• Designed in-house product, osCaddie, a managed services platform for rapidly deploying and hosting Drupal websites
• Worked closely with UX research and collaborated with users, clients, and internal developers to design a great experience for both technical and non-technical users and meet Appnovation’s business goals
• Collaborated with front-end and back-end engineers from the inception of the infrastructure to the final client-facing levels to build a product that looked and felt polished from the core

• Designed and developed over 20 client websites and applications for clients such as Epic Games, Girl Guides, and Amnesty International
• Introduced design systems and promoted designing with code within the team
• Implemented new website-building processes that significantly improved efficiency and quality

• Responsible for the design and front-end development of Veer and Corbis websites
• Internationalized the Veer website and emails for the European markets
• Advocated bringing art direction to the web through the Veer website

Live Wires began as a simple wireframing library, but it has evolved into the digital manifestation of my web design philosophy, encompassing art direction, front-end development, and the cohesive processes that bring it all together.

Louder Than Ten is the project management and operations training consultancy I helped co-found. In September 2023, we officially converted to a worker-owned cooperative. This new milestone, fresh direction, and radical new business model commanded a new identity. Our fresh brand needed to be bold, scalable, and connect to our target audience: owners of creative and digital agencies.

At the beginning of 2021, Louder Than Ten partnered with Promethean Research to investigate how digital agencies coped and adapted to the pandemic in 2020. We surveyed 84 design, marketing, and development studios to understand their experiences during the pandemic and compiled a 72-page report. Our goal was to create a unique and recognizable identity for the report, distribute it online, and also have a printed copy to share with friends, clients, and prospects. My responsibilities included designing the report's identity, building the website, and designing the report itself.

When Louder Than Ten started training digital agencies, most of them struggled to design a pricing framework that was suitable for their agency. Just do a Google search for "how much should I charge" and try to wade through all the generic advice. Advice that doesn't consider the agency's size, financials, project dynamics, and goals. To address this, we developed Nimber. It’s an interactive educational tool that provides agencies with customized rates, revenue targets, and client size goals based on their specific numbers and business objectives. Additionally, Nimber educates agencies on how these metrics are calculated, and includes an estimating and risk analysis tool.

Steve Gertz is a killer finishing carpenter who runs North Hawk Woodcraft in Alberta. I set him up with a slick logo and simple identity system, including letterpressed business cards, so he could soar above the herds of lame gradient-happy logos that roam Calgary’s construction industry.

The team at Code for America approached me to design the print version of their third issue of Civic Quarterly, a quarterly journal that aims to engage readers with their civic design role in US politics, economics, and citizen interaction. This journal features intelligent writing and beautiful illustrations that explore various aspects of civic design in our digital world.

For this project, I aimed to create a dynamic layout that would guide the reader through each piece and fully immerse them in the provided illustrations.

Pupil was a teeny Mac utility that let you select your optimal screen resolution from the menu bar on retina-based screens. I designed the app with my friend Padraig Kennedy, who developed it.

How to survive the digital apocalypse.

This is how I begin my in-browser design process: Crafting a style guide.

I’m all about reducing as much waste as possible in my design process. Everything we do should contribute to the final product so we can spend more time addressing design problems and less time painting pictures and translating them into our intended medium. Ultimately, I think this change in approach results in better products and more value for our clients.

How many hours do we whittle away adjusting site map templates, dilly-dallying in wireframing applications, picking apart prototype frameworks, and feverishly massaging Photoshop comps only to throw them away when the next project phase begins? How many more hours are spent converting those formats to something else?
Instead of creating a series of disposable deliverables, let’s look at the web design process as an evolution. Everything we build should in some way take us closer to a final product with as little waste as possible.

Travis Gertz is the co-founder of Louder Than Ten, the school for freelancers and teams managing design projects. He has a knack for translating what’s great about traditional publication designs to a more appropriate format on the web. At Type Brigade №26, he’ll show us a new kind of breakpoint.

Design the best version of your business

What would your work and life feel like if they were a shade or two brighter?

• If you finish all projects on time and on budget?
• If you had a sus­tain­able, healthy bank balance?
• If your clients loved you at the beginning, mid­dle, and end of a project?
• If your team root­ed for you throughout the process, too?

Pret­ty freak­ing great. That’s what.

Louder Than Ten is a Vancouver-based project management training and consulting company founded by Rachel and Travis Gertz. They developed their own project management manifesto and recently converted the company into a worker-owned cooperative, allowing employees to become equal partners. This is a unique and humane approach to project management that stands out in a crowded field.

Rachel and Travis of Vancouver's Louder Than Ten worker cooperative talk with Josh about their business and why they decided to make the conversion to a worker co-op.

Most work environments prioritize profits over people. But there are other ways businesses can look—if we’re willing to imagine them.

In this episode, we talk to Travis Gertz from Loud­er Than Ten about design sys­tems: what they are, and why are they so hard to define and under­stand? We dis­cuss whether the world is a bet­ter place with the gray same­ness of pass­able but monot­o­nous design from Word­Press themes com­pared to the chaot­ic indi­vid­u­al­i­ty of MySpace and danc­ing hamsters.

Don’t let technology constrain your design flexibility! Travis Gertz joins the show to explain the importance of art direction and creativity when designing for digital experiences. He outlines some simple, practical ways to apply these nuances as well as larger-scale design flexibility. We discuss how to apply flexible design with Craft CMS, share other site examples that showcase editorial design, plus considerations with client workflow and technical performance realities.

Traditional print/graphic design relies on a strong system to provide a base system so we can get to a minimum standard of consistency and quality as soon as possible… much like the web. But unlike the web, once we have our underlying foundation, most of the effort is made in adding expression and care into how each piece of content is produced and presented.

As our workflows evolve to support responsive, mobile-friendly sites, so too should our deliverables. Enter web-based wireframes. Travis Gertz, creator of Live Wires, joins the show to share why he built the framework and the benefits of web-based wireframes. We talk about the pros and cons of frameworks, in general, and how Live Wires is different because it is intentionally flexible and non-prescriptive. And we discuss the “sameness” we see in the industry and how we can better push our creative boundaries.