In design as in life, acting with the end in mind is the only way to arrive at your destination. This means beginning with intentionality, that is, with a solid understanding of client and audience goals. All aspects of creative follow from there. My skills and experience are at once broad — encompassing film, print, and the web — and deep, especially in front-end development and design.
Director
As a Creative Director, I pursue the creative process with open-mindedness and a sense of humor on the one hand, and a tough-minded analyticity on the other.
I take great joy in motivating and elevating a team’s enthusiasm and helping them create their “personal best” work. As Director of Communications and Information Systems at YFC/USA I led a small but highly effective team of five programmers, contract designers, and support professionals. We consistently received high marks for the quantity and quality of our work. We were overtasked and underfunded, but we consistently delivered. As Creative Director of the studio I founded in Barcelona, our team of designers, filmmakers, and fine artists collaborated on a number of multimedia pieces, culminating in hosting an international film institute. I developed the curriculum, schedule, and goals and had the opportunity to instruct, to co-produce, and even to play at being a stunt-driver for a scene or two.
Having played a central part in a sweeping brand refresh for Washington State University, I have considerable experience crafting, promoting, and stewarding a brand, balancing the needs of institutional consistency and the desire for a diversity of self-expression within the university community.
Designer
Design is credibility. It communicates: “I’m worth your time.”
We have mere moments to capture someone’s attention. Inundated by ads and information, we’ve trained ourselves to make microjudgments, to determine in seconds whether to keep reading or move on. Escaping the fate of the trash can, the back button, requires compelling and targeted design. Sustaining interest requires usability and relevance.
What animates me most is giving form to thoughts and ideas, finding the perfect visual metaphor, the right media for the message, and the most intuitive path forward. I have twenty years of experience bringing ideas to life across all media, including magazines, book covers, signage and displays, letterhead and logos, small and large websites, and even several short films. I crave excellence. I strive for design that enables, delights, and captivates.
Developer
With its equal emphasis on word and image, the Web has always been my first love. I published my first website in 1994 before Photoshop had layers and when CSS was unheard of. In the ensuing years, I have closely followed the breakneck pace of evolving technologies, implementing dozens of sites ranging in scale from small non-profits to national organizations. I continue to sharpen my skills daily.
Front End: My most recent, large scale project at Washington State University — a university-wide template and framework — has required an intimate, high level understanding of each core web technology, including each of the various approaches to responsive layouts (fixed, fluid, hybrid), the delicate dance of CSS specificity, the most recent guidance on HTML5 semantics, and the best blend of Javascript and CSS animations. On the Web, if you stop swimming forward, you drown. I have always aspired to create sites that are purposefully on target, visually arresting at first glance, and tightly coded under the hood.
Back End: I am no SysAdmin, and it’s a stretch for anyone to credibly claim the title of “full-stack developer”. Nevertheless, I have worked broadly on many platforms, my most extensive experience with Drupal and WordPress, as well as a now defunct CMS called Xaraya. I am conversant with the LAMP stack, MySQL and PHP in particular. Having suffered for too long under the regimes of proprietary battles and IE6 dominance, I am an enthusiastic and informed proponent of web standards
For what it’s worth, my daily tools: Coda, Grunt, Github, Terminal, Inspect Element, SASS (with CodeKit), Photoshop, Illustrator, Glyphs (for symbol fonts), Keynote, and Pages.
Specialties
- Creative Direction and Communication
- Ideation
- Original and Compelling Design
- Web Design and Development
- Content Management
- Copywriting and Editing
- Critical Thinking & Analysis
- Non-Linear Film Editing