This is a Shopify theme that I created for a premium clothing brand. The goal was to create a theme that echoed the style of the clothing being sold. I went with a clean, minimalist design that featured large photos of the products.

The site also had to be responsive, so that customers could purchase products from the store on any device.

PhotoWatcher is a web app I created to help run a Photo Day for a club I run at my university. Photo Day is an opportunity for students to come and have their photos taken professionally (by myself and my team). We ran the event successfully in the past, but managing the photos was a problem. Memory cards were lost, photos were mixed up, and confusion ensued. To solve the problem for the next photo day, I decided to write an application to manage everything for us. This application was written about 3 days before the event, so the code could definitely be cleaner. It could stand to have some unit testing set up, but it worked perfectly for our event, so I'm calling it a success.

The system consists of a NodeJS server and several HTML5/JavaScript/jQuery clients. The clients communicate with each other and the server using web sockets. The code is available on GitHub.

I used Adobe Lightroom's tethered shooting mode to automatically download RAW photos from the camera as they were taken. The server watches this folder for new images using watch. When a new image is detected, the server extracts a JPEG preview from the Camera RAW file using rawly. It then notifies all of the clients that a new photo has been uploaded.

Customers are added to the system using a simple web page that collects their name and email address. When a new user is added, all of the other clients are notified via a message through a web socket.

Once a customer is added, the customer's name is selected on the Photographer Console. Photos appear on this screen as they are taken, and are tagged in the database with the currently selected customer's name. The photographer can also tag images as "final" images by clicking the "select" button on each thumbnail.

We wanted to enable the customer to see their photos as they were taken. To do this, we set up another display running a simple viewer. This viewer shows the last photo taken. The display can also show any image by clicking its thumbnail on the Photographer Console. A similar screen was set up outside the "studio" area running a slideshow of the images that had already been taken. This helped draw more customers.

Once the event was over, I created an Overview screen that let us view each of the selected photos, download their RAW files, and upload final edited photos. This helped us keep our editors in sync, and prevented them from editing the same photos.

Finally, we created a simple web interface for customers to be able to log in and view their photos. We also set it up so that the email could be provided through a URL query. This allowed us to send custom links to our customers through MailChimp.

Overall, the system worked amazingly and really streamlined the process. We had 60 customers throughout the day and took more than 250 photos. I am now planning on spending some time creating a more robust and maintainable version of the system for the next photo day. For now, I have posted all of my code on GitHub for others to use/expand/learn from. Here is the link.

This is a booklet I designed for the Ryerson University Co-op Student's Association. The goal was to refresh their existing marketing collateral with a fresh, professional new look. Adobe InDesign was used for the layout, and Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop were used to create the graphics.

This was a project that I built for my third year embedded systems course. It consists of a pair of ESP8266 wifi microcontrollers, an OLED display and a temperature sensor. I put everything into 3d printed cases that were designed in Autodesk Inventor. You can find a full write up about it on my other site here.

Last summer I had the opportunity to complete a 4 month co-op placement at Hydro One in Barrie. I was a computer programmer analyst, and was responsible for maintaining all of the programs used by the Training and Development department. In addition to providing maintenance, I also created a new program that managed the training courses offered by the department. I worked within the existing software stack at Hydro One (WinForms, C# and SQL).

One of my main goals while creating this program was to make it as user friendly as possible. To accomplish this, I worked with the future users of the program to develop an interface that was both intuitive and easy to use. I created a number of custom UI elements, and incorporated drag-and-drop functionality. As a majority of the functions of this program involve courses offered on specific dates, I chose to organize a majority of the information in a calendar view.

I also incorporated a number of user preferences, including the ability to adjust the main interface colors.

While working on the programs, I found it challenging to keep the code documentation up to date. The existing documents were created in Microsoft Word, which made them difficult to navigate, and meant that you had to manually update any functions that were added or changed. To fix this, I created a command line application that took the XML documentation files generated by Visual Studio and converted them into a single HTML based documentation file. I set this program to run during the post-build events in Visual Studio. This ensured that the documentation was always up to date.

The HTML file uses a light weight JavaScript router (rlite) to handle all of the page changes without refreshing. The logo is loaded as a DataURI, and all scripts are embedded in the file. This allows the documentation to be contained in a single HTML file.

This is a website for a local personal trainer. The idea for this website was to create a platform that could be easily expanded to grow with his business.

The website is a simple, single page website. It is mobile friendly, and has a contact form at the bottom that sends emails to the client. Google's ReCaptcha software is used to prevent spam. Everything is running off of a simple NodeJS webserver, which provides fast response times with minimal server load.

My brother and I have been building 3d printers for almost two years. In this time, we have built three different 3d printers, two of which are our own design. Our printers are based on the open source RepRap project. My brother works mostly on the mechanical components of the printers, while I do most of the electronics and software.

After we built our first printer, we were asked by the Simcoe County District School Board to speak at a series of conferences and elementary schools about innovation and 3d printing. Our talks were well received, and we were able to inspire many students to start innovating on their own.

Inspiring 'Tech' talk from SCDSB alumni and current student--building a 3D printer to create and innovate! #SCDSB pic.twitter.com/CjIJiPFk5i

— SPotts (@potts_spotts) April 28, 2015

Andrew /Dan Colvin @BarrieNorth1 student /grad telling of their 3D printer experience to SCDSB admin @SCDSB_Schools pic.twitter.com/HN0B22odXZ

— John Dance (@JohnDance4) April 28, 2015

Amazing brothers designed and built their own 3D printer and CNC!! They are our future!!! #NPDL @SCDSB_Schools pic.twitter.com/OuIDDldLJx

— Leyla PF (@leylapf) April 10, 2015

Amazing creations by #scdsb students who designed/built this 3D printer. Sparking students to think big. #npdl pic.twitter.com/V5pvjspSuC

— Alison Golding (@A_J_Golding) April 10, 2015

This animation was done for a school project. It was used as a backdrop for a live presentation. All visual assets were designed from scratch in Adobe Illustrator, and were animated with Adobe After Effects. The voiceover was recorded in Garage Band.

Over the past 7 years, I have worked with the Transportation Technology department at Barrie North Collegiate to create promotional materials for their various programs. These have included t-shirts, sweaters and banners. I also worked with the school's Students With A Testimony (SWAT) club to create a unique t-shirt design.

This is a project I worked on for a restaurant in Guelph Ontario. My client needed a simple website to display their menu, location, and hours. They also wanted a way for customers to post reviews, and upload photos of themselves wearing RU Serious clothing in the community (this has become a local tradition).

The front end of the website is a fairly simple single page website. Everything was designed to be responsive in order to be accessible to the largest audience possible.

In order to facilitate the review and photo features, I developed a custom management system in PHP. The system accepts photo uploads and reviews, and holds them in a queue. The site administrator is notified of the new posting, and is given an opportunity to approve the review.

I used the MaterializeCSS framework to build the user interface of the dashboard. The goal was to make it as simple as possible, so that anyone could use it with minimal training. By utilizing a material design framework, I was able to implement common interaction patterns that most people are already familiar with.

My client also wanted to be able to edit and manage the menu on the website. To facilitate this, I added an easy to use editing system to the administration page.

Everything makes use of AJAX calls to a PHP based API. This provides a seamless experience for the user, and minimized the number of jarring page refreshes.

The backbone of the system is a basic MySQL database. This holds the users, the menu items, the reviews, and the photos.

As the multimedia director of the York University Musicians Society, I have had to opportunity to design promotional materials for them on numerous occasions. Here are a few examples.