For Cebit2009 I was hired by q~bus to implement the animations on the stage-led and the scheduler on the so called "life cycle". After some initial brainstorming with the responsible A.D., I came up some Photoshop concepts and started fooling around with glsl-shaders.

The challenge was to seemlessly combine the two displays (a 150 meter long LED-cycle with 17000x64 pixels and the stage-LED with a resoultion of ca 800x800) to an appealing union that displays messages, schedule information and the general idea of the Deutsche Telekom booth. The final visual result was highly appreciated.

Additionally I used q-bus' innovative state control software to develop a simple user-interface for the people of the content team could post instant messages or change the data of the timeline scheduler.

After two very intense months, I successfully finished the latest project for my long term client q~bus, a design agency specialising in exhibition design and interactive display solutions. This time I was not part of the multitouch team (damn, it would have been nice to see Angela Merkel and Arnold Schwarzenegger playing with one of my projects, but still). Instead I was responsible for the rendering of the stage LEDs. After all it was a very nice project with a beautiful result. It's quiet a catch to see that Deutsche Telekom was pleased with the demoscene-like style on their main display.

Since autumn 2008 I am working with the team of moviepilot to improve the user experience of their web-site. This has been a great and intense trip so far. It involves all stages of UI-design: brainstorming, concept, prototyping, usability testing and implementation. And it provides the wonderful opportunity to catch up with the latest developments in RubyOnRails world like Haml and Sass.

I have to admit that redesigning moviepilot is by far the most complex UI-job I have been involved in. Not only because the site's tremendous complexity, but also because of their perfectionism. I never had a design that went through so many design stages. But the results look very promising and will go online March 2009. I can't wait, because they turned me into a big fan and I am now using the site almost every day.

What moviepilot.de is about

Although it is still a long way to match all my own expectations regarding ui-design (well, to critic is my job there...) the site is really cool:

Moviepilot calculates your taste regarding movies. After you registered and rated something like 50 movies, it will forecast how you would rate most other movies running in cinema, on DVD or even TV. It has cool lists of the movies current running in theaters sorted by your taste.

Working with them has actually increases my film consumption tremendously! Give it a try and register: www.moviepilot.de

For an upcomming update of NI's GuitarRig-series I was asked to apply some mockups.

This was the second multitouch application I was working on at q-bus. Since we could build upon our framework developed for cebit 2008 we concentrated on content presentation and interaction design. The multitouch display with the huge dimension of 18m x 1.5m and a resolution of 12600 x 1050 was driven by cluster of synced render clients.

Despite two interactive scenes with a lot work in python scripting, I also got the chance with work with GLSL shaders to distort the scroll texts in the background. For an hourly showcase application, I also wrote several particle paint methods which also reacted on FFT-driven sound analysis.

Tooll is a self made application for creating digital content in real-time. It was developed primarily for doing demo scene productions like demos and 64kb intros. It unites features from a lot of different other tools (e.g. Werkkzeug, Abobe After Effects, Maya, and more). We are using realtime rendering to do motion- and visual effects design.

At CeBIT 2008 I was responsible for the interface implementation of a large scale multitouch application at the booth of the Deutsche Telekom AG. The seamless projection of 12m x 2m was done by 3 high-resolution projectors and parallel rendering of several MacPro. The application featured menus, video-players, slide-shows and a little multi-player game.

The implementation was done with Python building upon q~bus' in-house 3d-render-engine sednaRE. The project was highly acclaimed and became one the major attractions of the Telekom-booth.

A small task of creating some low resolution icons for their amazingly complex project management suite "Projekt PMS", quickly turned into a major redesign and finally into a long-term trusted relationship. The key issue in this project was balancing obvious ui-requirements/enhancements, the espectations of existing customers and technical limitations. Although the final implementation of the design tool well over two years, it proved to be an excellent investion into the future of Projektron.

Robotdent is a leading provider for dental navigation and operation assistance software. I used the chance of a general UI-redesign of one of their's touch screen applications for analyzing and optimizing usability. For the following programming tasks I created extensive material and specifications.

Startet in 2006 by Benjamin Krause, omdb.org is to become an ajax driven alternative database for movie fans. Since I joined the project fairly at the beginning, I was responsible for most of the interface design and the general usability. I could also contribute to certain aspects of the database design.

