For the past six years, I have volunteered with my local chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA Mobile) serving in various roles on the Board of Directors including Communications Director, Education Director and, most recently, President. In that time I have designed and developed various print and digital marketing campaigns for events hosted by the organization.
Designing user interfaces and experiences is one of my passions. I've had the pleasure of designing and executing websites and mobile experiences for several companies and organizations during my career. My understanding of HTML, CSS, Responsive Frameworks and object-oriented programming languages allows me to work in tandem with back-end developers to create beautiful, functional and pleasant user experiences.
As Senior Creative in the Marketing Department at Crown Products, I was responsible for catalog, social media, e-blast and collateral design from 2009–2013. From 2013–2016, I served as a corporate design consultant for Crown and its parent company Imagen Brands (including its subsidiaries Vitronic Promotional Group, MCM Group, Carolina Sewn and Chelsea Teddy Bear.)
During my four years as a consultant and contract creative for IMAGEN I worked on developing creative marketing plans from the ground up for all five companies. Additionally, I created and implemented social media strategies, trained their corporate creative and sales teams on branding and social media best practices, managed brand standards, developed budgets, and designed numerous projects including catalogs, presentations, film projects, websites and more. Over a span of seven years my work received more ten local and national design and advertising awards, I led the in-house design team through a complete rebrand in five months and I grew Crown's social media following from zero Facebook followers to over 10,000 (the highest in the industry at that time.)
While my work for IMAGEN Brands as a consultant went far beyond design, I’m unable to share examples of those marketing plans, proposals, brand standards, and internal training guides here due to their sensitive nature. I am able to share various examples of design work I created for IMAGEN brands and its subsidiaries. Not all ideas were implemented, but they illustrate the ideation and creativity that went into the process.
In 2018, I designed several corporate marketing pieces bro-bono for Victory Health Partners, a non-profit which provides low-cost medical care to uninsured adults from Alabama, Mississippi and Northwest Florida. Work included their 2018 Sponsorship Appeal, Annual Report, and collateral items for their 2018 Hope for Healing Banquet. I received an American Graphic Design Award for my design of the Hope for Healing Sponsorship Appeal brochure.
Negative Capability Press is a non-profit press devoted to committed to publishing quality books of exciting and innovative poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. It has been publishing nationally recognized books and a journal for 36 years. I worked with Negative Capability for over twelve years and during that time designed more than thirty books for the company. I was also responsible for general operations, marketing, designing books and curating artwork and experimental design work for publication in the press’ annual fine arts and literature journal Negative Capability. Outside of Negative Capability I have also worked with several best-selling authors to create print and e-book covers for their novels. I received an American Graphic Design Award for the design of The Diary of Kaspar Hauser in 2018.
As an extension of my written thesis Revision: Revising Traditional Exhibition Design (SCAD 2012), I created the reVISION Project, a website and social community that serves as an educational resource for museum professionals who are interested in creating stimulating, engaging, interactive exhibitions. Informing the Future is an idea that formed from my thesis topic, which asks the question, “How can developing technology be used to enhance our learning experiences?” The included images illustrate how I turned my research into a conceptual redesign of an existing local art museum exhibit that utilizes QR codes, a mobile app, and touch screen/virtual reality technology to enhance the learning experience.
Abstract: "In recent history society has experienced a cultural and cognitive shift in the way we interact. The rapid rise of communications technology has altered the way we process information and it has changed the way we learn. While classrooms have recognized this change, museums have not and as a result museum attendance has begun to suffer. The crux of the predicament appears to be knowledge based. Museums do not know how to refashion themselves as a persuasive entity worth visiting. They lack the resources that will teach them to deliver interactive design exhibits that stimulate and engage an audience. They do not understand the implicit repercussions of not changing. It is critical that museums react to the transformation that has taken place. Otherwise, society will lose this invaluable expression of our heritage."
While the majority of my work has centered around corporate marketing, user experience and publication design, I have had the opportunity to work on several interesting branding and identity design projects for corporations, non-profits and small businesses. Also shown here are some of my favorite projects that never left the conceptual stage.
Fine Art & Illustration is both a hobby and passion of mine. I am classically trained in oil painting and a variety of wet and dry media. Additionally, I also enjoy exploring fiber arts, printmaking and cosplay. Many of the works shown here are personal projects, however I have recently collaborated with poet Sue Brannan Walker on a book, Let Us Imagine Her Name, published by Clemson University Press.
