Phil Tobias

Led development in redesign of the TBWA\Chiat\Day New York and Los Angeles offices. Both offices have a customized, mobile friendly carousel and Spotlit.es embeds to show off their work, clients, and leadership in a simple cohesive single page web presence.

New York website
Los Angeles website

Pilot.is a design + technology unit. We create artful, handcrafted products that live at the intersection of marketing and engineering. Pilot is the creator of Projeqt.

Content Distribution Made Simple. Make it easy for your brand to create real-time, social campaigns for the web. Spotlites allow you to distribute dynamic content to your current website, microsite, mobile, tablet, Facebook page and more, all in a matter of seconds. Manage your entire brand presence online with our intuitive, artfully designed platform.

Works daily with the Pilot.is team to actualize changes in development and user experience to Projeqt.  Leverages agile development to architect and engineer a series of major updates.  Additionally, leads front-end development and author of the WordPress plugin for Projeqt embeds. Projeqt has been recognized by The Daily, The Webby Awards, Mashable, and FWA.  It won the Education Resource category at SXSW 2012.

The team that made blitzagency.com are in a multipage spread in the how_we_built section of .NET Magazine describing the redesign process.  As tech lead, the site’s technology stack and behavior is explained throughout the interview.  Additionally, a tutorial on how to create a check-in map and leaderboard using Foursquare and the Google Maps API finishes up the feature.

Led development on redesign of company’s website handling Front/Back-End with a custom WordPress installation as a CMS. Assisted on Creative and UX to create an app-like feel.  Heavy use of Javascript and CSS3 was used to implement sliders, transitions, panaroma dragging, and touch-based behavior.  Launch became huge success becoming a Top Tweet on Twitter and SOTD on FWA.

FWA – Site of the Day 4/12/2011

Built out the original HTML experience of the Halo Waypoint site.  Took advantage of .NET’s MVC2 framework to quickly build out a content driven web site.  The Waypoint site also had an excellent Silverlight version.

Worked with a team to develop rover.com to create a large array pages in a short turnaround.  Leveraged Javascript to build a lightweight homepage carousel, validation, and various modals.

Paper written and presented at the 2010 Design Conference in Chicago 13 – 15 of Februrary 2010 with the help of Dr. Daniel Spiegel.  This paper discusses the two-way conversation between device and user with focus on filtering noise and removing ambiguity to deliver clarify and control for UX with design as a facilitator.

Demonstrated how to go beyond the helper events jQuery provides and create your own custom events in a tutorial published on Nettuts+.  Additionally, described the barely documented Special Events API and how to use it to create your own events.

Assisted in development of Activision Guitar Hero Hub web site.  Leveraged various technologies to create reusable modules, and integration with CMS.  Helped in creating new community for Guitar Hero Franchise, user profiles, leaderboard, and player stats.  Used various web services and APIs, including Facebook and Twitter, to create an engaging communication for Guitar Hero players.

The web site for Starbucks Shared Planet consists of multiple Flash elements elegantly designed to create a fluid and presentable environment.  In addition, the site leverages the .NET framework to create reusable modules for quick integration and fast client turnaround.

Paper written with the help of Dr. Daniel Spiegel and published in ACM Ubiquity. This paper discusses the importance of design and using it as a vehicle for strategy, flow, and affordance as it pertains to User Experience.

In this project, implementation of Silverlight video player and JavaScript was used to help Microsoft launch Elevate America.

Press:
CNET: Microsoft aims to Elevate America
PC World: Microsoft Hopes to Elevate America

Development of microsites for FX Networks original series shows including Rescue Me, Sons of Anarchy, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Nip/Tuck, Damages, The League, Archer, and Justified.  Additionally assists with site upkeep, video player pages, and community discussion pages.