John Heiner

In preparation for the 2012 election, USA Today re-branded the Politics section of the website to have a primary focus on the election and live election coverage. Working with another developer, we re-developed the Politics section to the new design and created a few specialized pages to focus on issues and primary results. Live primary results were a major target for USA Today and we already had a system in place to pull live results from the Associated Press, but needed to transform the data into a visual representation.  Live results presentations were made for single State results, multi-state results, and super tuesday results. Every night a primary or caucus occurred, the live results belt would be displayed on usatoday.com and update with live votes counts from the Associate Press.

One of my final projects on the Army.mil team was another Medal of Honor site recognizing the heroic acts of SFC Leroy Petry. The three previous Medal of Honor sites had all used basically the same site template, and it was time for a refresh. I designed and developed almost all the sections of the site which focused on clear navigation and a refined color scheme. One of my favorite sections is the battlescape which my design team took ownership of.  Patrick Slawinski conceptualized and designed a new graphic story-telling approach with a progress tracker as you scrolled through the events, which worked extremely well with the 3D image renders created by William Deacon. Medals of Honor are a big deal and with only 10 medals awarded since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began. They are very rare and the recipients deserve much honor and recognition for their heroic actions. I’ve been very lucky and I’m honored to have been a part of telling these Soldiers stories.

The Medal of Honor Project for SSG Rob Miller was a special project, and one of my favorites while I was on the Army.mil team. I was in charge of developing the Battlescape section of the microsite and as we received more information on the project, we realised the events that took place leading up to his heroic actions were very detailed and spanned a great deal of time. Determined to tell this soldier’s story in its entirety, I proposed the idea of a full motion graphics video presentation with narration. The final piece that came together was an 8 chapter series of events that used a flyover style of animation to illustrate the positions and actions of Robert Miller. It is still one of my favorite battlescape features that we created at Army.mil.

Being the most visited defense site in the world, the Army.mil web team set their sites on a new audience, mobile. The goal of the U.S. Army News & Information app was to provide easy mobile access to news, information, and a database full of resources such as Army ranks, equipment, and other useful knowledge.  Under the creative direction of Eamonn Bourke, I led the design for all aspects and sections of the app which included news, pictures, ranks, fact files, video, uniform information, an Army Game, and many others. The U.S. Army News and Information app was released in January 2010 to rave reviews by Mashable, Oh my Gov! and others. It was the first iPhone Application released under the Department of Defense, and one of the first for the entire government.

In preparation for the launch of My.Army.mil, the first user-customized web site under the Department of Defense, the Army.mil creative team led a full scale marketing effort. I was in charge of creating animated videos that would showcase the site and its features. My.Army.Mil offers visitors the ability to log-in with their Army Knowledge Online (AKO) or Google Friend Connect to create a personalized destination for Army information and media, ranging from traditional news stories to up-to-the-minute social media updates. I produced a teaser video, full introduction video, and instructional video that were released in stages leading up to the launch.

The idea for Army.mil/create came up as we discovered so many Army websites that had violated the Army brand because there weren’t any easy to access branding guidelines online. With over 1600 official and unofficial Army websites generating content every day, from installation websites, blogs, social media sites and everything in between, the Army wanted to help create a unified look and feel for each site. We developed a site of resources and instructions for branding your website in order to adhere to specific Army guidelines and best practices. Army.mil/create also included many design and development resources, and even a full html page template. Army.mil/create was the U.S. Army's first online branding toolkit for web and social media branding.