This was my biggest rush job of the summer. Cole’s Mom contacted me late one night, to say her son was getting married, and the only weekend both families could squeeze in a wedding before Cole’s school commenced was in 3 weeks! Luckily the bride knew exactly what she wanted. I churned this one out in about 2 hours. Congratulations Cole and Emily!
After much deliberation my MIL and I convinced the bride to pick a wedding invitation. I think they turned out pretty nice. SPOILER: The wedding went great! My sister’s-in-law and I may have gotten a little carried away with our plans to turn Rachel’s jeep into a unicorn during her reception. Scroll down to the bottom for a look.
I had fun coming up with a concept for this full-page newsprint ad. Family history can be a tricky subject to make visually interesting, since finding good-quality old pictures available for commercial use is hard. That was half the battle bringing this sucker to life. I used both Illustrator and Photoshop to build this project.
These are a series of posters I created for an 80’s themed party SirsiDynix (a.k.a. SD) is throwing in April. This is part of SD’s biggest customer event of the year. I did all the illustrations myself and the concept for the posters was mine in collaboration with SD’s main marketing writer and SD’s event planner. I created them in Illustrator.
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The sheer size of this little booklet put it high on my list of favorite projects. I had access to lots of high-quality photography and the permission to give the text plenty of room to breath. The end result was 30 beautiful pages, saddle-stitched. The entire booklet can be seen here: BLUEcloud Campus. The format was used as a template by another SD designer to create a companion booklet you can see here: BLUEcloud LSP.
This was the first ebook in a series. Along with creating the ebook itself, I knew my work would become a template for the rest of the series. I spent a lot of time developing the concept before I made any significant progress on the layout of content.
I wanted the template to have a signature cover, one that would make each addition to the series easily identifiable. However, inside the cover I wanted lots of flexibility. I also wanted the cover to appeal to my audience: public, academic, and special librarians. Therefore, I decided to lean upon every librarian’s love for beautiful, leather-bound books, and use a faux peek-hole in the cover to visually separate one book in the series from the next. This created a sort of dual-branding opportunity… the series having one brand, while each individual installment is allowed unique color schemes and symbols.
Once I established the concept for the series, I fleshed out the concept for this first installment. Web Services is not the most visually inspiring topic. There is a sort of design anthology connecting web services to images of clouds, but I didn’t want to lean too heavily upon that. So, I settled on a line-and-node figure as the basic motif, symbolizing how web services connects information across different databases in the internet ether. I combined this symbol with a sunrise illustration for the title-image. I feel this combination was visually interesting, hopeful, and calming (we didn’t want anybody running away because it looked to technical), while also tipping a hat to the “cloud” anthology.
I created the illustrations in Illustrator, but the interactive PDF was made in InDesign.
This simple brochure was created in Illustrator in the beginning of 2013. I used bright, fun colors to underscore the fun subject matter and set this piece apart from the company brand, so as not to turn off non-customer participation.
When I worked as a Design Lead for I-Comm Student Media, I was responsible for a group of new graphic designers. I managed the work schedule, helped critique and consult on their projects, and helped grade each student at the end of the semester.
Here is a poster I helped another student create. We worked together to brainstorm the concept, and then when she worked to build it I checked in and offered ideas for improving it.
This is a logo that I-Comm was asked to create for a medical professionals conference. The student who created the project came up with the idea, and I gave advise about how to make the form recognizable.
One of SirsiDynix’s large customer user groups is in Australia each year. It’s known as COSA. In 2016 I had the task of creating the show program. The show was taking place at the Geelong Library, and they had sent our team a set of gorgeous photos to use in our promotional materials. I relished this opportunity. I had another reason to be proud of this project: It had less revisions and errors than in the past. When working with a team on the other side of the globe, revisions can really bog down the process and cause confusion/delays across timezones. I finished well within the time frame and hit it out of the park on the first try, leaving very little to be revised, despite it’s length. Here are several pages from the booklet.
Another note: The logo on the bottom of the first page below (Connect, Inform, Empower) was not designed by myself. I mentored a new designer, fresh out of technical college. She did the bulk of the concept and design work and I talked her through it. The COSA team liked her logo so much they recycled it the next year. This was the first logo they used more than once.
This project is an example of something I did for fun on behalf of a family member. This particular project shows a little bit of my personal style emerging at an early part of my career. I’ve always been in favor of simplicity and calm in design. Some messages require a little bit more crazy, but not a birth announcement. I used Photoshop to create this design.
