Christopher Marques

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Sound Studios

Sound Studios is a rapidly growing recording studio company based in NYC. The project involved creating a website that provided an accessible digital presence, streamlined booking system, and chatbot for customer service.

Overview

Sound Studios is a company started by two friends as a side hustle, which quickly evolved into a full time business. They offer low cost professional recording service's focusing solely on vocal recording. This has allowed them to open multiple locations across NYC, due to the concepts need for minimal space. The company continues to expand, and is branching out to new states.

Project Owner​

Sound Studios

Role

Web Designer, UX/UI Designer

Services provided

Web Design, Brand Identity, UX/UI Design, Booking Integration

Timeline​

2021

Development Platform​

WordPress

Visit Site

Challenge

The company was growing faster than the owners could handle manually. They needed a website that would handle booking, customer inquiries, and provide answers to common questions without needing direct interaction.

Objectives

The objective was to create a platform that reduced the amount of manual labor by offering an automated booking system and a comprehensive FAQ section. A chatbot was also included to handle customer inquiries.

Research

When I joined the project, the existing wireframes did not align with the desired features, and it became clear the designs couldn’t be completed in time. I took over, starting with a review of competitor websites to identify best practices for booking systems, mobile-first design, and user experience. I also gathered user feedback on common booking challenges and collaborated with Sound Studios to understand their key services and goals, focusing on price transparency and clear service descriptions.

In tandem with this, I worked with the client to refine the visual direction of the site. Using reference images of their studios and brand, I researched appropriate colors and typography that would align with their sleek, modern look while enhancing usability. This approach allowed us to create a cohesive design system that balanced both functional needs and the studio’s aesthetic.

 

Design System

The fonts chosen were Gotham for headings and Montserrat for body text to ensure modern and sleek readability. The color palette focused on strong contrasts, incorporating sleek, dark tones that matched the studio’s atmosphere and branding.

Aa

Gotham

Heading

size 71/48/20

Aa

Montserrat

Body

size 48/30/25/20/17/15

#F2F2F2

#FFFFFF

#000000

#8D8D8D

#ECECEC

#0F0F0F

Elements to be Addressed:

  • Manual labor involved in booking and answering inquiries.
  • Need for an automated system to streamline customer interactions.
  • Lack of a cohesive online identity that reflected the modern, sleek aesthetic of the studios.

Goals:

  • Create a fully functional booking platform integrated with the website.
  • Design a website that captured the look and feel of the physical studio spaces.
  • Automate customer inquiries through a chatbot and provide answers through an FAQ.

Scope of Work:

  • Website Development: Created a website that allows clients to book studio time online.
  • Brand Identity: Refined the brand’s online presence with consistent design elements.
  • Automation: Implemented a booking platform and FAQ section to reduce manual labor.
  • Chatbot Integration: Set up a chatbot to handle customer inquiries.

Finished Site

Client Feedback:

Conclusion:

The website allowed the business to scale efficiently, supporting the increase in bookings without adding extra manual work. The branding reinforced the modern, sleek identity of the studios, and the digital solutions significantly reduced the need for direct client interaction, freeing up the owners’ time.

Beat Vortex

Beat Vortex is the working title for a rhythm game I began working on in 2018. 
I picked back up work on the project during 2020 to see how much further along I could get. 

After extensive research, I was able to implement multithreading for the song loading and analysis.  
This took load times on mobile from 7-12 minutes depending on the song to 50-90 secs. 

I later use a similar technique to improve the terrain generation, which yielded similar results. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello. 

Honor Lore and art

During the pandemic, I took the opportunity to freelance and work from home as a way for me to focus on finishing up one of my passion projects.  

One of the first steps along this journey was to develop more of the lore and background of the world. 

Honor Rulebook

As progress on the game began to pick up steam, I shifted focus over to refining the rulebook I had previously thrown together during the original development. 

As part of the process, visual and grammatical improvements were made to improve the flow and clarity of the rules. 

After completing the revisions of the rulebook, the project moved forward into play tests and further refinement. 

Journal App

This past year I started working on developing a productivity app. I felt that the to-do list’s or habit trackers I had tried were very narrowly focused on doing one thing well. This often left users needing multiple apps to handle simple planning and task management for their day to day. This creates a lot of opportunities for confusion,  wasted time, and more pain points than their software solves. 

The goal of the Journal App is to give every day users the same depth and control over planning of their schedules as we have for corporations with software like Jira, Trello, Monday, or Asana. 

This project has been a great test of my UI design and implementation. It has also given me a chance to further improve my workflow for loading/storing user data. 

Tools used:  Photoshop, Trello, Unity, Visual Studio. 

Tulipanov Virtual Gallery

For this project, I was asked by the painter, Igor Tulipanov, to create a virtual gallery space where he could host private exhibitions of his art. 

I used a concept image he gave me to model the exterior off of. I then designed an interior that worked well for that space and fit his unique art style. 

The final goal for the project is to be able to embed the gallery on the homepage of their site. This proved to be the main challenge of this project was setting up the ‘multiplayer’ aspect, due to it being webgl. 

 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Photon 

Pip42 - 1 : Building design

PIP42 – 1 gives players the ability to place down structures and create bases on a foreign planet. To do this required a modular building. 

I started off by building a mood board of space structures that I felt fit the aesthetic I was looking for. 
Since the game is top down, I need to design with the ability for the  roof of all the models to be removable. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya. PureRef. 

Honor Stats Rebalancing

After the first few play tests, we found the stats for Honor needed to be rebalanced. 
Using google sheets allowed me to visualize the distributions of stats for classes, weapons, and armor. 
I was able to do this using conditional formatting, which I set to shade cell based on their value. 

The original stat calculations took a considerable amount of time to work out. 
Developing a new system cut down the time substantially. 

Tools used: Google Sheets

Honor Card Design

Over a few months, I worked to refine the card designs for my tabletop card game. Here are some iterations of the early stages. 

After not seeing much progress towards a suitable design, I decided to create a mood board to help define what I wanted to create. 

I’ve settled on a simplified look with minimal framing, allowing more room to let the art shine. 

After settling on the new design, I began implementing those concepts across the rest of the card types from the game.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Pureref

Graphics by Color Group

Before
After

This was a project for a local business. They wanted their site updated to something that was more modern and fresh than their old site. 
I designed and built out the new site remotely, then swapped the site out over night to prevent downtime and users seeing a broken site. 

www.ColorGroup.com

Museum of Bops

Museum of Bops was a freelance animation project for the painter Igor Tulipanov.  

Igor wished to see the characters from his paintings come to life. 

I modeled the character, built out a museum and animated all the characters.

The video is the intro of the project where the characters enter the museum before climbing into the paintings to interact with their fellow bops

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello.