Home | Creative Portfolio

PageBeginAnchor

Personal Statement

Whether it is creative writing or graphic design, there are some key guidelines and methods that play into the order of my process. Design is just as much a practice of improving efficiency of a work as it is designing a solution to a process. While mechanical efficiency can be described as finding the minimum number of parts possible to make a solution function, it must not be forgotten that the goal is found in solving a problem, not in the extremity of minimalism. Therefore, I take in to account that minimalism can generally be the right path to begin a project with, but never the end goal.

printport

Print Portfolio

Download my print portfolio (4.9mb PDF)

Amethyst Bay Ad - Poster

When creating this piece, we were not provided photos or any other assets beyond logos and branding guidelines, so the photos had to be sourced from royalty free stock images. What proved to be challenging was finding an image that worked well to show amenities the fictional hotel would offer. After scouring for some time, i decided that the solution would be to create a collage of individual pieces from other photos.

Fantastic Galaxy - Pulp Sci-Fi Magazine Cover

Fantastic Galaxy is a concept design based on vintage monthly science fiction magazines and paperback pulp science fiction anthologies. I have always been enamored by the paintings on the covers of science fiction novels and magazines and have a growing collection of these to take inspiration from.

STEM Magazine Spread

visually engaging magazine spread, with the self imposed challenge of limiting myself to one image per page. While I knew what to do with the feature image, the image on the second page was trickier. I ended up using a photo of one of the gold records they sent during the Voyager program. I knew it would be visually stimulating to have the words wrap around the round image so I created a word wrap boundary just a little bigger than the record.

Font Exhibit Sample

This assignment was to create a specimen-like homage for a font. I chose Metallophile Sp8 as it is a really interesting concept for a font. It was created based on Futura, a font from 1927 meant to look clean, modern, and future oriented. What is ironic about Metallophile Sp8 is that it takes this modern font and emulated the look of a warn or messy printing press plate. The challenge was in finding a way to show the similarities without overlaying them on one another. Fortunately Futura is a geometric font, so it was really practical to show the G from both fonts over a circle. The color for the background of the circle would also be repeated as the accent color for the whole piece.

Funeral Program

This piece is a program for my grandmother’s funeral that was designed based on my aunt’s specifics. You may not immediately notice it, but none of this has white or black on it. When I initially designed it, I ran in to an issue where the black text and the white clouds had too stark of a contrast with the pastel pink and purple themes. I decided to ‘soften‘ up the white clouds by making them a really light gray, and modify the blending mode of the black text to find a lower and more appealing contrast. I have effectively lowered the contrast by raising the black levels and lowering the white levels.

Paperback Textbook Cover

This piece is a fictional textbook based on the same dimensions as Debbie Rose Myers Graphic Design Portfolio textbook. I had an initial idea to design a textbook that implies motion in it’s shape. I started with creating a sine wave graphic to get a general shape to build from. I then added the teal and orange curved shapes to provide more color and to build off from the sine wave curve motif. While it may look like I have only chosen two different fonts, there are three. In addition to the VHS reminiscent Videotype font, I have Dacherry for the title and a mix of Dacherry and Socake for titles on the back. Socake and Dacherry are made by the same artist and can be a interchangable down to the character. This allowed me to diversify the characters on the back to not look as uniform as would be the case if I only used Dacherry.

Takeout Menu Trifold

Being a novice when it comes to print work, I found myself working mainly with dark colors when designing the initial table tent piece. While it helps with the premium look and feel of the brand, I knew this would not be replicatable for the entire trifold for two reasons. 1. It would be a lot of black ink and could look tacky in practice. 2. White text on black in a restaraunt would be difficult to read in the evening for many of the adults in the demographic served. Knowing that this is a takeout menu, it is absolutely necessary that returning patrons can read it easily and navigate its content with ease. Therefore, the text would need to black on white for legibility, and the entire menu would take up the inside of the brochure so there would be no need to search elsewhere for an entree. The address, phone number, and hours of operation were also a high priority for closing sales, so they are all placed in one location, easily locatable by the large minimalist map on the back of the brochure.

Takeout Menu Trifold

Inside of Takeout Menu Trifold

Japanese Block Print Spread

This was a fun piece to work on as I knew of this Japanese style of art, I had no idea the process of wood blockl carving and printing that lead to the basis for these paintings. I knew that this type of article would certainly be in a textbook or magazine, so I opted for a traditional and professional font and chose to use Minion Pro. However, I ran into an issue when placing captions and and call out quotes. This was especially present with the far upper-right image captuon “Zōjō-ji in Shiba...” as the font for the caption was the same as the paragraph font. I decided to make the caption bigger, but it was still too close and I was fearing a reader may jump the rails and keep reading past the gap afyer “colour-blocks and the...“. The perfect solution was in making it right-justified instead of center, and setting the font to be a sans-serif Avenir. I then put the rest of the captions in this font and justified it away from the body text and it did the trick.

