You're good enough.
You're smart enough.
And doggone it,
people are going to like you.

I am a print design trained digital designer with 9 years of experience helping businesses get their image right. I thrive at coming up with the ideas that drive creative direction & implementing those ideas with graphic & digital design skills, a keen eye for branding, & a thorough knowledge of front-end coding.

I’ve worked with multiple startups, agencies, non-profits & businesses during my career. Some highlights of partnerships I’ve had are American Family Insurance, Insureon, Blue Chip Marketing, World Cocoa Foundation, ESDNetwork, Shoutlet, Hardly Square, IRWIN, University of Wisconsin, & The Onion’s A.V. Club.

In the years of working on projects with these organizations, I’ve picked up and honed a wide-ranging set of skills – concert photography, identity strategy & design, user experience design, publications design, information architecture, social media strategy, etc.

Knowing the programs & technology that allow for the above skills is essential in being able to implement any of them. Some of these include CSS3, HTML5, jQuery, PHP, XML, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Coda, SVN, Lightroom, Fireworks, WordPress, Joomla, OmniGraffle, and the list goes on. These are the tools to implement the concepts I help conceive.

BandSwap Madison

Band, Blog, Concert, Photography

I had the opportunity to shoot some photos of SpokesBUZZ’s BandSwap that was held at the High Noon Saloon in partnership with the Madison Arts Commission. The event featured two local bands, Sky Road Fly and Sexy Ester, as well as the Denver band Common Anomaly. Click on the photo to go to the full set at flickr.

You can view the rest of the photographs I took on flickr.

Jessica Steinhoff’s Website

Design, Interactive

Jessica Steinhoff, a Madison-based writer, needed a super clean website to showcase her stellar writing chops to potential clients. I helped her meet that goal with this responsive site made with HTML5/CSS3 and based on WordPress. Now, because minimalist sites can be very bland, I added a hover feature highlighting imagery from each of the pieces of writing showcased, and on top of that, the colors of the portfolio item blocks are randomized. Refresh the site and see for yourself.

ESDN pitch

Branding, Design, Interactive, Print

At ESDNetwork, there was always a mad scramble for investors, just like the situation is at every other web startup worldwide. Their secret weapon was this set of investor decks that made some Silicon Valley successes request designs for their own stealth startups.

I created these knowing that our investors would be from the jewelry industry but also from tech. Fun and minimal and easy to understand. Emphasis on minimal infographics and easy to read text (both relating to typography and copy writing).

To set us apart from every other Dieter Rams designer doing minimalism, I took cues from Internet icon design and the random alignment errors screen printers are all to familiar with.

OrderPad

App, Design, Interactive

OrderPad is an iPad application that was designed for multiple B2B clients at ESDNetwork. It was made to replace the oh-so-old-school briefcase full of jewelry that salesmen would take out to retailers to get them to sell a jewelry brand’s products.

The design is focused on the brand, with the ability to theme the application in a plethora of ways, but also made to handle products with thousands of different options and combinations. This quickly made ESDNetwork realize the mass market appeal and start marketing the app to other industries it could serve.

The design itself is one that lets the buyer dictate the experience. They can sort and filter in a ton of ways, view high resolution 3D versions of products, quickly repurchase past orders without the need for a salesman in the store and more.

Baltimore Sports & Life

Branding, Design, Interactive
Baltimore Sports & Life

Baltimore Sports & Life and I teamed up to create a very Baltimore-centric site design. We worked in state and city flags, along with a skyline and various other Chesapeake Bay related flourishes. Once we had the city more than represented, I wanted to make sure that reading the site would be as easy as possible, since it is very community based with not just blogging, but heavily used message boards as well.

Baltimore Sports and Life logo

While the blue crab logo didn’t end up being used, it was a great starting point on coming up with a clean serif based logotype.

Prevention Speaks

Branding, Design, Interactive

The University of Wisconsin needed a website designed for their health services department’s new non-profit training website PreventionSpeaks.org. I worked with them to hone a user experience and friendly design that would be usable by a base audience that spanned a huge range of familiarity with websites.

To get started though, I made a logo that could be multipurpose (as illustrated by the large speech bubble in the footer of the site) and hinted at a certain classic 80′s video game (with the thought that the site would have some game-ification worked into the user experience). Then came up with a color scheme that helped to represent the different sections of the site.