Hi, I'm Brandon Rosage. I led the creative direction, visual design, and front-end development of Ushahidi's crowdsourcing software.

I teamed up with Ushahidi in October 2011 to design and develop four products – the Ushahidi Platform, Crowdmap, SwiftRiver and BRCK – which help individuals worldwide democratize information, increase transparency and lower the barriers to share their stories.

In addition to supporting The Ushahidi Platform’s existing open source code base, I also drove the visual design and front-end development of its ground-up rewrite of Version 3. The platform was a ground-breaking web application used worldwide by activists, news organizations and everyday citizens to collect information and visualize data through interactive mapping.

I also worked on a three-man team tasked with redesigning and re-building Crowdmap, Ushahidi’s popular location-based reporting tool. Crowdmap Director Brian Herbert, Senior Developer Evan Sims and I cooked up the new product in less than a year, launching a total re-imagination of the service, built on top of a powerful API and crafted support a range of location-aware devices.

Upon joining the Ushahidi team in the fall of 2011, I began work on the visual design and front-end development of its lauded SwiftRiver web application, aimed at helping people make sense of a lot of real-time information in short periods of time.

I also contributed to the hardware and software design of BRCK, an Ushahidi initiative that attracted more than $170,000 in Kickstarter funding and has since spun off into an independent company. BRCK was designed to be a low-cost, battery-powered modem, largely for residents of Africa, that can switch between ethernet, Wi-Fi and 3G/4G connection. I helped design the high-level form of the device, its branding and its on-board software.

My work

• Visual design
• HTML5
• CSS3
• Javascript
• jQuery
• Leaflet
• Mustache
• PHP
• Kohana
• Craft CMS
• ExpressionEngine
• Public speaking
• Final Cut Studio
• Audio engineering