Because omdb was full of the newest technologies (ruby on rails driven ajax, tableless css2, etc.), it was a perfect chance for becoming acquainted with the latest developments in web technology.

The overall look is the result of a fantastic team work with Benjamin Krause, Sheila Seyfert, Diana Karsten and many more.

I started to implement Streber because I needed a solution for my daily work as freelance designer and programmer. Today it Streber evolved into a considerable open source solution, which gathered a small community of users and developers. It has been translated into more than 10 languages and is now an important tool for my work.

Very roughly you can describe Streber as a mesh-up of forum, wiki, todo-lists, bug-report, and time-tracking tool. It requires PHP5 and can be installed and configured with FTP and HTTP access.

Read more at www.streber-pm.org.

Concept and design of a corporate identity for a post-production company.

Driven by the idea to use a mobile phone's gyrosensor for gaming bit-side reinvented a very old game concept and combine this this unseen 3d-graphics on mobile symbian phones. I was responsible for the graphic and level design.

A well known game distributor was so impressed, bit-side got the job for the remake of "Marble Madness" on mobile phones soon later.

Despite the sometimes questionable "suggestions" on the client side, this was quiet a fun project.

Disappointed by the visualisation provided by tools for log file analysis, I tried a new approach to this topic.

Bit-side got the idea of turning the playground of a classic game concept onto a 3d world. This would have been something... Damn it.

I made detailed mock-ups for a suggested community website of the watermill foundation.

Very abstract piece on Shakespear. The creative freedo provided by director Herbert Fritsch was both: heaven and hell. But the intensive team work resulted in a very nice watchable short movie.

Bit-side developed Taxi Fever for an advertising campaign of debitel. It was so successful that we also ported the game to Flash for Cebit 2004. For me this was project was like a time tunnel back to old school: Doing game design under under the extremely difficult restrictions of early mobile phones felt just like programming the KC87.

Hui, this was fun!

About this paper

During a recent large scale project for a car manufacturer, came in contact with Maya, a high-end tool for 3D-visualization. Although I really love the handling of Maya, most of its 3D-modeling tools and the over-all concept of the interface, I think there are some serious issues within the design of the interface. I started this redesign mostly for fun. I am very interested in interface-design and therefore Maya is quiet a good subject of studying. I don't think that there is anybody outside, who really knows anything about this tool (excepting its programmers at Alias and maybe gmask and some other people at highend3d.com). I read five or so books and talked to a lot with other users of maya.

I also have got experience with some other 3D-programmes like 3dsMax, AutoCad, Medit, Microstation, Form-Z, Lightscape (not really a modeling tool), Poser (too) and Multigen Creator. Maya has a better interface than any of these tools (excepting some aspects of Multigen) but it's definitely not perfect. If you look at certain aspects of Poser or Softimage it is really obvious that there is is a huge potential of improvement. I think that one of my favourite programmes should not only create amazingly good pictures. I also want it to look amazingly good, while I am working with it.

After I posted the first version of my suggestions under href="http://www.highend3d.com/boards/showflat.php?Cat=1,2&Board=mayageneral&Number=171823&page=2&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=">highend3d.com there were a lot of argument about colors and fency interfaces vs. workflow. I really learned in this thread and redid most of my design.

Thanks for ideas and feedback: M. Elsässer, N. Mühr, C.Mantei, I. Radusch, A. Baslik, O. Markowski, Joojaa, beaker, askaniblue, STZ, a.m.o.

For a very urgent deadline, I designed and programmed a flash game for a booth at IFA 2003 within one week. The general idea was to explode all the bubbles before any of them touched the ground. The player controlled a small bee with a gyro mouse.

The game featured some extra weapons and a high-score table.

Motivated by the disappointing usability of the computer terminals in Berlin's public libraries, I invested some time into a suggested redesign. Any tries to get in contact with astech (the software manufacturer) or authorities in of the ZLB (the library's management) failed. It was quiet an astonishing experience in how publicly founded software design often fails to reach only the basic requirements in UI-design and all related people blame somebody else.

Driven by the contrast between short live time and the increasing documentary and artistic relevance of computer games, I dedicated one and a half year into the study of history, classification, archiving and presentation of computer games and computer hardware.

The academic approach to the subject finally lead into a comprehensible design process and a spacial implementation of a museum complex consisting of institute, archive and museum.

The thesis was rated with 1.0 and suggested for the "Tautstipendium" (i.E. the year's best thesis).