Design with purpose.
Purpose to create interest, understanding, and trust between you and your customers.
It’s that simple.
US Postal Service
Sticky design. US Postal Service stamps designed to make an envelope lovely. Worth every cent.
DuMOL Winery
The craft of luxury. I created everything from a label rebrand, to anniversary wines, packaging, NY Times advertising, posters, signage, and a newspaper journal. Winemaking—especially in the luxury category—is very serious and the competition is fierce. Where the industry tendency is to gold foil everything and say “we make the best wine,” I moved DuMOL toward an accessible, more authentic brand of communication. Our belief was that consumers like the stories and the people behind the wine as much as they like the wine—and in the end, the primary differentiators are the tone of the our voice and our visual language. For 16 months, we produced 5 editions of The DuMOL Dirt—a breakout publication designed to describe the complex process of winemaking from the valley fog to harvest to French barrels—each with just enough detail, spice, and humor to make them collectable.
Lundberg Spirits
Spirits in the night. Small batch suite of spirits. The gin and bourbon were designed to be birds of prey, but when the mescal came along we kept with a creature but celebrated the carved wood animals (Alebrijes) of Oaxaca—El Zorro (fox). Lundberg Spirits.
Nutrex
Farm to Health. Nutrex manufactures two products farmed from the waters of the big island of Hawaiʻi. Both products were in need of dramatic redesigning to compete in the crowded health supplement category. As both Spirulina and BioAstin products are produced elsewhere in the world by less pure means, it was important to stress that these products are produced in a one-of-a-kind location with methods that are unreplicable by competitors. In other words—accept no substitutes. We developed a seal that was employed not only on the packaging but ads and promotion certifying the authenticity of the product’s origin. The second key attribute to the redesign was to convey a Hawaiian gestalt that spoke to the company’s heritage since 1984.
23andMe
Navigant
Trimble Navigation
Trust Magazine
Trusted contributor. The Scottish investment firm Baillie Gifford produces a semi-annual printed magazine for its investors and prospects. The magazine features articles by their investment managers and other thought leaders in the financial community. Over a 5-year period I created illustrations for 11 covers and 36 interior articles. Subjects ranged from risk management, energy, AI, founders, cyberspace, climate change, relationship building, pandemics, and myriad articles on all facets of investing. Like the masthead, the client invested tremendous trust in my ability to create interest and understanding of articles of great complexity and often highly abstract.
Marks
Santa Cruz Guitar
Made by hand. The Santa Cruz guitar Company is one of a few companies that employs master luthiers and makes their guitars one-at-a-time to custom specifications while their customers wait up to a year in line. This 40-year old company makes their instruments much like violin makers make theirs—with every effort to create a legacy instrument that transcends the standards of mass manufactured instruments. Over the years, I have designed posters and ads that celebrate the rarified space that they occupy in the world of high-technology and mass production. Their instruments are beautiful to hear and to see. I have even designed a custom 'songbird' inlay available for special order.
Marketing by education. Santa Cruz' guitar-making process takes one-hundred plus steps that we have condensed to twenty-eight events that have been described in great detail through word and pen-and-ink drawings. (book in progress) The book serves to pull back the curtain on the artistry and craftsmanship that comprise the rigorous standards that make their guitars sought after worldwide by amateurs and professionals the likes of Brad Paisley, Elvis Costello, Eric Clapton, David Crosby and Don Edwards to name just a few. The principle is that the more a customer knows about their instrument, the more they love it and the more they promote it to others. Santa Cruz has an enormous fan base and there is no better salesperson than a satisfied (and educated) customer.
Steelcase
Symantec
Goodwill, SF
The Energy Foundation
Illustration
Illustrated voice. With regular frequency, and short deadlines, I'm asked to help publications, companies and organizations illustrate their messages. Clients such as Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Harvard Business Journal, The Robert Woods Foundation, The Whitehead Institute, and Aidswalk, to name a few.