Design Process
Developing a Personal Brand Story
Selling my diverse background and unique skillset as a media creative demanded something more than a sizzle reel. I decided on a straight explainer video to guide potential clients through portfolio pieces and tell my story.
I set out to establish a design system for my personal brand with a clean aesthetic to comfortably frame the disparate styles and media across many years of work.
Logo marks and animation set the basic style
Iteration of a concise CV to match
Visual research, stock acquisition, and element design
Storyboarding was essential to establish and maintain a flow
Motion and final editing were refined in further mock-ups
Developing the central animation - Left/Right Brain Breakout
Evolution of the film production portfolio section
Final "Explainer Demo Reel"
ePub for Finance Client
Kingsdale Advisors' annual report on the state of corporate governance is a hotly anticipated publication in the finance sector.
For their first year releasing the Proxy Season Review online only, they contracted me to create a clean interactive PDF for an edition addressing the impacts of COVID-19 on Canada's boardrooms.
The primary challenge was to engage a conservative audience in data heavy content.
Mood boards, mockups and font explorations for first "ideation" round. Addressing the virus directly with a "Pandemic 1918" design theme was deemed too scary, so we pursued the more simple and graphic "Isotype" look. After exploring a horizontal format for a desktop-centric audience, that was also discarded.
A second round of cover designs evolved from the "Isotype" look to a globe theme reflecting the dramatically changed world. My suggestion of an all-black cover and frontmatter to acknowledge the impacts of BLM in 2020 was well received in light of the founder's role in creating BlackNorth, an organization committed to eliminating anti-black racism in corporate Canada.
Interior pages and chapter title pages were developed alongside cover iteration.
Final designs for cover, chapter title page, and sample interior page.
Animated Brand ID
I was contracted by a video producer to create animated videos for a human interest series. Based on early discussions, I researched and developed a hand-rotoscoped animation style. A final "proof of concept" followed, telling a short story with stylized compositing and dynamic text.
While pitching the series to online outlets, the opportunity arose to pivot and create a brand ID OLV for a data analytics client. I storyboarded and sourced video to animate while the producer worked with the client to refine and record voiceover.
Our timeline changed in the environment of the first COVID lockdown, so planned text was jettisoned in favour of simple animation and VO.
