Allan Gray Rebrand

I was part of the team that worked together with Brand Union to rebrand the Allan Gray brand. When I initially joined Allan Gray we soon realised that although Allan Gray had an incredibly strong brand, the brand needed a refresh as well as it needing to be extended. Together with Brand Union we developed a visual language, refreshed the logo, selected and systematised a new set of fonts that worked well across all platforms and also re-imagined how the brand would be positioned.

Allan Gray website

I was tasked with redoing the Allan Gray website. This massive project involved taking input from various stake-holders in the business and consolidating this while still trying to make cohesive, simple-to-understand information available to the variety of clients using the site (direct clients, mediated clients, institutional investors & returning clients)

I was responsible for redesigning the site. This involved developing video,  professional photography of featured staff, working with illustrators and with Allan Gray's agency to develop content.

On the tech side I was involved in the initial setup of the development environment for the front-end coders, making technology decisions such as which javascript libraries to use (D3.js for charting, fullpage.js, twitter bootstrap, etc)

The design and development process was heavily dependant on user testing. Initial rough direction was tested using the paper prototyping method and later we set up our own testing lab.

Coronation It all comes down to trust campaign

This project was done under a very tight deadline, I used sketch for the design iterations and then implemented within Webflow. In the process of implementing I realised that the animation tools provided within Webflow were not up to the task at hand so I was lucky enough to discover the SVG animation tool Keyshape, if you haven't used it yet, give it a whirl. It's cheap, powerful and integrates quickly and easily with Webflow.

I was also not happy with implementing a standard HTML 5 audio player, given that you can't skin it at all. So decided the implement plyr.io audio player.

Allan Gray employees

I was responsible for designing an enticing careers section for the Allan Gray website. We wanted to show a wide-ranging group of employees and decided to do a studio shoot which was then put into a large banner allowing users to highlight each individual to find out more about them.

We worked together with Photographer Brett Rubin to create this memorable and very well received website.

Allan Gray Careers

The objective of this project was to give potential employees an idea of what it's like to work at Allan Gray, show potential career paths taken by a diverse selection of employees, who potential candidates would be able to identify with. To achieve this we interviewed and photographed a group of employees at Allan Gray, in a studio environment as well as various locations inside and around the Allan Gray head office. This also allowed us to show off the work environment.

My involvement in this project was from initial conception, briefing the photographer (as well as taking some of the photographs myself when some of the candidates could no longer participate and had to be replaced) and finally I built the entire project in Webflow.

22seven

I worked at 22seven as Flex developer and designer. 22seven is a financial aggregation service that allows users to see a consolidated view on their finances and sells financial products.

We were faced with many interesting visualisation challenges, some of which resulted in quite beautiful visualisations. The circle on the right is done with verlet integration code (Credit goes to my friend Andries Odendaal's help in pointing me in the right direction) which automatically clustered different financial spending data categories together.

Coding

My friend Andries Odendaal asked me to code this project for him for one of his clients logistics company Livingston. The coding got quite tricky since I had to build a custom component, in essence a tooltip with a search function built into it.

To achieve this I combined two existing components, tooltipster and select2. I also had to put together a bit of logic to intelligently string sentences together so that they would be grammatically correct since the sentence would change structure depending on the choices the user made.

Extreme Nineteen

I designed this ActionScript game together with developer Matan Uberstein when we worked at Buynary. The extreme 19 game was developed as a promotion for the golf course of the same name in Limpopo. I was lucky enough to go there and we filmed a pro-golfer teeing off at the Extreme 19th hole on the top of the koppie to use as footage for our game character.

To make this landscape accurate I acquired the GIS mapping information from the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) as a point cloud and converted this to a mesh in Rhino3D. I then pulled the mesh into 3DSmax to populate the landscape with trees and the golf club building.