Recent Work by David Cole

EtherPad

I joined the tiny EtherPad team as the design lead. Most of my work experience has been in an environment like EtherPad: among a tiny team of engineers I'm the voice of UX, the designer of all visual elements, and coder of most of the HTML & CSS.

EtherPad had distinct phases in its brief life-cycle (Google acquired the company in December 2009). My first challenge was to make the product approachable and clear to the non-hacker. Next was to demonstrate to users what the dang thing was even for (a problem lacking a satisfying individual answer, I'm afraid). Then, along with continued refinement, we entered a phase of building tools in support of the core writing interface.

Fluther

I worked with Fluther on and off from 2009 to 2010, right up until their acquisition by Twitter. Before the acquisition, we were working on a complete redesign of the website. I helped them with a renewed product strategy, which informed a series of concept, user experience, and visual design choices. We weren't able to complete the work, but it was great to see a single vision carried through the complete design stack.

I also did a lot of little design bits here and there, including the complete design of the federated version of the site, their blog design, a redesigned tag experience, and various illustrations and UI faceliftery.

Disqus

I was brought on to help Disqus freshen up their identity, but during the initial conversations it became clear that Disqus-the-product had bigger problems than Disqus-the-company. The build up of features for both publishers and commenters — two groups with little overlap — was blurring focus and leaving users confused. A new strategy: turn Disqus into two products and redesign the site to match.

The redesign of Disqus, then, wasn't about adding in anything new. Rather, it was a restructuring of the old to support the continued health of what would become a family of products. One of the most challenging things I've ever worked on was the embedded comment system for Disqus. It was a hefty task to design (and code!) for a system that could function on any site, regardless of page width, type, backgrounds, etc.

Sleepover

I hit a point in 2009 when I felt tired of hitting the same problems over and over again. I reviewed my work experiences and noticed that many of my favorite projects were blogs, news sites, magazines, and the like. At the same time, I had befriended a book designer who wanted to work more on the web.

Intersecting our interests was the troubled publishing industry, so we decided to start a studio focused on online publishing projects. Our largest project was a complete redesign of BET's website, but my personal favorite projects were Bygone Bureau, Put This On, Lapham's Quarterly, and PRI. Our Tumblr themes are used by hundreds of thousands of blogs, including brands like Kate Spade and GQ. Under the Sleepover banner, I wrote a popular experimental post called Metagames and Containers.

And the rest...

The previous are the largest points in my design career, but I tend to work on a lot of projects at any given moment. Here are some snippets from various smaller projects that I've enjoyed.

I love drawing, but I'm much more comfortable in Photoshop than I am with a pencil and paper. So, I find pixel art a very natural fit for me when I feel like drawing.

Also included is a mockup of Showroom, a fork of EtherPad that I designed for The Colbert Report for their script writing.