Ira Oksman

Art Director & Designer

Ira Oksman Kantsurova - Art Director and Designer from Toronto

Make Something

Art direction, Print

Minuum website

Art Direction, Web

Spare

Art Direction, Ambient

Nuit Blanche

Art Direction, Illustration, Ambient

Receiver

UI/UX, Web

Foundry

Art Direction, Web, Print

Illustrations

Typography, Illustration

Sansual Free

Typography
say@helloira.com
Foundry

In the months of March and April of 2014 Toronto hosted Foundry, a multi-week festival, dedicated to the exploration of the forward-thinking music and experimentation in technology.

This is the second time I get to work on Foundry. This year I got a chance to reinterpret the brand, design the UI and interaction of the website, created a number of social media ads, emailers, print ads, and even helped out with some front-end.

Receiver is a brand new web app that lets you Save, Share and Discover any form of streaming content from sites like YouTube, Soundcloud, Vimeo, etc.

To compliment the function of Receiver the app was designed like a music / content library; imagine a more intuitive version of iTunes. That means gathering videos and music, curating playlists, and sharing your favorite content with your friends.

My role was Lead UX and Visual Designer.

This was a very large and complex project that took me about 4 months to complete.

I came up with the overall UX, user flow scenarios, wireframes, details of interaction, and then the visual system by which everything would play out.

The planning

Though the founders had a pretty good notion of what they’d like the product to be, we were still unclear about many details and Receiver’s feature set. It took a fair share of collaboration to refine the final product.

There were hours of meetings, lots of coffee breaks, and many heated discussions about how the finer details should play out. All of this gave way to what Receiver is today.

All images are owned and copyrighted by © Receiver 2014

x
x

Nuit Blanche is an annual all-night festival of art and creativity; their main idea stands on having art installations around the city. This campaign does just that, utilizing traditional ad spaces to create an interactive installation.

The idea for an installation is to use a technique called “Ombro cinema”

Campaign would feature emotional and physical interaction with art.

Placement could be anything where motion occurs: a moving streetcar, a fence, a changing perspective of the bus shelter, a window of the train looking out to an ad with the hidden animation, etc.

x
x
Make something

Suddenly, this won Applied Arts - Design 2015, Poster Series.
---
What is this? This campaign was a passion project of mine to encourage people apply to Nuit Blanche. It was self-funded.
Why? People have been getting progressively more disenchanted with Nuit Blanche Toronto in recent years. Overall consensus is that there are too many people and very little art. Yet most of those who complain never try and participate.
Damn, so what could be done? I created a small wild posting campaign to encourage you to stop complaining, get off your behind and “Make Something”.

x
Minuum site

Minuum is a startup made out of a few extraordinarily talented people in Toronto. End of 2012 they decided to fix the input on a mobile phones, got into Y-combinator, raised 9 times what they asked for in their Indiegogo campaign and made the coolest little keyboard for the Android and iOS platforms.

I worked as an interactive designer and helped with UI/UX on their apps, defined the visual language of their brand, did some promotional materials, conducted user testing and, well, I made them a website.

Since Minuum is an app, the site had to be mobile first and responsive.
About half the traffic we get is from the mobile phones.
It was also important to communicate the diversity of the product without making it too complex or heavy.