I’m a driven and skilled creative player/coach who’s passionate about building brands and communicating value in creative ways. For nearly 20 years, I’ve helped brands from small shops to enterprise-level B2B and SaaS, position and refine their story and develop cohesive visuals that resonate with their audience in crowded markets.
VIEW MY WORK BELOW.
ExtraHop is a success story on so many levels. I worked tirelessly with leadership as we transitioned the company from network performance to cybersecurity, launched a new product and a thoughtful rebrand to help the company establish itself with a new audience and new use cases in a market with over 2000 vendors. I was there in the trenches from product naming, tagline creation, campaign strategy and execution. In just 2 short years we became the fastest growing company in the second fastest security category in the market. As we grew, I had the opportunity to scale our creative output by building and mentoring new talent. A year later, I absorbed the web-development team to scale and perfect our creative execution.
While the breadth of work over a 5 year period is too much to cover, there are a few of my favorite accomplishments. The “Rise Above the Noise” campaign was the largest I have worked on to date and put ExtraHop on the map in a profound and meaningful way that inspired the company and it’s prospects about the value only ExtraHop could bring. We catapulted off of that effort with our Red vs Blue concept at Black Hat conference in Las Vegas where users were invited to play, compete, engage and ultimately donate to cybersecurity focused charities. Today, the brand equity is set by the users who rank the company 5 stars in industry leading reviews and vendors continue to borrow and copy from our successes. It’s the highest form of flattery and I couldn’t be more proud of my team and our accomplishments.
Sunstream Boat Lifts was a company with a premium product they were selling to an affluent customer base, but whose brand and image were far from premium. Beginning with a fresh identity and polished brochures to set the tone at international trade shows, I developed a new polished look that was athletic, and on-par with luxury vehicles and boat manufacturers.
The site was a much larger undertaking due to their vast support for consumers and dealers. I was able to use the style guide I designed as a jumping off point to create an amazing and interactive experience for their end users and provide the needed information and tools to their dealers to grow the brand and the business.
Working for Austin is an absolute blast. When he first came to me about 8 years ago, he was transitioning from a business name to his real name and wanted to establish a brand that would position him far above the typical private DJ status.
After many creative sessions, we landed on adding “experience” to the name and dropping the disc jockey as his services were far more expansive. An event with Austin Beaver was truly an experience you wouldn’t soon forget.
In this business, appearance is important—especially when you are your brand. I directed a photo shoot with a very talented photographer to exemplify Austin’s casual and approachable personality and his professionalism in handling his events. Then I went to work on crafting a brand that would attract his demographic, set him far apart from his competition and evoke an emotional response. In my years since beginning work with Austin, he’s become internationally known and one of the most sought-after private event DJ’s in the country.
I knew we had a potentially enormous market for this project so we wanted it to be attractive, hip and cool.
No one likes carrying around their prescription meds, so I needed this to be something people were proud to use. I also knew that it was the perfect name for an ambigram (a word that reads upside-down and right-side up). Not to mention, an ambigram is great for use on a product that isn’t always right-side up.
To excite consumers on how they could use the products in their lives, I created user profile postcards as handouts at promotional events. The web site was designed to increase awareness of the many uses of the product and connect to potential distributors. You can now find Pillid® in a number of national retail outlets.
Golazo came to me by referral after they had just completed an identity overhaul. Their web presence was not only sporting the old logo, it was sorely outdated and in no way able to compete with their competition. With a split market made up of soccer moms and young athletes, I designed it with great content in mind, but delivered it with a cool factor that anyone would be able to appreciate.
The end result was a site with animated HTML5 graphics and a deep informative homepage giving a great user experience. The average visit time increased and bounce rates decreased. This is one of my favorite sites I’ve had the pleasure of working on. Development by Prismatic.
Michael Benson Band has a stellar reputation as the live entertainer to have in the Seattle area. What they didn’t have when I began working with them, was a visual identity that matched their reputation.
The challenge was to present new and potential clients with the impression that they were the “it” band. Starting from the ground level, I created a logo design that was timeless, classic, and represented the professionalism of the band.
For the web site, content was king. The site was designed to handle the enormous task of providing large numbers of audio samples, song lists, band bios, testimonials, awards, band schedules, blog and more, in a way that was user friendly and compelling.
The website has become his strongest selling tool, and even helps his clients with song selection and tips after they have booked. Development by Factor1 Studios.
I hope you like what you see and I’m excited to talk soon.