“Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” david bowie
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USPS SEND A SMILE
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MUSEUM OF AMERICAN PREHISTORIC SCIENCE
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TOP SHELF
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THE PULSE
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CRIMINAL RECORDS
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SNACK BLOX
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BACKSTOP: THE HISTORY OF THE CATCHER
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SUPER SIGNER!
ADVERTISING
BRANDING / ENVIRONMENTAL BRANDING
INTERACTIVE
BRANDING / ADVERTISING
PACKAGING
ADVERTISING / TYPOGRAPHY
INTERACTIVE / BRANDING
contents
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Usps send a smile ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN
The goal of this campaign is to promote positive interactions with the United States Postal Service, an organization that many have a negative opinion of. The Postal Service is one of the few ways that people can have a real, physical connection with others, especially those far away. By asking customers to think about how USPS has made an impact on their lives, the campaign makes customers actively think about the benefits of the brand. Visually, the campaign is influenced by the existing and successful USPS brand and image. The campaign logo is inspired by classic Americana as well as postmark stamps. The shield represents reliability, an important tenet of USPS. Real customers and their stories are featured throughout the campaign in order to make the campiagn personal and relatable. USPS-related imagery is used in the background of all elements in order to give the campaign consistency and distinction from existing USPS material.
A commercial familiarizes the target audience with the campaign and leads them to the campaign’s social media pages for further interaction. The commercial shows real customers getting special deliveries from USPS to make them smile.
Commercial
Additionally, the campaign’s social media pages will feature customer’s stories of how someone made them smile with a thoughtful piece of mail.
The contest featured in the commercial is the main activity that gets customers involved on social media.
Social Media
Existing in-store kiosks and displays are refitted with campaign signage featuring the stories of customers. The signs also encourage customers to share their stories and to send a thoughtful package to someone to brighten their day.
Retail Graphics
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museum of american prehistoric science BRANDING / ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
The Museum of American Prehistoric Science (MAPS) is a conceptual museum. that blends ancient subject matter with cutting edge technology. This blend meant that the design of each component needed to be simple and modern, while still tying into the museum’s prehistoric content. The logo and color scheme for the brand takes inspiration from cave paintings. To assist with wayfinding, a color, an icon, and a texture were developed to represent each floor for ease of identification. The curved boxes from the logo, as well as the brand red color, were singled out as signature, recognizable elements that were incorporated in all components for brand recognition. To reinforce an ancient and earthy feel, natural textures were used wherever possible. Credit to Alex Barnes and Zac Cashion for help in developing the original concept for the museum.
Museum Guide
The brochure’s unique fold and die-cut allows for easy navigation to each floor’s exhibits.
The MAPS app enables guests to easily access additional information about relics, experience virtual tours, and interact with exhibits.
Museum Guide
The lobby directory is a four-sided tombstone sign. For easy wayfinding, each floor has a corresponding color, symbol, and carved stone texture.
Lobby Directory
Floor Signage
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top shelf BRANDING
Top Shelf is a concept for a hockey-themed bar and grill, in the vein of ESPN Zone and Buffalo Wild Wings. The challenge was to stand out from existing sports grills while also delivering a brand that has the excitement and energy of the game of hockey. The solution was to make the brand modern, simple, and bold. A focus on black and white vector imagery, allowed for a clean, eye-catching look. An accent color of a light/electric blue was chosen to add some energy, and is seen throughout brand elements. Additionally, chrome elements are utilized to help support the clean and modern feel. A set of icons, which focus on recognizable symbols of both hockey and food, were developed to serve as the brand’s primary design elements.
The menu cover features a foil stamped logo and spot gloss pattern of the Top Shelf icons on black leather.
Menu
To-Go Packaging and Coasters
The Top Shelf icons were designed to work in one color so that they could be placed on any color, allowing hockey fans to always stay true to their team’s colors.
Apparel
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the pulse INTERACTIVE / MOTION GRAPHICS
The Pulse is an event finding and planning app. Users can create, locate, and share local events and activities with those who share similar interests. The name “The Pulse” was chosen because a pulse is a burst of energy that emanates from a single point until it makes contact with something. This provides a very fitting metaphor for the users of the app, who, when creating an event, are sending out a “signal” that reaches out to connect with others. Additionally, the name is a play on the saying “keeping your finger on the pulse,” which means staying up to date. The goal for the app was to be simple and intuitive. The app icon and logo is a geo-tag marker and a stylized letter P. Within the app, this icon doubles as a geo-tag marker, alerting users of the location of events in the surrounding area. A friends list and messaging function was added to help skew the app toward more of an exciting, social media outlet and away from simply a planning and calendar app. This led to the development of detailed user profiles that not only help users find people with the same interests but also allows for users to be notified of new events that match their interests.
Mobile App
Search events by category, keyword, or location and join the guest list.
Create your own events, easily share them with others, and meet new people.
Add your interests to be notified when a matching event is posted.
This animation starts with a single house creating an event, signified by the appearance of the icon. As the camera zooms out, other houses join in until the whole neighborhood is creating events and the logo appears.
