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.


MASS Exchange

MASS Exchange is a programmatic futures exchange for advertising, and has taken the Wall Street futures exchange model and adapted it for trading advertising.

I worked as the product designer for MX, collaborating with the creative director to execute the UI/UX and visual design for its interface. My tasks included designing the UI in Adobe Illustrator, based on UX wireframes provided to me, and rapidly prototyping them in HTML and CSS. The prototypes were then passed on to a development team.

Categories
UI design, futures trading, web app, visual communications design, web development

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading

I started with Balsamiq wireframes provided to me by the creative director:

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Wireframing Futures Trading

Using these and the identity colors chosen by the creative director, I designed the application’s user interface. I began with the dashboard, which went through about 10 iterations:

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading
Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading
Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading

Eventually we decided on Baskerville for the headings. We felt that a serif typeface conveyed stability, and a sense of establishment. The creative director remarked that one rarely comes across a bank with a sans-serif typeface.

I implemented our designs into HTML and CSS prototypes, starting with the dashboard, one for the advertiser side and one for the publisher side:

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading

There were more than 20 screens that needed to be designed for the publisher side and advertiser side. We established visual identity guidelines and stuck to them rigorously.

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading

I let the creative director’s wireframes dictate the flow from one screen to the next, and used visual cues such as colors and content placement to make the flow as intuitive as possible.

Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading
Ariel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures TradingAriel Cotton UI UX Design Mass Exchange New York Interface Visual Design Futures Trading

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