game and onboarding), user testing, interactive prototypes, art direction, 3D object optimization, and building and finessing final room layout in JavaScript