Logo Animation
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criminal records BRANDING / ADVERTISING
Criminal Records is a music store in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. They have had the same branding for almost their whole existence, which spans almost 30 years. The store is located in a very artsy and eclectic area of the city which draws a lot of attention to the store’s very generic branding. Additionally, the store itself is very artistic and plays up a nostalgic and urban feel. The challenge for this redesign was to make Criminal Records look like it meshes within the surrounding neighborhood, while also establishing a solid direction for their brand. The CR letters from the existing logo were pointed out as being an element that the customers like, so a new, exciting CR logo that is an actual icon was developed. The shape of a record and turntable arm served as the basis for the letterforms. Though this causes the logo to be more abstract, it allows it to serve a great double purpose.
EXISTING LOGO
C R LETTERFORMS
RECORD PLAYER
NEW ICON
NEW LOGO Redesign Process
Magazine ads, which resemble pop-art comic book covers, would also be posted as street art around the city. The ad plays on on the hipster-think of vinyl records being better than modern methods of listening to music.
Advertisements
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snack blox PACKAGING / BRANDING
Snack Blox is a new concept for a food product that motivates kids to eat healthy, combining building block toys and healthy food into one. The goal of the brand is to convey the concept in a way that stands out to children and their parents. The target audience is elementary school aged children, who, at that age, still play with creative toys but would be reluctant to eat their fruits and vegetables. The containers for the product were designed to be reusable building block toys that the child can play with after eating. Brand colors were kept bright and eye-catching, while drawing influence from fresh fruits and vegetables. While the product is healthy and organic, the packaging was designed to look more like a toy than a typical organic food.
Product Packaging
Product Packaging
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backstop: the history of the catcher ADVERTISING / TYPOGRAPHY
This is a conceptual exhibition for the Baseball Hall of Fame to celebrate the catcher’s position, which is such an integral, but often overlooked, part of the game. The challenge was to create a cohesive campaign that clearly portrays the excellence, history, and timelessness of baseball’s great catchers. The campaign presents these catchers as epic and largerthan-life legends, leading to cinematic-inspired image and type treatments for all components. The “Thayer” typeface, created specifically for this campaign, takes design inspiration from a 1930s-era catcher’s mask and is specifically named after the inventor of the catcher’s mask, Frederick Thayer. The campaign’s imagery focuses on the iconographic catcher’s mask, one of the most easily identified aspects of baseball.
a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog The typeface is named after Frederick Thayer, who developed the first catcher’s mask and is based off a 1930s era catcher’s mask. The metal bars from the mask were developed into modules which are used to create all the letterforms.
Thayer Typeface
The layout of the ads were designed to stand out from traditional, page-centered imagery and text so that it catches a reader’s eye in a magazine. The headline plays on the teaser-poster, cinematic imagery.
Advertisements
The program serves as a souvenir that guests can enjoy long after they experience the exhibit. It is filled with articles about historical events relating to catching and profiles of the catchers inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Program
All text and imagery taken from BaseballHall.org.
Commercial
This promotional motion graphic is a timeline of the five greatest catchers in history, and is a preview of the players in the exhibit. The use of still images enhanced with subtle movements make the piece restrained and retrospective while still being epic and exciting.
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super signer! INTERACTIVE / BRANDING
Super Signer! is an edutainment game for children, where they interact with a character who teaches American Sign Language while also improving reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills. Like the Rosetta Stone language learning programs, the game pairs words and imagery with hand shapes in order to reinforce knowledge and facilitate learning. The game is based on the idea of stealth learning, which disguises learning through fun activities where children don’t even realize they’re learning. Each level introduces a new category of words, such as colors, shapes, and animals. Visually, the design is loosely based on comics, with halftone dots and menu buttons that evoke sound effect bubbles. The character, called Buddy, was created to be cute but still very human-like, since human features are very important in sign language. In order to help children follow the character’s signs, dog-like pads were given to the character’s palms and fingers, making them stand out.
Levels start with a few spelling questions. The character, Buddy, signs the next letter needed for the answer, helping the user learn the signs.
After answering each question correctly, Buddy shows the user the hand shape for the word they just spelled.
In the next section of the level, Buddy tests the users’ knowledge on the words they learned in the first section.
At the end of each level, the user unlocks items to customize their character.
Tablet App
The commercial introduces the concept of the game and also demonstrates how the user would interact with the character while learning.
Commercial
Flash cards help reinforce learning by making the abstract concepts concrete.
Flash Cards
The flash cards can also be used with Super Signer! Quest, an outdoor activity based game within the app. The cards are tossed like frisbees around a yard. The character then challenges the user to quickly run and find the cards to spell a word. The cards are scanned in with the tablet’s camera to check their answer.
Super Signer! Quest
Super Signer! Motion is a desktop program that supplements the tablet app. It keeps kids, who spend a lot of time on the computer, active and focused. It runs in the background and at random intervals, will take over the user’s screen, giving the user a “brain break” before allowing them to return to what they were doing. It can be used in the classroom or at home.
Super Signer! Motion