I ♥︎ BRAND DESIGN

Welcome to my portfolio overview page.

I’m so glad you’re here!
Please take a look around, and get in touch if you’d like to discuss how we could work together.

Ship It! The Game of Product Management

One of my favorite projects I worked on at Postlight was a card game on product design, which we shared with current and prospective clients. Once the team all agreed on the general concept, I explored several visual aesthetics, and landed on this 1950s Atomic Age-inspired look and feel, a nice blend of tech-forward and retro cool. I completed all the design and illustration work on this whole project, including the game cards, packaging, promotional inserts, and digital collateral. I was also part of a group of five people who created the gameplay mechanics, which included many, many rounds of play testing.

Once the game was finished, we hosted a launch event and invited all our NYC friends to attend and play the game with us. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. We created a form where people could request a copy of the game, and within days had over 4,000 people sign up. For several weeks, we received unanimous praise for the game across all our social channels (including over 200 Twitter photos). This project was a highlight of the Postlight marketing team, and was hugely successful for spreading brand awareness of Postlight.

Postlight, a digital product studio in New York City.
Graphic design, illustration, packaging design, logistics, game design.
- Stephen Carlson, designer
- Paul Ford, copywriter
- Xarissa Holdaway, copywriter
- Meredith Franzese, operations
- A handful of people for game design testing

Garmin fenix Campaign – Find Your Both

This is an interactive microsite based on the “Find Your Both” campaign for the Garmin fenix fashion / outdoor GPS watch. The fenix is positioned as a refined timepiece for the modern man, and a smart GPS watch for his more adventurous side. The goal of this microsite was to generate customer engagement with the campaign, while visualizing the dual-nature aspect of the watch. On this site, users can vote each image up or down, based on their own personal taste. When the user has finished choosing photos, the website will present which version of the watch is right for them.

I designed the responsive site for this campaign, working closely with the engineering team to figure out the algorithm and develop the site. Additionally, I worked with the larger creative team on the campaign concept. Additional components for this campaign included TV spots, marketing emails, digital ads, print ads, and social media content.

Garmin, a leader in GPS technology and wearable devices.
Digital design
- Stephen Carlson, designer
- John McEown, art director
- Tom Patten, copywriter
- 1 software engineer

Greenhouse OPEN

Greenhouse OPEN is an annual conference for HR professionals focused on helping business leaders attract and retain great talent in their organizations. Along with a Creative Director and another designer, I helped design the branding and collateral for this year’s event. This conference took place at the Jacob Javits center in New York City, and was attended by over 1000 professionals. We also designed an immersive experience for the conference after-party.

This event was a big challenge, because it was over five times the size of the previous year’s conference, and covered an area of 100,000 square feet. Some of the specific things I worked on included general event branding, wayfinding signage, welcome signage, t-shirts, app design, marketing collateral, digital design, and more.

Greenhouse, a provider of HR recruiting software for talent acquisition.
Design and art direction
- Stephen Carlson, designer
- Eunice Hong, designer
- Trenton Kenagy, creative director

Postlight Brand Design

At Postlight, I was responsible for all internal brand and marketing design. An important part of that responsibility was maintaining consistency of the existing visual language, while continuing to explore new ways that the Postlight brand could evolve, as the company grew.

Mercury Brand Design

Mercury is an open source, browser-based AMP converter and web parser. In other words, it takes a cluttered web page, and transforms the content into something much more readable. As part of my role at Postlight, I was in charge of maintaining and growing the existing visual style of Mercury, which was a sub-brand of Postlight.

Postlight Holiday Card

This is the 2018 holiday card we sent out to clients, along with a lovely gift basket (not pictured). I did all the design work on this project, as well as worked directly with the printer, which included resolving several production issues with how the design would translate into metallic foil stamping.

Postlight Socks

Everybody loves socks! This was an internal gift we gave to all Postlight employees. The design pattern is loosely based on pixels, and visually represents the abstract concept of transition, which is an important aspect of digital design. I did the design work on these socks, as well as the vendor sourcing and production management.

Postlight Track Changes Blog

While at Postlight, we redesigned our popular Track Changes blog while also migrating all the content from Medium to our own Postlight domain. I created all the blog article illustrations, while also provided light support for the design of the new blog itself.

Justworks Holiday Card

This is a card we sent out to our customers, wishing them a happy holiday. I designed and illustrated these cards from scratch. The design concept was to combine common holiday elements with common workplace and HR visuals. I designed three different variations of this card – one vertical and two horizontal fold designs – in order to have custom card designs for each type of customer.

Justworks, an integrated platform for HR, payroll, compliance, and benefits administration.
Graphic design
- Stephen Carlson, designer
- Adam Meisel, creative director

Justworks Blog Redesign

As our marketing needs grew to include more articles, news, and gated content, our current blog was not getting the job done. I redesigned the Justworks blog in order to help the marketing team have more control over how content was promoted and featured, as well as giving the site a much-needed visual design refresh to bring things up to standard with the rest of the Justworks brand.

For this project, I worked directly with the marketing team to assess the current pain points of the old blog and the requested features of the redesign. I did all the design work, and worked closely with our contract engineer for the development work.

