I am Ariel Cotton.  I'm an artist, product designer, & maker of interactive things.

I craft beautiful, human-centered interfaces for web and mobile applications. I draw and write comics about life in Berlin and New York City. I even tinker with electronics and make interactive art from time to time.


Baculus

I was hired to design a website, a brand identity, an infographic, and an app interface for the product Baculus. Baculus is a clear plastic backpack with wheels, a telescoping antennae/flag, a wifi access point, small computer, GPS transceiver, software defined radio, and battery. The platform provides ad-hoc, self organizing wifi networking, by working together with the humans who use it. It is meant to be used in disaster scenarios where WiFi is not available. The users of Baculus create a mesh network, using themselves as nodes.

Winner of a Stage 1 Design Concept Award in the Mozilla Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society Challenge

Categories
UI/UX design, identity & branding, information design, web development, illustration

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response

Colors

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response

The creator of Baculus, Jonathan Dahan, describes it as “a resilient, self-contained, friendly internet buoy.” I extended this metaphorical concept of a buoy to the branding of the product, and used colors that suggested a buoy floating in the ocean.

App

This app helps users in the mesh network see where the other nodes are and stay in contact with each other.

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response
Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response

Diagram

The client needed a diagram for the users to understand how Baculus functions.

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response

Website

The brochure website provides information on the installation and implementation of Baculus, how Baculus works, and research and testing. I designed the mockups, then implemented them into a website using Jekyll.

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response

For flair, I created a custom buoy mascot illustration for every page.

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Baculus app rescue volunteer map community disaster response
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