Social media sites are the shizzle. Everyone is typing away their lives on the internet. It has become commonplace to life cast all of your activities, feelings, and desires to everyone. We all have a facebook account, wait you don’t? Some of us are twitterers and some are on both or on some other social media site with a collective of people. For some reason, people just love to tell all of their friends, and enemies what they are doing, watching, or liking at the moment.

When we think about the different ways people can find out what your up to, where you are, or how your feeling… its pretty scary. If you were asked “Would you like a stalker?” what would you say? Guess its easier nowadays to become one, but if you stop tweeting for a second and step back. Think about what your saying and how your saying it. You don’t want to air all your dirty laundry to the world.

Your creating a running dialogue of your life. An online diary of everything that is you with no lock and key. Anyone that is linked to you can access all of the information on you at any given moment. So when your having a bad day and hate your boss, wait and don’t tell the world. As part of a new generation of the internet we are given a great privilege. We are documenting millions of lives in a cloud of information in our history. So make it count! When the world burns up due to global warming, do you want some alien race, millions of years in the future to read how you ate too much taco bell and was sitting on the bowl for hours? I think not.

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I have had this post in my queue for almost 2 years now, but felt at that time it was a bit harsh since my experience at this firm was quite short. But I feel that if there is anyone out there thinking of employment with this business, I owe them this gratitude to post my experience and my disgust with the way this business is run.

In all of my experience I have never been in contact with a company that had no compassion for their employees. After a offer for employment I was brought on to assist in the design and development of creative projects for the company. As with any employment, the beginning of my experience was great. Collaborative projects and creative brainstorming the company had potential to be a long term home for my career. As time passed the company stated receiving more RFPs for a larger set of clientèle but the management of such projects was a more on the privative side. With any growing business the advancement of project management and team work is something that needs constant attention. Some of these key character flaws stemmed into a constant distrust and animosity towards any ideas for advancement I came up with.

Although I understand the concerns with monitoring employees actions while working, my performance in my designated position was alway to highest caliber. Ken Braun felt the need to monitor my personal email regardless of my performance. My emails were seen as malicious in nature and for some reason a threat to his company. As a prelude to this, we had made an agreement that any business I brought in I would receive a percentage. If I wasn’t to contact clients via email, how would I drum up new business…

An addition to the ideology and un-trusting nature of the owner of the business is his wife’s role in the company. I was not aware when I started at this company that the “Project Manager” was in fact Ken Braun’s wife. Working 2 days a week, and half days, Sharon thought that in some way she would be able to manage all projects coming into the company. Trying to help out I made advancements and suggestions to assist in the project management of the company. This was my biggest mistake. Like a Hen protecting her eggs she lashed out at my ideas and proceeded to shun me out of any company meetings or progress reports.

In short this firm is filled with a bunch of washed up designers with large egos. If it wasn’t for its freelance staff, the company would have no original ideas or the resources to create good work. The short time I spent at this firm my ideals were put down as not good enough, my work was never “good enough” even though the creative director had a style that is stuck in the early 90’s and mine was refined.

If you get an offer from this place deny it. If Ken doesn’t like you you’ll be out in a month. And if you value your ideas, and want to work with a team, you should definitely look into other firms on Long Island.

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I’ve been working on a new design for Vectorloft V3. As they say, one of the hardest things to design for is yourself. So needless to say its a painstaking process. I hope to have the new site with all the bells and whistles I’ve been learning over the past 2 years. Be ready for a site rich with new media concepts and lots of Web 2.0 and 3.0 styling. But for now I’ll post my projects here until we get this new site up.

Below is a short-listing of projects developed by Matthew Cassella (Vectorloft LTD). Projects vary is scope but display the full range competencies I hold.

Newsday.com
http://www.newsday.com
An experiment in new media, the new newsday.com required a multitude of collaboration with many different agencies in order to execute the final product. Although the site is still not fully completed, it shows the design management skills necessary to accomplish a large scale interactive portal. All CSS, front end development and design logic managed by myself. Without the support of the awesome design and development team at newsday.com this site would have never been a reality.

Red Bull Racing
http://staging.vectorloft.com/redbullracing/
Contracted to better organize the Red Bull Racing web portal. The design takes cues from the original design and combines a grunge style with a large array of ease of use upgrades. Media and featured news is displayed more readily and organizes the content to allow for the visitor to create a more full featured environment for visitors to better choose their path through the multitude of media contained within the site.

Skyline New York
http://skyline.vectorloft.com
Interactive portfolio showcasing each product set of Skyline New York. Matthew Cassella compiled the needs of the client into a fully interactive solution. Showing the large set of products complete with call to actions for the internal marketing initiatives.

DirecTV HD Demo
http://www.vectorloft.com/directv/
Contracted as a Senior Designer for the 2007 holiday term Matthew Cassella created this HD Demo to showcase the advantages of HD television to DirecTV.com visitors.

Coldwell Banker Interactive CD
http://www.vectorloft.com/coldwellbanker/
Interactive CD developed based on the Coldwell Banker brand to showcase “The Art of Selling Your Home” and the advantages to using Coldwell Banker.

Time Sports ReDesign
http://staging.vectorloft.com/timesports/
Technologic innovation was the theme of this new interactive face for the largely popular cycling brand. Redesign includes easements for more enhanced product focus as well as interactive elements to stimulate the view on landing for increased conversion rates.

EC Dormer Redesign (In-development)
http://staging.vectorloft.com/ecdormer/index.html
Idea was concepted as a different approach on standard web design. Pages are set up as tabs which open up to show content. Idea is still in development but portrays the clean cut look and feel which coincided with the re-branding project.

Service Channel Flash Demo
http://servicechannel.com/sc/login/demo.html
Contracted on freelance for Studio 150 this demo was solely developed by Matthew Cassella in flash. Concept was submitted with basic instructions for functionality. All animation and creative interactivity was concepted and executed based on the aesthetic of the designed site.

Long Island North Shore Heritage Area
http://www.linorthshoreheritagearea.com/
Design and development of this site portal includes a fully interactive CMS system, which was updated by Vectorloft for increased functionality.

The Globesity Festival
http://theglobesityfestival.org
Fully controllable Wordpress customization included video upload capability and full control by the company over content of the site. Vectorloft designed and developed the site aesthetic look and feel and carried the brand through all advertising materials for the festival.

Brookside Environmental
http://www.brooksideweb.com
Redesign of an outdated web site. The new design infuses a large array of client taken photos to display the large breadth of service the company holds. With the redesign, conversion rates on the domain were doubled from the previous design.

BigHip
http://www.bighip.com
This email marketing company jump-started their brand and consumer appeal with a brand new look stemming from initial logo designs. Vectorloft transformed the dated site design with full creative revision and site wide copy revisions transforming the web portal to attract new set of customers. With almost 10,000 hits a day BigHip boosted their sign up rate 15% over the previous quarter.

Razorshark
http://www.vectorloft.com/razorshark/
Looking for a new exciting look Matthew Cassella encapsulated this company’s brand into a site wide visual experience. Taking cues from the name the site was developed with creativity in mind. Playing on the deep-sea shark concept the site creates a unique visual experience.

Studio Roya
http://www.studioroya.com
Based on graphic cues from this professional art director, Matthew Cassella developed a fully functional flash applet to display this artist’s diverse portfolio.

CTA
http://staging.vectorloft.com/cta/
Conventional approach on a Career Training site. Idea included a interactive header which allowed visitors to scroll through ideas and tips on landing to increase conversion goals.

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