Environmental Magazine Cover

While the hunting magazine had a considerable amount of seriousness to it due to the nature of the content and the audience, the design for the environmental magazine would need to be a considerable departure from anything like it. Even the name ‘Take a Hike‘ was meant to be a cute tongue-in-cheek joke that required a similar font to match. The font ‘Kiti Cuties‘ would prove to be the best font to meet that goal as the shapes of the letters would take on a purposely uneven an crooked look that would pay homage well to the cheeky tone of the title. Another major consideration was in color choice, which proved to be a more difficult problem to solve as I needed to make it look so far removed from a sport hunting magazine, that I decided to look at environmental organization logos for inspiration. These included the Vermont Echo Center and the EPA’s logo, both a timeless blue and green, meant to symbolize green life, as well as blue skies and water. The blue and green went a long way in solving the issue as it couldn’t reasonably be mistaken for a hunting magazine now.

Hunting Magazine Cover

The next two pieces proved to be challenging as they both stem from the same CC0 image of an elk, but they both are very different magazines designed for different demographics in mind. In order to make a hunting magazine that could reasonably be picked up at your nearest Hudson News, I decided to do some research on not only Hunting magazines, but also other magazines that cater to men. What I found were some common themes. Hunting magazines such as Field and Stream, as well as Bowhunter, make heavy use of telephoto images of large game with a low depth of field, and often have an element of the image overlap some of the text without obstructing legibility. I decided to increase the blur of the background and place the text for the featured pieces on the left hand side so that I could obscure the lettering of ‘territory‘ to acheive both. Lastly, I found that there is a certain dark rawness to the quality of the images featured in mens magazines, especially for Guns & Ammo and Field & Stream. I added some vignetting to the base image of the Elk and increased the contrast and crushed the shadows to acheive this look. The highlights for the image however needed to stay low or else the white snowy mountains would be competing for attention with the text.

Videography / Editing

Filming, Editing, and Motion Graphics

Southern Dunes Commercial

Recorded 4K video of Southern Dunes golf club facilities and actors, combined with provided drone video in Adobe After Effects to produce a commercial.

Get Out Golf - App Store Promo

Recorded 4K video of golfers at app partnered golf courses, combined with provided drone video, and illustration and App Store animation in Adobe After Effects to produce a commercial for local television.

Adobe Rush Tutorial Series

Planned, wrote, recorded, and narrated a tutorial series to train students and staff to use Adobe Premiere Rush, a beginner video editing program by Adobe.

Journalism Dept. Unboxing

Recorded students unboxing and having fun with their new video and podcasting equipment.

Created motion graphics in After Effects to supplement the narration.

Narration written and provided by student.

videdit

Motion Graphics

Illustration and 2D Animation

Cassette Tape

Created a cassette tape graphic with client branding in Photoshop and animated multiple layers in Adobe After Effects in a Vox video inspired fashion.

Adobe Rush Workshop Promo

Created original graphics in a vector illustration program, superimposed a screen recording of the software with some highlighted features, animated motion graphics consistent with Adobe and client's branding, and assembled in Adobe After Effects.

mogra

3D Animation

Modeling, Texturing, Shading, and Animation

Rescue the Valkyrie

Animated in 3D using Blender & Adobe Substance Painter for an Escape Room exhibit.

Planned and executed in close coordination with client, utilizing storyboards and iterative animation.

Retro Air Conditioner

Animated and painted in 3D using cell shading and grease pencil in Blender.

Proof of concept for stylized cartoon animation.

Cars with Legs

Produced storyboards and animatics from provided script and audio using Adobe Flash in close communication with show creators.

Illustrated and animated short series pilot in Photoshop and After Effects for 2D sequences. Illustrated and animated in Blender for 3D sequences.

Edited and assembled with sound and royalty free media in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Dog Sheets in 3D

Animated in 3D with a depth of field wrack focus in Blender. Recreated Tommy Hilfiger bed sheets from a photo and re-pattered in Photoshop. Height and normal mapping in Blender using nodes.

Proof of concept for recreating products from photo.

Space Station Orbiting

Modeled, lit, and animated in 3D using a real-time rendering engine.

Proof of concept for real-time animation with reflective surfaces.

3danim

Vector Graphics

Showcasing work Specifically made in vector applications.

Big Daddy's Pizza

Cleaned up and recreated the logo for Big Daddy's Pizza from provided image file and provided client .eps, .ai, and .svg vector files for updating their website and for employee apparel printing.

Social Media Vectors

Various vector graphics that I have created for media needs over the years in vector software (Illustator, Affinity, etc.)

vect