I partner with publishers, non-profits, small businesses, and social enterprises to create high quality graphics and visual storytelling rooted in their distinct context and identity. Practically, this means designing logos, developing deeply contextual and captivating brand systems, and crafting compelling long-form layout systems for books, resources, and magazines.
My specialty has come to be books and the creation of comprehensive and complex layout and design systems, but illustration, logos, and one-off graphics still make their way into my work on a regular basis.
I hold a BA in Communications & Media ('13) from Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Before getting into design professionally, I worked in university residence administration, in broadcast media as an on-air, and for a brief stint in print journalism. All in all, I’ve worked in design, photography, and visual problem solving professionally for the past 6 years.
I work alongside a handful of delightful fellow entrepreneurs and operators in the social enterprise space at Canadian Mennonite University's Centre for Resilience co-working space. It's a wonderfully productive spot. I'd love to host you here or wherever you are to talk about whatever exciting project you have in mind.
Cost for work depends on the kind of work in question. I provide quotes and flat rate negotiations for projects with familiar development processes, timelines, and structures. Some unique projects involve a level of exploration that makes costing them up front tricky, and for these I would charge hourly.
You can expect a high level of collaboration working with me. I believe all good design is done as a team, and that designers bring the questions, not the answers, that help find the right approach as we bring a project to life together. Read more about my work below.
No one needs an essay they didn't ask for! Choose what you actually want to read.
Like the Right to Repair movement, I believe clients deserve a right to learn how to participate in the ongoing life of whatever designers create for them, and I think designers should actively champion that right as much as they can.
Over my design career, I have watched businesses, particularly restaurants and small nonprofits, grow and get caught in the gap of having increased design needs without being able to increase the budget for design work in proportion. As a result, businesses either overspend on design, use free or cheap template-based design solutions that dilute their brand, or hobble along with what they started with, creating patchwork solutions that deteriorate in appearance and usability over time.
I don't believe this has to be inevitable. Through patience, careful compromise, and a creative openness to new and unconventional design platforms, I believe it is possible to empower people to exercise design thinking themselves, and invite clients to participate in the ongoing life of the design work they've paid hard-earned money to have made.
My work for Hildegard's Bakery is an example of successfully creating a design system that a business can understand and maintain themselves to create regular updates to a large and disparate array of print and physical graphics.
In my work, I've come to realize visual culture is often (and sometimes unfairly) a proving ground for dignity, confidence, and clarified self understanding. Design does for communities and organizations what well made and tasteful clothing does for people - connect us to our moment, ground us in our own stories, and draw us out into the world and into our fullest potential.
Good design is a task of balancing tradition, context, and familiarity with the richness of change and new possibilities and the reality that we live in a culture that leaves things behind, for better and for worse. The best design sets aside the ego and visual self-indulgence of the designer and acknowledges the work as a labour of love.
Minimalism can be fascistic snub against the varying quirkiness, organic flow, and mundanity of human experience - deconstructing and reconstituting reality in its own image. On the other hand, Maximalism can be a controlled and overwhelming tactic to trap minds and hearts in a vivacious facade.
The best minimalism seeks to elucidate the simplest truths and principles of beauty, and the greatest leaps of visual enthusiasm root themselves in the people and communities to whom and for whom they speak. The best maximalism is unafraid to find beauty and inspiration in everything. Designing in between this space means inspiring people to embrace the simplest truths while living boldly into the complexities of culture and everyday life.
"Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence." - Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style.
Design is a broad discipline, with many disciplines and sub-disciplines to fall in love with, but the text is perhaps my greatest singular passion. My work is a joy if only for the days and days I spend in search of the perfect layouts and type systems to speak for texts. I am utterly convinced that typography is a cornerstone of tasteful, inviting, and recognizable work, and that visual excellence lives and dies by it. Every typeface is intertwined with the history of its usage, and whenever it is set to new text that history rings with its own voice. Finding the right harmony between the text is of therefore of inestimable importance. In layman's terms, fonts mean everything to my work.
Though my work as a book designer occasionally follows a tight and conventional 'create-concepts-from-the-brief' role where I 'just design the book', I am usually brought in as a project animator and logistics coordinator. This means grasping and exploring authors' and publishers' dreams and goals; identifying possibilities, constraints, and ideas; and leading all parties through the process of arriving collaboratively at the finished project. Pulling on my journalistic and communications background, I often work with the authors and copyeditors to suggest changes to the manuscript copy and structure in the process of realizing the wholistic vision of the book.
This work takes me beyond just doing design work, and the hours that I have spent with collaborators digging through the trenches of an issue or area of their study are some of the most beautiful hours spent in my field. By the end of a long book project, the final product is just a symbol of that wonderful, difficult, and illuminating time spent working side by side to help quiet labours of love become visual acts of speech in the world. What an honour.
Soundcloud - Music & Sound Production
Flickr - Photography
Notepress - A upcoming notebook project I work on with @just.ie and @simonhamm.
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