kivodesigns

Beautiful Headshot of Mike Kivikoski

Mike Kivikoski Designer & Front-End Developer

  1. 1. Information

    Mike Kivikoski is a traditionally trained Graphic Designer & Front-End Developer who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Endicott College in beautiful oceanside Beverly MA and has been designing and developing sites and applications since ‘98. He has experience adhering and absorbing companies' strict branding style guides before construction of their projects. Several of his projects are multilingual applications, one specifically that functions seamlessly with 65+ languages.

    He prides himself on his always-expanding knowledge and commitment to today’s languages and web standards. His markup is written semantically with the structure, presentation, and behavior separated and is always trying to share his knowledge with his peers. Mike is very experienced in XHTML & CSS and knows quite a bit of Javascript (including manipulation of the DOM), ActionScript 2, XML, and PHP with a small tiny sprinkle of MySQL.

    He currently resides in Somerville, MA located just north of the city of Boston. When he’s not working on his laptop he enjoys watching DVDs (genres include: action, comedy, horror, the occasional drama, and the-always-awesomely-shitty-early-nineties-action-flicks booh-ya), eating/cooking/trying all kinds of food, drinking award winning beer, sucking at video games and camping in his home state New Hampshire & and beautiful Maine.

    I began working with Mike about a year ago. Since then I've enlisted his help on numerous projects including development and coding of several large, complex websites. In every project large and small Mike has shown himself to be a true professional. He is masterful in coding — projects arrive on time, on budget and working perfectly. Mike is flexible and accommodating and takes the time to understand what we need, offering suggestions and options to give us the very best result. He is extremely talented, a pleasure to work with and his deliverables are nothing short of fantastic.” Jeffrey A. Shaw, Principal Envision Marketing & Design, Inc.

  2. 2. Samples

    1. Vector T-Shirts

      Although the majority of my work is based in interactive design and development, occasionally I get to put my illustration skills to work.

      • Illustrator
      • Photoshop

      I was approached by the Pelham Parks & Recreation to create series of shirts for multiple youth sports activities throughout the years. These shirts are a sample of the best ones created over a four year span and were all done Pro-bono to give back to my hometown community.

    2. American Express Wishlist Walkthrough

      American Express Wishlist 2007 Walkthrough

      I was contracted by a small design agency to work on the American Express Wishlist 2007 tutorial flash video. The video demonstrated the concept of AMEX’s Wishlist and how it works. It displayed the amazing deals customers could win and buy and how they could enter the contest.

      • Photoshop
      • Illustrator
      • Flash

      My role in this project consisted of working with the Creative Director and Client Manager to create the storyboard for the three-minute animation. After the storyboard was finalized, I was responsible for taking all of the pixel-based images and recreating them in Illustrator for the swf. I also prepared any miscellaneous assets that the Flash developer would need for development.

    3. Statistics for HOW Magazine

      Using information design as the basis for this project, I created multiple vector illustrations that displayed various information about the page diversification and other facts in HOW magazine March‘06. I gathered, sorted, and displayed data that dealt with the layout of magazine, gender in advertising, and sections of content.

      • Photoshop
      • Illustrator

      The goal of this piece was to allow the viewer to visually make connections & conclusions about the layout and demographic of the magazine with ease. This was accomplished by using color, scale, and movement.

    4. Quest Seminars - Home screenshot

      Quest Seminars

      Quest Seminars is a company based out of Burlington, MA that holds seminars annually throughout the country. Quest has been providing seminars for Physical therapists for over 24 years. Before they hired me, their site was lacking of a design and the development was archaic. It was an un-styled page with the browsers' default font thrown into a table layout with very complicated and unnecessary Javascript rollovers. Working with the owner, Trudy Goldstein, we developed the requirements the site needed and discovered the demographic consisted of users 30 — 50 years old who were not ‘internet savy’.

      Quest Seminars - Courses screenshot e

      Using the knowledge of their demographic as a starting point, wireframes were created followed by successful design mockups. The new design gave the site a professional and established feel with an easy to use navigation and simple architecture. The site was then developed using XHTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of PHP. Trudy has told me she has received numerous comments from her attendees about the look and feel of the site and how easy it has been to use.

      • Photoshop
      • XHTML
      • CSS
      • PHP

    5. Data Foyer

      Data Foyer - thumbnail

      This application was designed for the Data Operations team at my current employer, Integrity. The purpose of this application was to give DataOps an easy to use interface that allows for sorting data and information from multiple databases. With this application they can easily sort users, new activations, deactivations, and parse other information from a MySQL database. I was responsible for the UI Design and the front-end development, which consisted of XHTML & CSS and a co-worker did the backend functionality hooking it up with the databases.

      Data Foyer - zoom
      • Photoshop
      • XHTML
      • CSS
    6. Pratico's Landscaping

      Pratico's Landscaping

      This site was a redesign for one of Vermont’s premier landscaping companies. Their previous site lacked design direction and had minimal examples of their work. I worked with them to create a friendly site that gave their clients easy access to their contact information and services. This site was also launched at the same time they relocated their main building and gave their business a much needed facelift.

      • Photoshop
      • XHTML
      • CSS
    7. Volkswagen Rock God

      VW Rock God Boston Registration

      This landing page was created for the Volkswagen Rock God Guitar Contest that was held in Boston in late 2006. I worked with the strict VW branding guideline and specific imagery in this layout. I designed the entire interface before handing the mockup over to the development team while I was an intern at the Boston Phoenix.

      • Photoshop

  3. 3. Contact

    Say Hello!

    Follow Mike on twitter: @kivodesigns

    @lisarex yea def! I started the book this morning and am blasting my way thru it, its very insightful

    @mclive i've been attending @refreshboston and plan on attending a lot more @buildguild and @uxboston Also want to go to WP & jQuery meetup

    @mventre haha thanks. :D

    Finding 'web design firms' that still build sites like it is 1998 w/ no Aesthetic and horrible markup really pisses me off. anyone else?

    haahaha: "This monitor doesn’t have to suffer my fist through it’s face because of one simple browser. That’s what this wall is for…” -9lion

  4. Y. Why

    Why did I choose to build a one page site?

    I wanted a site where I could have a brief bio, show select samples of my best work and be easily contactable and found myself losing that goal due to past revisions being too complicated and involved.

    The solution was to put all the information right out there on one page. This allows the user to reach all my objectives without a single click. Additionally, I wanted a place where I could share my thoughts and knowledge — this is what the Articles section will become in the next round.

  5. Z. How

    This site was built with some ink, a few dozen pages of a blackbook, a mac, a personal Ubuntu development server, Photoshop, XHTML & CSS, Wordpress, PHP, in Dreamweaver & Coda, with hosting provided by the great people of eleven2 and a couple tall cans of PBR.

    Justus, Lucida Sans, and a tiny bit of Georgia and Baskerville

    I no longer test my personal sites in IE6.