Darryl Patterson

Current

Freelance/Owner at WidgetApps

Past

Information Architect - Contract at Syncapse
VP, Digital at Sharpe Blackmore Euro RSCG
VP, Digital at Euro RSCG 4D

Senior Instructor at Centennial College
Owner at Widgetapps
VP, Technical Director at Hydrogen Creative
New Media Consultant at Mixed Media
VP, Technical Director at Interactivity Inc

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Education

Harris Institute for the Arts

Recommended

4 people have recommended Darryl

Connections

198 connections

Industry

Marketing and Advertising

Websites

Darryl Patterson’s Summary

A digital veteran of 17 years, I have spent most of it digging into every new technology I can get my hands into. I am entirely self taught and spent 10 years teaching my craft to hundreds of students. I am one of the few that pioneered Information Architecture for digital in the 90's, and recently have been developing IA best practices for mobile.

I have a knack of learning the capabilities of new technologies very quickly, but more importantly I can find the impossible links between technologies. I was mashing up long before mashups - try and imagine a mashup without the convenience of APIs. In my experience there is almost always a simple and elegant way to make very different technologies play nice together - to play nice in such a way to build something beautiful and greater than the sum of it's parts.

Darryl Patterson’s Specialties:

New technology, information architecture, technical team management, team building, mobile platforms, digital advertising, training, user experience

Darryl Patterson’s Experience

Freelance/Owner

WidgetApps

(Computer Software industry)

July 2009 — Present (5 months)
Information Architect - Contract

Syncapse

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

September 2009 — November 2009 (3 months)
VP, Digital

Sharpe Blackmore Euro RSCG

(Public Company; Marketing and Advertising industry)

June 2006 — June 2009 (3 years 1 month)

When Euro RSCG 4D merged with Sharpe Blackmore, digital made a slow progression from being primarily CRM & RM to more traditional digital advertising and social media. We developed very successful social media campaigns for Hersheys (Ice Breakers and Oh Henry), innovative banner ads for Fidelity and Volvo Canada, an on-line community for Intel and many other digital projects to support the traditional advertising Sharpe Blackmore launched. The largest digital project was Home Hardware. While at Sharpe Blackmore, we transitioned Home Hardware's on-line presence from simple brochure-ware to a feature rich retail website that features the 60,000+ products that they offer. We developed all digital work for Home Hardware, including banner ads, campaign microsites and email marketing. In my final months at Sharpe Blackmore, I worked closely with senior management to restructure the digital department to reflect the new positioning of the agency.
VP, Digital

Euro RSCG 4D

(Public Company; HAVS; Marketing and Advertising industry)

2004 — June 2009 (5 years )

I was hired at Euro RSCG 4D to clean up their digital production and improve the quality of delivered work. It was primarily driven by outside production companies & contractors – my mandate was to bring it in-house. After evaluating the problems areas, I quickly began implementing new processes & protocols to make the digital development run on time and on budget. I wrote a coding standard for the developers and developed a code framework that all future projects would use. This allowed for much easier code re-use and much quicker bug fixes. I brought in code versioning (SVN/Subversion), a well defined workflow and much more effective estimating & budgeting for the project managers and account managers. Before I started at 4D, digital production was consistently delivered late and over budget. In 2 years, I was happy to say that over 90% of our digital projects were delivered to time-line and on budget. Our work was primarily CRM and RM systems for Bell Mobility and RM web applications for Diageo (Guinness, Crown Royal, Smirnoff).
Senior Instructor

Centennial College

(Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

October 1995 — July 2005 (9 years 10 months)

I started at Centennial College teaching their Intro to HTML course. After very good evaluations by the students, I was asked to develop a web certificate for their Continuing Education program. Using the same techniques I use for my IA work, I developed the courses needed for the new certificate program and well as developed the course's outcomes & teaching materials. When first launched, I taught most of the courses which included courses on CGI/Perl, HTML, Java, JavaScript, XML, Databases and mobile platforms. I also spent 2 years on their Information Architecture PAC (program advisory committee) developing an IA graduate program.
Owner

Widgetapps

(Computer Software industry)

May 2003 — February 2005 (1 year 10 months)

In order to broaden my skill set even further, I spent a couple years as a contractor for hire. Over the 22 months as a contractor, I developed a wide range of projects. I developed an on-line training and testing system for Centennial College using JavaScript on both the front & back-ends. I developed a Java application that integrated with mining analysis server software to display results directly to client when they were ready – this included the Java servlet on the server side and the web-based Java client. I designed and developed a PHP 5 framework which was used to develop an on-line community website. I wrote custom CSM applications for many clients.
VP, Technical Director

Hydrogen Creative

(Marketing and Advertising industry)

2001 — 2003 (2 years )

At Hydrogen Creative I helped build their digital portfolio. I developed a custom email marketing engine for their clients which was primarily used for Compaq's e-news. We built visually stunning websites and e-communications. We developed an ad builder for Scotts Canada. We developed an on-line game for Health Canada. We applied Information Architecture best practices to Interac and Green Cross Canada to recreate their on-line presence to improve the user experience.
New Media Consultant

Mixed Media

(Broadcast Media industry)

1998 — 2000 (2 years )

I worked closely with Mixed Media to bring a new level of digital expertise to their clients. Being a television production company, most of our work involved video delivered over the web. At the time most video was “postage stamp” sized and pretty rough around the edges. Using the Real Media streaming server and our experience with video encoding, we were able to deliver a higher quality experience to the end user. We designed & built Hotdocs' first website which included short video clips of every film being featured at the festival. We were also creating media rich presentations for government & shareholder meetings which included embedded media such as video and Director - quite a feat for the time.
VP, Technical Director

Interactivity Inc

(Internet industry)

1993 — 1998 (5 years )

Interactivity is where I honed my interactive skills. I started out with multimedia development for CD-ROM including “mixed-mode” CDs that had both CD audio tracks and a CD-ROM partition. Our most notable work was a CD-ROM for Shelly Brown & Associates which was featured on the cover of Studio magazine. It was a beautifully created portfolio that was a technical achievement ahead of its time. I then chose to focus only on the web and over the next 4 years I built many website and web applications. These include: Interac Association's first website and a custom VAR extranet for Merisel's resellers (now Synnex) featuring a manufacturer sponsored product catalogue.

Darryl Patterson’s Education

Harris Institute for the Arts

Audio Producing & Engineering , 1991 — 1992

Additional Information

Darryl Patterson’s Websites:

Darryl Patterson’s Groups:

The Rotary Club of East York, The Information Architecture Institute, Canadian Yachting Association, Zend Certified Engineer

Interaction Design Association
Rotary International
Toronto
Marketing Executives Group
Official Rotary Club International Group (Authenticated members only)
Rotarians
ki work - powering the online business revolution
Zend Certified Engineers
Online Advertising Professionals
Canadian Web 2.0 Jobs
Information Architecture Institute (IAI)
Rotary International Members
TED
Digital Marketing
Toronto Digital Marketing Professionals
Canadian Interactive Experts
The Age of Conversation Authors and Fans
Zend Framework Developers
CEO/ CIO/COE/COO/CFO/Head/VP/ Director/President Level - Senior Leadership Group
Rotary International Club
Official Rotary International Group
Typophile
ISMAR 2009
Mobile Experience Innovation Centre
People Living In Toronto
Mobile Marketing Canada