Christopher Marques

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Sound Studios

This up and coming recording studio business needed a digital presence as they quickly scaled across New York City. With the increase in locations, came increased bookings and customer inquiries. We solved this by setting them up with a digital booking solution, FAQ's, and a chat bot.

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 Developer/Designer

Services provided

Web Design, Brand Identity

Timeline​

2021

Development Platform​

WordPress

Visit Site

Challenge

The client was having more success than they could keep up with, and was in need of a way to relieve the stress of the overburdening but less critical tasks. As of this point, most of the business was being run through the two partners interacting directly with staff and customers through text or phone calls.

Objectives

The primary objective was to remove the need for the partners to interact directly for the business to function. We focused on creating a site that would answer most of the customers questions, while one of the partners sought out a booking platform that we would then integrate into the site.

Research

When I was brought on this project, there was another designer working on the wireframes for the site. It soon became clear that the designer would not be able to complete the designs in the time frame we needed. At this point all I had was a low fidelity concept of some of the features the client wanted for the site.

From here I began researching similar sites, other recording studios, and sites that fit the aesthetic the client had explained to me. It was from this research I was able to narrow down on a set of elements the page should include and some best practices for how we might lay out the site.

As the client began to send over reference images of the studios and their brand, I was able to expand my research and better lock down colors and fonts that would work with what they had.

Design System

Fonts Modern Clean easy to read. Colors modern sleek, dark like the studio. Strong contrast to the colors of the studio images.

Aa

Gotham

Heading

size 71/48/20

Aa

Montserrat

Body

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

#F2F2F2

#FFFFFF

#000000

#8D8D8D

#ECECEC

#0F0F0F

Challenges:

Goals:

Scope of Work:

Finished Site

Client Feedback

Conclusion

Beat Vortex

Previous
Next

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

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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.