G & M Investment Group came to me looking to rebrand their business as Alpha Pointe Capital. The first step in their brand overhaul was to have an entirely new logo designed, followed by an encompassing brand style guide.
After receiving Alpha Pointe Capital’s answers to my brand questionnaire – a comprehensive list of questions that helps me to see where their brand currently stands – I built a moodboard to lay out my initial thoughts and present them to the client. I grouped my ideas into three themes based on their choices of adjectives like “experienced,” “strong” and “trustworthy” within the brand questionnaire. The moodboard allowed me to be sure that I was headed in the right direction, and it assured the client that we were on the same page regarding their new mark. Once the Alpha Pointe Capital team locked onto a singular “A” emblem, I slowly made refinements to the logo – communicating with their team the whole way – until reaching the final, geometric “A” design. Color and typography soon followed, all geared toward a more modern look with a bright color palette to back it up.
Following up on the new logo’s development, I created a visual style guide to lay out best practices for using the logos in branding materials, as well as the brand’s color palettes and typography. With an online style guide, Alpha Pointe Capital is now able to easily access and share their logo files with their own team, or external content creators, and they will be able to make updates to their brand rules as they grow.
The Water Design-Build Council needed an annual report and infographic that would reflect their 2005-2015 “Decade of Progress”. It was important that both the layout and content of these materials maintained WDBC brand standards, and I drew on their color palette in order to call attention to key data and copy.
In order to speak more to the theme of this particular report, it was arranged by year, in a timeline fashion, with each spread referring to a certain span of WDBC history. In addition, the cover of this report was a compilation of their design-build work over the years, and a timeline was included to show the leadership changes that were made over that time.
A companion piece was created in the form of an infographic, and it served as an eye-catching, tangible handout that WDBC could use at trade shows. By making the document legal-sized, rather than letter-size, my goal was to create a handout that quite literally sticks out from all the rest. While it did include information from the annual report, the infographic focused primarily on showcasing WDBC and encouraging readers to become new members.
I had the great opportunity to provide Redemption Church of Arnold, MD with a new logo in 2018. They were in need of something new to use on printed materials and, in particular, on their website and app.
Working with Redemption leadership, I was able to narrow in on what they were looking for. After a few rounds of logo concepts and revisions, they had settled on a geometric “R” form that I paired with bold, condensed type and a bright gradient of colors.
Comprised of everyday shapes – a triangle, a circle and rectangles – the icon is meant to be simple, yet also meaningful. The triangle itself represents the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In addition, the triangle points upwards, towards Heaven while also forming the foundation of the “R”.
As a last addition, we took one of the unused concept logos and turned it into a logo for Redemption’s Kids ministry. A short set of brand guidelines were also created, so that Redemption can share how they use their new brand within their organization.
This tee design was a fun, quick project from 2018 for a fundraising event to fight breast cancer. I enjoyed the process of coming up with a few options for them, each playing off the event theme. After a few iterations, the client settled on a more typographic graphic which was used on volunteer and survivor t-shirts.
From 2014 to 2016, I worked with the Annapolis Opera to create unique graphics for each of their individual shows in addition to the overarching theme for each season. These designs were used on banners and posters that went up around downtown Annapolis, plus postcards that were mailed out to AO members and playbills that were handed out to attendees.
Some of my favorite designs are included below, for shows like Così fan tutte, Gounod’s Faust, Cinderella: A Children’s Opera, and AO’s season-opening show Angels & Demons. My overall goal in all the designs for Annapolis Opera was to provide a cohesive, recognizable brand that could span individual production graphics. As such, I often utilized their core red color, plus a similar typographic treatment for all show titles – with exception for the children’s operas.
After nearly three years, I must admit that I still play Pokémon Go daily. When it first came out, I loved the clean, simplified logos of each of the three Pokémon Go teams. Each one is bold and easily recognizable by it’s shape and color. They encourage a sort of pride amongst the team members, and I know I certainly used the logos as a determining factor for picking my own team. For this side project, I wanted to build out my own version for each team, making them even more geometrical and restricting myself to very specific angles, shapes and colors.
