• Hello! I'm Brian VanArsdale
    I look for ways to rethink technique and tradition.
    Let's get to know one another.

What I Do

Production

Digital Project management from planning to execution to operations.

Technology

Development through scoping, architecting, auditing code, and leading large-scale development teams.

Music

Professionally-trained saxophonist and Composer.

Sports

Owner and operator of a growing digital sports property (and a big sports fan).

Concepting

Combining user-experience with concept - all based on research and analytics.

Food & Drink

Supper Club Owner, Chef and Mixologist.

Some Examples

Throughout my career, I've had the chance to create some pretty great things across different genre. Below are some examples from the past few years. For each, I was intimately involved in the concept, the production, and the planning - and I oversaw the project from start to finish.

  • Duncan Hines

    How do you redefine a website for cake mix? You do research and interviews to understand the baker, then build a website that inspires them. Instead of the traditional navigation, we organized the content around "inspirations" - colors, flavors, dates, memories, etc, and removed the traditional navigation in favor of a simple search bar, "What would you like to bake", and an engrossing visual interface. Although the site is still new, Duncan Hines is already seeing gains in all key metrics, and most importantly direct correlation to sales.
  • From the Heart

    My third recording, this album features my quintet playing music that we performed around New York and on the road across the country. A collection of mostly originals, 'From the Heart' features music and musicians from my working group in New York City. Musicians included Clay Jenkins on trumpet, Mamiko Kitaura on piano, Dan Loomis and Ike Sturm on bass, and Jared Schonig on drums. The music is broken into three "acts", each representing a different portion of my life.
  • Facebook/CNN

    When the world's largest social network asks you to concept and develop a program around the Presidential election, you pull out all the stops. Through a partnership with CNN, we created a facebook application that polled users about political opinions. Then, we combined Facebook Social Graph data and CNN show topics to produce a dashboard for CNN producers that showed more info than any standard opinion poll. The result was brand new insights into the social world and its users, allowing show producers to generate new CNN content.
  • Sports from the Basement

    Founded in 2014, Sports from the Basement looks to present a view of the sports landscape through the eyes of the casual home viewer. The commentary can be sharp, but we don't get caught up in the media spin or whitewash of larger sports institutions, instead we hope to take a fresh look at the sports landscape everyday. Topics include Basketball, Soccer, Baseball, Football, and College Sports.
  • The Flood

    My first recording, featuring a full jazz orchestra. This was a recording of an hour-long multi-movement work that I composed for jazz orchestra, intended as a programatic interpretation of the "flood" story, most commonly known as the biblical story of Noah. The story is found in many religions and cultures, and the piece was designed to present the listener with the delimma faced by everyone involed.
  • Cryptography

    My second recording, this was a true documentation of my working trio as we existed in NYC. With Dan Loomis on bass and Jeremy Noller on drums, this was a live session, designed to document the music we were creating at the time. The album features both jazz standards and originals, and explores the possibilities of a group without piano or guitar.

Get In Touch With Me