techies.com

This portfolio entry is bittersweet to me. It is because of my employment at techies.com that I owe a lot of my hands-on website design and multimedia design experience early on in my career. However, they were the first company to lay me off. In fact, they laid off 30 designers in May of 2000. Yeah, it was 2000 and lots of people in the tech sector were sacked, but that didn’t make it feel any better.

As designers, we were given responsibility over a region or city, to design the profiles for companies within those areas. My first area was helping with the New York City market, hence the NBC profile. After Florida opened, I was assigned there and did n-space’s profile among others. My practice was to try to mimic the style and colors of the company website, but still make it unique. It was the practice of making unique profiles for companies that really set techies.com apart from the other job banks like monster.com or headhunter.net. Anyway, that also ended the designers’ careers because it was a better business model to have a standard template for all profiles. We all got laid off, and the company folded shortly after.

On to the portfolio. This is a very short example of some of the company profiles I built while at techies.com, NBC:
nbc_intro
nbc_about
nbc_tech
nbc_test

And, n-space:
nspace

This is a multimedia project that I did freelance for techies.com. It was a business card CD that told their story. I worked on revising this for four months, and was simply glad to be see it come together in the end.
techies_logo
techies_main
techies_about
techies_ppt
techies_video

Here’s a walkthrough of that project:

So much nostalgia…and yes, that was Mark Hamil. Well, techies.com is gone. At least I still have my pullover and beanie hat. It was a great learning experience too!