{Apologies. Images on the way!}
I enjoy drawing, designing, and arranging information with visual appeal. So, for the past... many years, I've done various side projects for friends and acquaintances. In addition, I've worked as a rug designer and the in-house graphic designer for a coffee roasting company.
I worked for G. Coles-Christensen Rug Merchants (later General Mercantile) for over two years, designing custom hand-woven rugs. I worked closely with interior designers and individual clients to create designs suited to rooms, based on motifs from fabrics, paintings and antique rugs. I helped two designers create their own "line" of rug designs. For many clients I helped them pick out designs from our catalogue and choose colors to work with their existing furniture. I edited rug designs in Illustrator to change sizes, proportions, design elements and colors. I created a textured template that sped up my design editing process, reduced errors, and provided a mock-up that looked like a real rug (versus the coloring book page design that the company had used before I began working there).
Another aspect of my role at G. Coles-Christensen Rug Merchants was advertising and marketing. I designed (and coded) monthly email marketing campaigns and blog posts, as well as two product catalogs. To give the company a younger, fresher look, I helped redesign then coded a new website that was focused on easy online rug purchases from our in-house inventory.
I was hired at the Brooklyn Roasing Company as a graphic designer, working under the owner and founder of the company who had designed the logo and set the graphic tone for the company. The idea behind their logo is that the outlines stay the same while the colors and contents within the lettering are constantly changing—much like Brooklyn. As a result, my work involved changing colors and masking images into the letters of the logo, as well as resizing and placing the logo on various applications. While there, I helped design travel mugs, biodegradable plastic to-go cups, t-shirts, pens, product labels, bike caps, new menu boards, event signage and various office materials and printed collateral. Ultimately I ended up doing a lot of clerical work, taking wholesale orders and fulfilling online orders instead of pure design work, but that's to be expected at a two-year-old rapidly growing business.
When I began working with the owner of Cardinal Graphics, he was preparing to launch the company, and needed everything from a logo to custom proof folders to a website. He knew he wanted the logo to include a compass rose and very specific red and blue. With that in mind, I designed his logo, and once we had that nailed down, I designed business cards, stationery, and many collateral marketing pieces, including a "Pantone" folding calendar, an origami piece, and a little printing terms glossary. Finally I designed and built the website.
I worked at Java Joe's for over five years, and in that time I painted two versions of illustrated pastry labels, drew various special drink signs, redesigned the menu boards, and made customer comment cards. If you are ever in Santa Fe, NM, please go visit this coffee shop that will forever shelter a piece of my heart.
While working at Naidre's Cafe in Brooklyn, NY, I chalked the daily sidewalk and indoor menu boards. When my manager left Naidre's to work at another café, he hired me to do permanent menu boards at his new café, Choice Market in Brooklyn, NY.
None of these are published, but I was pleased with how they all turned out. Someday I would like to get better at illustration and perhaps illustrate children's books or even textbooks.
I designed and illustrated (partially by hand, partially in Adobe Illustrator) a children's activity book about visiting New York City.
As a project in college (instead of writing a dry, academic paper), I wrote and illustrated a children's book about Newton's Principia, cleverly titled, "Le Petite Principia". One of my fellow students thanked me, claiming that my illustrations and simple explanations actually clarified something she had not quite grasped beforehand.
For the same professor, later in the year, I wrote and illustrated a creation myth detailing the complicated relationships between electricity and magnetism, titled "The Creation of Current".
I painted a wordless book for a design class that I took while I attended Wellesley College. It illustrated Murphy's Law and the Buttered Toast saying. The visual narrative shoes a neatly laced sneaker and a perfectly jelly-laden slice of toast. Next the sneaker is shown walking and getting caught on a chair leg, while the toast is shown flying up then falling down. The book ends with a human figure outstretched, face-down on the floor, with one leg caught in a chair, the opposite arm outstreched towards a ruined piece of jelly-side-down floor-ruined toast.
Also while at Wellesley, I painted a book illustrating a service trip I took to Guatemala. I tried to capture the outrageous colors of the landscape and art I saw there in the mundane depiction of the school building's freshly-painted walls and the well-worn bus we traveled in.
Back in high school I wrote and illustrated a cut-paper children's book about the environmental impacts of hog farming, titled "Hog View Farms".
This is a logo and poster I made for an annual Thanksgiving Day 5K fundraiser in Santa Fe, NM. The elementary school hosting the run was the Atalaya Roadrunners.
I volunteered to make a flyer for a local (NYC) campaign launch party. It had to work as a printed flyer and as an email campaign, so it's typography-based and fairly simple. I also only had two days to do it.
This is a flyer I made in college for an all-campus annual Faust-themed party. Pretty slick.
I designed an annual newsletter to their donors.
This is a silly poster I made advertising a free night of daycare, sponsored by a church in Santa Fe, NM. I made several other flyers for this couple's various extra-curricular advertising needs.
I made a newspaper-style announcement advertising a Bridge Club fundraiser for the Santa Fe Animal Shelter.