About

Interactive and Creative Director with a history including hands-on design & development, management, and executive experience living and constantly learning in NYC.

Truly platform agnostic, creating compelling designs and interfaces for products and experiences online and off.

I can now be found in the New York City office of Blast Radius.

I continue to instruct the Web Portfolio course for senior-year students in the undergraduate Graphic Design & Advertising program at NYC’s School of Visual Arts.

I can be reached at pete@[NOSPAM]peterciccotto.com. Detailed resumé available, just ask!

Or… check out the basic version at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciccotto

Some history:
I began my work in the online space at a couple of small web startups in 1994 and 1995. In 1996, I took on a series of projects involving the then nacent Shockwave plugin for Columbia Records Online. My first loves being art and music, this was a dream job. I then joined Sony Music as an Art Director for projects both online and off. In this position, I was able to work on every conceivable type of project: advertising, cd packaging, promotional materials, illustration and photogrpahy commisioning, production and art direction of photo and video shoots, motion graphic projects, dvd menus, and last but definitely not least, web sites. The creative division I worked in was run as an ad agency - I cut my teeth working from one deadline to another. Colleagues and friends began calling for my services and skills; I gladly took on many projects.

Around 1999-2000 I chose to focus my skills solely in the online area, as Flash (I’m talking versions 3 and 4 here!) was just starting to get much more impressive and was making up for the boredom I began feeling from plain old HTML. Later, the second web boom came, and Flash was forced to share the stage with a revitalized javascript world, while plain old HTML was finally getting its due being much more strongly backed by search engine rankings and more robust advertising technologies. Rolling it all together, my eyes opened wider and I grew into a much more platform-agnostic person than I was before. As the head of the company’s online and mobile design department, I gained considerable management experience. I was able to lead teams both small and large to creatively strategize and deliver successful products. Throughout this time I also gained executive experience, and continued to hone my client-facing skills. I truly had a great time heading a group of amazing people in the Online & Mobile Design group at SONY BMG Music Entertainment. Around 2005 or so, I was called into the Graphic Design & Advertising program at NYC’s School of Visual Arts to instruct the Web Portfolio course for senior-year undergraduate students.

June 2007: Pursuing a position at AOL, I departed Sony BMG. It seemed like a natural progression to work with larger online experiences directed towards a huge userbase. I was building upon my previous history and knowledge, and spent the majority of my time in the entertainment verticals. I was able to focus on areas like video, user gen content, community, and data feed visualization. My goal was to create useful, thoughtful, engaging products. I also spent some time on the client side, integrating outside advertising, as my Sony experience was more like that of an agency.

March 2010: Creative Director at Blast Radius in NYC. Have some fun clients, more to come…