In addition to designing the blog itself, I also created a visual identity for Justblog, which is a sub-brand for the blog itself. This identity was relatively simple and open-ended, allowing the visual language to grow as the blog scaled.

Icon Library and Badges

This is a custom library of icons and badges I created for Justworks marketing materials and sales collateral. One of the key goals for creating these icons, was to make it easier for other teams to have on-brand iconography, while also saving the time necessary to create custom icons for specific use cases. The badges are tied to specific Justworks benefits and are primarily used for sales collateral. The icon library is used in a wide scope of marketing materials, such as decks, marketing collateral, event signage, and the Justworks marketing website.

Justworks Overview Explainer

This is a quick, one-page explainer summarizing how Justworks can benefit small businesses. This is used primarily by the sales team, to be handed out at events and conferences. The biggest design challenge was figuring out the correct balance on how much content to include. Since this would likely most commonly be the 'second touch' exposure that a potential customer had to Justworks, we wanted to present some level of specific details, while still giving an inspirational, big-picture overview.

Whitepapers

Justworks publishes whitepapers, which are available on the marketing website and blog as gated content. These whitepapers are a critical part of the marketing team's content strategy. In order to make these whitepapers efficient to design and cohesive with the Justworks brand, I developed a visual design template. This template is largely derived from the Justworks blog redesign project I worked on, since in most use cases, a customer would access these whitepapers through the blog.

Work Fearlessly Branding

This was for a customer appreciation event that took place at Brooklyn Bowl. Below the t-shirt photos, you can see some of the sketches I made, as part of the design and lettering process for the primary graphic. The snapshots included below are from the ridiculous photo booth we had at the event.

Justworks Referral Program Postcards

Security Badges and Lanyards

The Story of Justworks

This is a 28-page, 5-inch promotional item I designed and illustrated to introduce new customers to Justworks. We wanted to use storytelling to make the message more interesting and relatable to people who were not familiar with Justworks. The Justworks product is very difficult to explain in a succinct way, so it required some thought and planning to figure out how to best convey the message. The pacing and flow of the story in this book is strategically weighted so the first few spreads are short and quick to get through. That way, the reader feels like he or she is already invested in the story before being presented with most of the product-specific benefits and features.

I pitched the concept, did all the design and illustration work, and wrote the story (which was adapted from a promotional video we had recently made). Throughout this process, I worked closely with our Director of Marketing and the Sales teams to make sure the messaging and tone were on target. The finished product was very well received both inside and outside the company, becoming one of the primary physical pieces of marketing used by the sales team.

Adding Life Insurance Beneficiaries to the Justworks App

Justworks offers its customers the option of life and AD&D (accidental death and dismemberment) insurances for their employees through MetLife. However, the low-tech process for employees to specify a beneficiary for their policies was rather clunky – employees had to download a PDF form from MetLife, print and fill out the form, then scan and email the completed form back to Justworks. We wanted to improve the user experience by integrating this process into the app. I did the product design for this, working closely with the PM to meet all the feature requirements.

The Amazing Adventures of FUND-ER WOMAN

At CommonBond, we needed a way to emotionally connect with our audience of financial aid officers, and let them know how our in-school financial aid services can help students succeed in college. The challenge here was to get FinAid officers to connect with and remember our brand, without being able to call out specific product benefits and features, due to restrictions in the student loan industry. We needed to come up with a promotional piece that shows we understand financial aid officers – they are the super heroes of the college admissions process, making impossible dreams come true.

I pitched this idea for a comic book to my creative director and our director of in-school marketing. I did all the design and illustration work, while working collaboratively with a copywriter on the script.

The project was a huge success, and financial aid officers at conferences around the country would come up to our display table and clamor for more Fund-er Woman. The reaction was so positive that we created a second issue the next year.

CommonBond for Business Brochure

CommonBond for Business is the B2B student loan benefit product at CommonBond. The old CB4B booklet was woefully outdated, and needed a fresh new update. I was the lead designer on this project, and worked closely with another designer and a copywriter to design this booklet.

Garmin Jeep

For this project, I designed a branded Jeep wrap to be used at trade shows, showcasing the Garmin VIRB action camera and Garmin Connect – an online fitness community. The Jeep also has space on the sides to showcase other outdoor GPS devices. The back of the vehicle has a video console that slides out, showing video footage from the action camera.

I did all the visual design, working closely with the Garmin industrial design team The ID team helped with early-stage concept development, as well as the physical implementation of the design.

Garmin OpenCaching

OpenCaching is a new geocaching brand I created for Garmin. This was one of my favorite projects at Garmin, because I designed the entire brand from scratch. The main components of this project included a website for finding and logging geocaches, a mobile app, and a whole bunch of promotional items and marketing collateral. Additionally, I created a geocaching mascot (Opie the Chipmunk), as a way to appeal to kids and families.

I did all the design and illustration work for this brand, working closely with a copywriter to establish the tone and messaging. For the website and mobile app, I worked with the mobile, UX, and engineering teams to build the digital presence of the OpenCaching brand.