GRAPHIC DESIGN AND PRODUCTION
My experiences in graphic design and production have encompassed nearly every aspect of the graphic arts, including magazines, books, catalogs, packaging, web design, product design, trading cards, album cover art, banner ads, direct mail, signage, t-shirts, graphic automation, cartography… You name it, and I've probably done it at some point in my career!
I've always had an eye for design, and I've spent much of my life studying the graphic arts and collecting the knowledge and resources that help make a better graphic designer. From the atmospheric record cover designs of Vaughan Oliver from 4AD Records to the clever marketing campaigns of Pentagram, there are diversities of style that always keep things interesting. Knowing your purpose and your audience can really inform the way forward to approach any particular design problem.
I've done far too many projects to cover even a small fraction of them on this website, but I'm going to try to provide a collection of samples that should give you a sense of some of the stylistic diversity that I've been involved with throughout my career, and give you a sense of the craftsmanship that I can bring to your particular needs. As a graphic designer and production artist, my first concern is solving the problem at hand, not inserting my own ego.
SAMPLES
SAGACITY MEDIA
I was the production manager for these publications at SagaCity Media. My graphic automation innovations improved the formatting time for restaurant listings by over 75% (see a video of my script in action in the Graphic Automation section of this website)! While much of the design was done by their in-house designers and art directors, I did have a chance to stretch out my design skills and I designed about half of the layouts in Windermere Living, for which I also developed a website for collecting the advertising materials from their real estate agents. As production manager, I was the person responsible for getting all of the magazines finalized and to the printer accurately and on-time, including mechanical specs and paper sourcing. The technical requirements for publications of this quality are very high, and require painstaking accuracy. I am very proud of my work on these.
DAKINE
I was hired as a graphic design and production expert for Dakine to help them lay out this 246 page sales catalog. With one other production assistant, I did about half of the internal page layouts and took responsibility for most of the technical aspects of the production. In addition to bringing my expertise in XML layout workflows in InDesign, I used my talent for batch processing to help them solve a serious problem with their outsourced catalog illustration files.
The illustrations looked good, but involved complex overlaid transparencies in Adobe Illustrator EPS files, which were crashing the printer RIP and also slowing output to a crawl. Using Photoshop, I developed a batch process to convert hundreds of Illustrator EPS files into Photoshop EPS files (which required no extra processing in the RIP) that I matched to the stochastic screen resolution used by their commercial printer. I then wrote a short AppleScript program to swap them all out into the layout in their original positions, and we were back on track!
Due to the computational demands of printing these complex Illustrator files, in their past experiences the final wrap became a race against time as the printers strained and crashed at the final deadline. Due to my process improvements, we finished a day early and with minimal stress!
I should mention that the text cropped off at the bottom of the page was a design element chosen by the art director! For Dakine, an "edgy" extreme sports brand for young people, it was a way of engaging their customers with a sense of humor and irony.
WIZARDS OF THE COAST
When I began my long relationship with Hasbro, one of the first designs I was assigned was this Star Wars Intergalactic Passport for Lucasfilm. George Lucas had released an edition of the passport as a special promotion for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, but there was no original artwork in their archives. Tasked to reproduce the cover image of the original, I created this replica design entirely from scratch in Illustrator. Having the chance to work on an iconic piece of cinematic history was an exciting experience, and when compared with copies of the original that turn up occasionally at auction, I think I did a good job of capturing the essence of the original. I continued to work on Star Wars products, including the Star Wars miniatures line and their role-playing publications for many years. Lucasfilm has a reputation for quality, and for good reason. I was extremely proud to have played a role in maintaining that level of quality.
For a few years there, Pokémon cards were the most popular consumer product in the world. Working on the brand was both an extremely rewarding and challenging experience. There were incredible amounts of overtime, crushing deadlines, but at the same time a feeling that you were part of something remarkable. Our team made it happen because we were focused, coordinated, and creative.
Because of the level of production required for such a hot commodity, I was required to fulfill a variety of roles. From typesetting cards, designing booster wraps, and creating the retail packaging to localization into ten different languages, this required learning new skills and putting them to effective use against unrelenting deadlines.
It was the most challenging commercial product that I've ever worked on in my whole career, and one of the most rewarding. I learned more getting that product out the door than any other single project I've been involved with. It also really put the concept of teamwork into clear focus. We were producing, together, the most in-demand product in the world for a few years. The challenges of keeping up with production taught me how to improvise and coordinate with others, and most of all, keep a cool head under stress. That experience was a pivotal one in developing my process improvement strategies, because we always needed to get more done in less time, and I started learning how to do it.
HORNALL ANDERSON
This glossy brochure that we produced for aviation leasing company Boullioun Aviation became one of the most celebrated projects that I've ever worked on, winning the Mobius Advertising and Northwest Advertising awards and getting runner-up at the London Packaging awards. While I production managed this entire project, this particular spread shown above was one of my design contributions to the project. This spread was the one they used on Adobe.com to showcase the project and was featured prominently on the front page of Hornall Anderson at the time.
This project for Foster Pepper & Shefelman was a capacities brochure for their legal services in the Seattle area. The project had such high end features as an embossed cover and a sewn spine, and transparent pages through which certain words relating to their services were circled. I was particularly proud of my work on this particular spread for their work for Paul Allen's EMP museum, as I had the opportunity to use some sheet music from Scott Joplin to illustrate Paul Allen's project inspired by Jimi Hendrix.
THE STREET TRUST WEB SITE
For this project, I was part of a multimedia design team working pro-bono for the organization. I submitted some of the early design prototypes and mine was chosen as the primary framework which was developed and added to by other members of the team. Their organization was very happy and grateful for our work, and I was proud to be able to contribute to something of such value to the community.