Concept magazine created for class. Chicago-centric quarterly, layout is colorful and dominated by pictures, stories short for how many pages are given. An 800 word story took 5 pages. Final three pages omitted. Available upon request.

The next idea was then taken from one of mine to make a site to gather late night food places and was turned into a nightlife blog. That too was not original but it was late into the project now and we needed to stick with it. The one requirement was that we report information to an audience. After realizing that a blog would never be successful like this I developed a new idea for it.

Bar Underground was born. I developed an idea to change how people search and look for bars (which could later be developed for any search of services or places). The mission was basically down with yelp. Yelp is entirely user generated reviews which completely biased. My system took user reviews out of the equation. To then allow a way to search for what is good to you we created certain categories to rate a bar on.

We would capture the personality of each bar. Things like how many people had beards there, how clean bathrooms were or the selection of beers. The categories were chosen based on asking random people on the street in different areas of Chicago about what they looked for in a bar. We picked ones that came up a lot and made a survey and went and rated many bars in the Bucktown/Wicker Park area.

Because of the time constraint it was kept simple and small, but enough to show the concept. Currently I am developing the idea in my spare time and expanding it to an incredible degree. At the moment I have three search categories with over 100 ratings in each. I am also working on making my own mapping system to work with the data and visual search interface. On top of that I am tackling making it optimized for mobile use. Touch screen phones will work particularly well with the interface.

A new model of the site is not available online yet, though I hope to be able to launch something within six months.