I am a digital designer and front-end developer in Texas.
Work
Below, you will find a selection of projects that represent the variety of work in which I’ve been involved. If you would like to see more detail or more examples of a particular type of project, please reach out.
Holidays at James Avery Artisan Jewelry
As the digital designer for James Avery Artisan Jewelry, I am tasked with creating engaging visual and interactive designs for email, web, and digital advertisements. This frequently involves a mix of campaign concepting, UX/UI, layout, development, and occasionally art direction.
For the holiday season of 2019, we decided to re-imagine some of the key elements of James Avery’s web presence and push the creative of the email campaign to elevate the jewelry.
Major deliverables included a clean, focused home page, a revamped gift guide that offered hierarchy and guided the user, and purposeful photography for all of our digital assets.
The new photography allowed us to work with the content instead of against it, allowing the viewer to get a better look at the stunning detail of our jewelry designs.
My position as lead marketing designer for HomeAway Software brought many opportunities to exercise my design brain. Projects included digital, print, environmental, and experiential design.
One of my first projects involved reorganizing the homepage for the B2B software division of HomeAway. Because HomeAway was formed as a merging of many different companies in the vacation rental and bed and breakfast space, the audience was vast. For this reason, the solutions we offered spoke to differing audiences, and our website needed to reflect that we were able to provide at all levels.
As the B2B side of HomeAway expanded, software became an integral part of large-scale vacation rental property management. Our team worked to develop consistent, branded marketing tools that spoke to the industry.
Marketing campaigns also required templated emails that could quickly be generated for unique audiences. These emails included newsletters, announcements for individual events and webinars, and targeted materials. This template was all coded by hand and easy to manipulate for any scenario.
A marketing email template used for newsletters.
Hover to pause or view the full email template. (Hint: after opening, inspect the source code if you’re interested in viewing my HTML)
Rezfest
As part of my work at HomeAway, I had a unique opportunity to brand and design the environment and coinciding experience of one of the largest events in the industry.
Digital graphics during a general session.
Rezfest, a three-day conference that brings together vacation rental industry leaders to learn and network, had me in charge of a $50,000 portion of the budget, which I put towards wayfinding, guide materials, audiovisual presentation, and ephemeral pieces like badges and flyers.
A column wrap that helped brand the environment.
Wayfinding proved to be particularly difficult for Rezfest 2016, as the hotel had a peculiar layout. Conference map signage was strategically placed around the hotel to help attendees get around. This map was also replicated in other places for consistency, including in the app and printed guidebook.
Large, easy to read maps were placed around the hotel.
In addition to the maps, we placed branded signage that called out breakout rooms and other areas of the hotel that were used for the conference.
Wayfinding signage that points to breakout rooms at the hotel.
Throughout the conference, keynote speakers would speak to the larger general session. When the presentation screens were in transition or not in use, they would default to a branded look announcing the speakers.
As a creative, finding ways to give charitably proved difficult until I happened upon an event called CreateAthon. This 24-hour marathon event brings together individuals from across the creative spectrum to collaborate and provide pro bono creative services to charitable organizations in need. In my third year with CreateAthon, I took on the role of creative lead in a rebranding effort for Todos Juntos Learning Center (formerly SSP Learning Center)
A horizontal logo created for Todos Juntos.
The former name for the organization, SSP Learning Center, lacked some clarity and needed to be changed due to a conflict with the trademarked phrase, “Si se puede.” As part of the rebranding efforts, my team developed the name Todos Juntos, which roughly translates to “all together” in spanish. The organization focuses on educating migrant parents and children, and a large portion of their clients speak spanish natively.
Mocked up tee shirts created to show how the vertical logo could be used.
The rebrand included horizontal and vertical versions of the logo in multi- and single-color versions, as well as executed mockups that showed how the brand could be visually represented across a multitude of media and platforms.
Over the years, I’ve had a few opportunities to design posters for events. It is not a regular part of my design activities, but it is definitely a fun departure from the mostly digital nature of my other work.
A poster design commissioned for a speaking and music event during SXSW in Austin.A poster design for a live Jazz event at a church in Austin.A poster design for a musical event at a church in Austin. The letter forms in “Hallelujah Hoedown” are completely custom.
Logos
While I spend more time applying existing visual identities these days, I have deeper experience in developing logos and other identity elements in my past.
A logo for a local distillery based in Texas. The letter forms in “Bujan” are completely custom.A logo for a local heavy metal band in Texas. The letter forms are completely custom.A logo for a small non-profit based in Austin, Texas.
Cornerstone
Cornerstone is a bi-monthly publication created to share community news and events at a church in Austin. The design of this publication needed to consider many limitations, including budget, available technology, and creative resources.
The cover of one of the first redesigned issues of Cornerstone.
I designed Cornerstone in black and white with a spot color, because the church used a two-color Risograph to print high-quantity jobs in order to save on costs. In addition to layout design, I shot and retouched many of the photos including the cover shot above, wrote articles for the publication, prepared print files, and even coordinated and finalized assembly.