Identities, catalogs, posters, programs, handouts, and the systems that keep the last one looking like the first. Brand and production design, most of it as a one-person department.
Identity and brand systems · Design frameworks · Catalogs and print production
I made everything the company put in front of thousands of independent retailers: catalogs, the product photography inside them, trade campaigns, and the pages that sold from them. Over 5,000 products, eight brands, seven years, one department.
Jewelry is bought by the millimetre. Every piece is photographed to one standard and printed at actual size: thousands of SKUs, on a catalog calendar, for eight brands that each had to keep a look of their own.
Every concert needs two poster sizes, a program, digital promos and the venue ad. The music changes every time. The masthead, the date block and the sponsor row never do. Seasons in, no two posters look alike and the frame has not moved.
Sell the music and carry the sponsors in one glance, then do it again next month for a different composer without looking like a different orchestra.
Look at the bottom of each poster: same masthead, same date block, same sponsor row, every time.
They had a mark and no printed matter to go with it. I built the rest around it without touching it: a tri-fold for the residential side, a full brochure for the commercial one, a pocket folder to carry it, and a sell sheet for every kind of job they wanted to be hired for again.
Two different buyers, a homeowner and a facilities manager, read the same company in the same afternoon. One frame has to speak to both, and the next sell sheet has to be an afternoon's work rather than a redesign.
The work has never stayed in one field or one market: scientific equipment, financial services, youth sports, a curling club, a university. Each audience wants a different look and a different voice, and the finished thing has to be right for them, not for a house style. A few of those jobs, most with a page of their own.
Three different kinds of work, each one looking like the client rather than like the other two. What they share is the method underneath. Most work is one of these, and most brands eventually need all three.
A mark, the type and colour that go with it, and the rules that keep it right when someone else uses it.
For teams that publish proposals, reports, catalogs or campaigns constantly, and keep rebuilding the same page by hand. A system of styles, parts and written rules that the next piece is assembled from, whether a colleague, a contractor or an AI is doing the assembling.
Long documents that have to be accurate as well as attractive: product data, true-size artwork, revisions every season, and a press-ready file at the end.
If a page needs hand formatting, a style is missing.
Space after a paragraph, an inset on a frame: set in the style, not with extra returns or a dragged handle. Spacing you cannot find in a panel will not survive the next editor.
Body copy on every line, display type on its first. A page you can feel is square is a page somebody measured.
Named, shared, printed in the guide. A colour that only exists in one file will be wrong by next month.
The same four on a one-off poster and on a brand system. You always know what the current stage needs from you, and what comes out of it.
What the piece has to do, who it is for, who signs off, and what finished means. Written down, not remembered. Usually one call and one email.
Budget, date, sizes, press and paper, and what already exists: a logo, a brand guide, last year's version. Found now they shape the work; found late they redo it.
A few real options, each a different idea, all carrying the same content, so you are comparing design and not imagining it. Settling the direction here saves work on everything that follows, and keeps all of it consistent.
Finishing touches and final approvals, then every version the job needs, press-ready and accurate to the last detail.
My first design job was fixing other people's files for a press: catching the mistakes before the plates were made. It teaches you that a design is only as good as the file it ships in.
I have been creative director for a scientific equipment maker, a sustainability startup and a century-old jewelry company with eight brands under it, and have run RFP responses, which is design under rules that bite. Freelance work has run alongside all of it. I have been the whole design department often enough to know how to be a useful part of one.
I work for clients wherever they are. I shoot my own product photography, read the printer's spec sheet first, and will tell you when the cheaper paper is the right call.
A logo, a catalog, a season of posters, the handout nobody else wants to lay out. Tell me what you're making and when you need it. I reply within a day, and I'll say if it isn't a fit.
If you have them, include what the piece is and what it has to do, when you need it and who signs off, and anything that already exists: a logo, a brand guide, last year's version.