Portfolio

Below are recent or favorite pieces of graphic design and various marketing materials.

Recently, my hometown decided to implement letters spelling out the name of the city, but with a twist: each painted by a different artist and calling back to what Lansing means to them.
So naturally I decided to throw my hat in the ring and created a “Lanstronaut” design! This is only a proof, as unfortunately I was not able to work on a final letter, but I enjoyed working with these colors!
The moon is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Quality Dairy – the moon is made of cheese!

When my mom was a kid in the 70’s, this brand – Freakies – was her favorite cereal. When my brother let me know he was working on “cereal bombs” (hot cocoa bombs but with cereal), we worked together to create a couple of trading cards based on the original characters in the line-up.
The problem was, the character images and logo were both image-fried due to their age. So I decided to re-illustrate her two favorite characters – Gargle and Snorkeldorf – and re-traced the logo to make sure we could get a clean start on these cards. There, of course, was no clear picture of the cereal, so I applied a filter over a stock image of Cheerios. Collect ’em all!

Blue Owl Coffee Company released a product a few years ago called a “Blue Howler” and put out a call for artists to create a can design that would also translate to a t-shirt design. Once 3 designs were selected by judges, it was up to Instagram and Facebook users to vote for their favorites. I didn’t end up winning, but I’m proud of how far I DID get.

To celebrate Disability Pride Month (in July!) I worked together with Vertafore’s branding and marketing team to come up with a t-shirt design that would show off that pride. I also created a logo for the group Able@Vertafore. You can actually buy the t-shirt here!

But that’s not the end of the Vertafore branding I did! To the left is Pixel, the mascot for our gaming interest group, Dice, Decks, and D-Pads. To the right is Toby the jaguar, the mascot for my team (Team JAG). Pixel was designed with the Vertafore colors in mind, and Toby was designed to look like one of the people icons that Vertafore has on their website. Did you know that Toby’s “spots” are parts from the “Chiller” Windows font?

After being inspired by art toys such as the ones by @zardapuya on Instagram, I knew I wanted to make my own art toy designs. One of those designs/design series is pictured here. Behold, the breadheads!

Each year, BIGGBY COFFEE holds an Annual Franchise Meeting, where the home office, franchise owner/operators, and baristas, among other things, get a swag bag full of exclusive branded merch. I was delighted to design this request, a Schoolhouse Rock spoof. Here you can see Espresso Man, Orange Washington (two unofficial mascots for individual stores), several baristas and customers, and of course, Bob and Mike themselves!

Each year when I was a child, my mom used to create these fun brochure holiday newsletters. When I grew up and started my own family, I knew I had to do the same. One year I created a 3D stand-up Christmas tree with family picture ornaments, another I created a cut-out “string of ornaments” with us as northern European-style baubles. Before I moved the newsletter 100% online, I created one last print newsletter in the style of a silly Christmas-themed movie. I think it was a lot of fun!

When I look at a Little Debbie box, my thought is that the packaging hasn’t moved past the early 90s in design. Each of the boxes, while fun, don’t have any kind of cohesion to tie them together, and typically have too much going on in my opinion. Additionally, the logo looks to be a semi-realistic drawing with no way to simplify the colors down. So I set out to change that with this practice session. I first redesigned the logo so that it still had the same charm, but was simpler. I gave it a “tag” so that it, along with the font I selected, would tie the products together as being related items. I also tried to simplify the boxes using the same ratio that the boxes come in. How do you think I did?