Skills:

Interactive Design (web, mobile, iPhone/iPad apps), Branding & Identity Design, Illustration, Front-end development, Tetris.

Tools of the Trade:
Photoshop, Illustrator, big cup ‘o coffee, pen & pathfinder tools, rulers & exactos, and NPR or music on my headphones.

Project most proud of:
The project I’m most proud of is the work I did for The Trestle Inn which is owned by our own Ian Cross . This is my most recent project, which included a logo, branding, website, and other identity print pieces. It was interesting to be involved in the evolution of an entire bar environment from its beginning.

Most of my work recently has been interactive; and while interactive design is my favorite, it was great to mix things up and design print material, such as posters, postcards, and menus. It gave me a chance to think differently about how different marketing collateral, while maintaining the same style and brand, needs different considerations based on its context and audience. It was a change of pace to think in Pantone colors & inches instead of hex codes & pixels. Instead of only thinking about how the website would work, I had the chance to contribute to the identity of The Trestle Inn in Philadelphia.

For the Trestle’s website, the team experimented with different technology (parallax scrolling), which because of its new way of approaching transitions between content, gave us a different perspective on a 1-page website. Parallax was a fresh way to approach using layered content and giving the design more spatial depth. It is something I would like to explore further in the future.

What is your design process:
I ask as many questions as possible, to get the most details on what the client wants and needs. I write a creative brief based on dialogues between the team and client. This is where we make decisions on the tone, audience, and sometimes even what colors need to be used. After this I do research and explore as much as I can about the idea/product/company. This is usually where the concept for the design pops up. Sometimes you can take a little fact about the subject and make a connection that can shape the whole identity of the design.

Research and design usually overlap for me. I make sketches to nail down a concept. This is something I always need to convince myself to do more of, in order not to get stuck in the details of an idea that isn’t working. Then all the technical stuff comes in such as grids, color schemes, type, buttons, and I begin fussing over each pixel, collaborate for feedback and a few rounds of changes until BOOM! it all comes together.

Where do you generate the most inspiration from:
An idea can come from anywhere, so I try to keep my mind open. Books, art/illustration, design blogs, dreams, a sip of whiskey… anywhere if you’re looking for it! Another place I get inspiration is from my old mistakes, or re-thinking previous solutions.

Dream Project:
My dream project would be a hybrid of illustration, iPhone/iPad apps, music, and some intense claymation!

Future design prediction:
I’m excited about where the web is going with typography. The internet has been around for so long and only over the past few years has typography really been taken into consideration beyond standard universal system fonts. I started using HTML about 10 years ago, and it is delightful to be able to use tools like Typekit to bring more typographic depth to the internet. It would be fantastic to learn more about typography; specifically, how to make fonts. Some day I would love to work on a pixel-perfect kerned font (designed for print & web).