VMA Gif Wall
The 2012 VMAs were considered one of MTV’s most successful, and social, live streams ever. One of its creative wins included ‘Gif It’, which enabled users to easily snap a gif from an MTV video, and share it via Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter.
I was responsible for building out the Gif Wall, which was used to display and share the best of the gifs.
House Of Style Collection
House of Style was a show on MTV that chronicled the fashion industry from 1989 to 2002 in 72 episodes. It’s coming back to MTV this fall, and the video archive was launched as a subsection of their style blog. It required custom dynamic sidebars, a new marquee, and its own categories and tags.
This was accomplished by creating several new taxonomies and custom post types, a custom template, and various widgets for the sidebars. Custom SEO, reporting and rewrites were also required for all related pages.
CMT Video Platform
Moving CMT onto the global video platform helped standardize the video experience cross-brand, while accommodating brand-specific requirements.
The video platform provides a premium viewing experience, and drives socialization, leading to more video streams. It also implements the new “lite” view, with a smaller page download, and better SEO value. Custom skinning and headers can also be injected on a playlist or video basis.
Viacom’s recommendations engine was also new to this instance of the platform, with a supplied feed being transformed into HTML and pulled in via AJAX.
Visual Schedule Builder
The Visual Schedule Builder website was built from scratch, using a design provided by the client. Since then, I have also provided support and implemented additional design updates.
Mobile Apps
The MTV and VH1 touch sites are optimized for the iPad’s unique UI and user behaviors, to create a rich, intimate experience that engages the user through direct touch and play.
I was tasked with creating the apps page for both MTV and VH1, with the ability for the marquee and carousels to swipe horizontally, and the content to scroll behind the header and marquee. Both landscape and portrait orientations were targeted.
VH1 Hubs
In 2011, I was the main developer for three different hubs on VH1, including music, shows and video. This was a full redesign with the goal of unifying the templates and user experience on VH1.
These pages implemented the new “lite” view, with the gain being a smaller page download, with better SEO value. Page composition is loaded with the initial page load, while redundant page level objects are inserted via javascript, supplied as standardized chunks of HTML.
CMT Shows Platform
With Viacom brands offering consumers similar content (e.g. TV schedules, episode information, video, photos, etc.), a dynamic template platform was created to save development and production time, while offering each brand the ability to provide their customers with custom programming, styles, and the flexibility to build on top of the platform as needed.
I was tasked with implementing this platform on CMT.com, starting with their new show, Working Class. This including developing photo, video, episode, cast and main pages, as well as maintaining backwards compatibility for older shows.
VH1 Home Page Redesign
The goal of this redesign was to improve the usability of the new homepage. This included clearer sharing (“hot meter”) stats, consistent with the updated marquee designs.
The hot meter functionality involved making calls to the Twitter and Facebook APIs, checking their stats and showing/hiding/customizing the data returned, depending on various rules.
MTV Geek
MTV Geek serves as the central hub for comic related and inspired content on mtv.com. It serves as a daily destination for comic fans within the MTV community and elsewhere, featuring the latest in comic books, video games, animation, toys, hobby gaming, tech, sci-fi, fantasy, horror and more. It also includes the latest previews, exclusive sneak peeks, behind the scenes videos, event coverage and MTV original comics.
My responsibilities included developing the main MTV Geek site, building reusable modules for use on external sites, and skin and navigation overrides for photo and video pages.
VH1 Debate: T.O. vs Ochocinco
VH1 expanded their Sunday night lineup with a block of programming around NFL widereceivers T.O. and Chad Ochocinco. At the end of each episode, a question was asked and viewers were invited to go online and cast their votes.
Myself and another co-worker were tasked with extending an existing platform to enable viewers to login using Facebook or Twitter and cast their vote. These votes were shared with their social networks via posts / status updates which link back to the main site, thus encouraging participation. New features such as displaying the question as a video and displaying voting statistics on the result pages were also added to the platform.
