Hey, I'm Rory. 

For a decade I worked as a hands-on Creative Director for Wild Apple. Working in concert with Business Development, Operations, and various creative staff on mostly Brand, Web, and Print projects. It was a HIGHLY demanding job both mentally and physically. While I was taking creative lead on every project and delivering on the bulk of web based work myself, I would be managing all the other various aspects and extended staff. We pushed hard. REALLY hard. And we won a bunch of awards as a result and our clients were always thrilled at the output and capabilities of our small but scrappy agency. We even launched a SaaS responsive website builder platform for k-12 schools that was quite the adventure and seriously an intimidating thing to take on. I will forever appreciate the team at Wild Apple and all I learned in my time there.

For a few years I contracted and freelanced as Spatial Anomaly LLC. I used this time to really expand my knowledge and skills from clients like MassMutual to web design work for an agency specializing in Car Wash websites and email marketing. I dipped my toe in a lot of different markets in this time but the standout was creative lead on the redesign of a Bank's website which was to follow a new marketing direction they were taking. Significant challenges arose there with appeasing strict compliance guidelines. The work was greatly received however and the bank went on to outperform much larger competitors.

This mutli-faceted role was like 80% creative service and 20% IT management. Very much a role that I was well suited for being a tech geek as well as a creative. I designed, built, and maintained all 3 major ecommerce sites as well as the email marketing. For this particular market which was dance garments of all different kinds, we were one of the first to bring these types of sales channels to the market and it exploded sales growth as a result. My designer skills were utilized also on support of photo shoots, retouching photos, illustration, and layout design on printed catalogs. I was never bored in this job as there was always a hundred different tasks to juggle and as an early career experience I could not be more grateful for the lessons in organization, business practices, and planning that go hand-in-hand with my later successes in my career. 

This company installed super high end control systems, smart homes, home theaters, and so on. Really amazing technology and I was tasked with the design of UI elements on the touchscreens that controlled these systems. This really predated touchscreens as we know them today and there were not really ample resources and studies done for usability. I was creating complete design systems for patterns that were relatively a new concept. I was incredibly lucky to get this job early on because it really played well with my own tech-geek sensibilities and taught me a ton of hard lessons on usability and user-centric design. I also designed and built the hell out of some Flash based websites. Remember Flash? How quickly the web moves... The image attached here is bits and pieces of what I could still find. Much of the original assets from this time are 20+ years gone.