branding and package design—Plus is a Bay Area startup producing high-end medical and legal recreational marijuana gum. As a bunch of former developers, they brought some mad science to bear on their product, creating an edible that won’t leave you debilitatingly toasted for 15hrs, melting into your futon, but could act as a replacement for a beer or two. I was approached to create an identity and package design that would express the brand’s healthy, sophisticated values. The physical packaging was designed by fellow Help Remedies alum Dale Trigger. This project was recently featured in PRINT Magazine, The Dieline, It's Nice That, and in the book First Thing's First!.

art direction and branding—This report commissioned by futurists at Google, looks at the future of work and leadership, and what strategic form Google will need to take. Most excitingly, the project called for updating Google’s branding, exploring how their visual identity would evolve in a more fluid, complex future. In this vision of the future, their classic shapes and colors flow into each other, converging and, as in real life, individual parts are never as siloed off as they seem. If you came here looking for Google secrets, my apologies. You will only find dummy text in these excerpts and so you will need to look elsewhere. If you wait around long though, the future will reveal itself anyways.

product design and branding— Staff was a Samsung funded startup which believed that greater workplace happiness means a better performing company and what would really make workers happy isn’t a ping pong room but being being able to know how their coworkers and those with a similar job thought and felt. Staff shared employee surveys by the employees, things we’ve all wished we could share with each other, and made them public, as well as shared Staff Reports, a sort of data-driven Glassdoor, that you have a truthful look at a company from the inside. While the product designer and art director at Staff, I had a central role helping to plan content and features, as well as developing the general feel and tone, and managing a small group of freelancers. The visual identity was most influenced by double fountain posters and the emotional cues they bring with them: social-mindedness, public gatherings, and the promise that we can make a different sort of future than the one given to us. Because Staff was entirely too pure for this world, it was sadly killed by Samsung on the day of it’s launch.

package design—After Help Remedies’ national rollout it became clear that their paper pulp and plastic clamshell case was a nightmare to merchandise on a large scale (like really bad). Help’s product engineer Dale Trigger and I were tasked with creating a new all paper pack that kept the feel of the original pack but could be displayed neatly on pegs. As drug competitors such as Target’s Up&Up had been upgrading their identities to something much more clean and modern, we took the opportunity to move away from the generic and feature the friendly, graphic imagery we had been using regularly since I had become art director. Help was sold soon after, and so these sadly never went into large-scale production.

concepts and interactive design— While at the Samsung Accelerator on the team building Staff, I collaborated a number of times with Ambient, a startup focusing on the "near and now". During the round featured here, I helped them find interesting ways to visualize the ebbs and flows of people entering one’s physical space throughout time, and how that data could be made useful as recommendations and comparisons.

product design and branding— Founded by friends 4real, Relevant is cryptocurrency and social news reader dedicated to using new technologies to keep fake and trivial news in check. Relevant is a self-regulating community which rewards and creates value for Relevant coins. The stark product design and visual identity was inspired by classic print newspapers but is grounded in today with emoji and emoji-like icons. Relevant is currently in closed beta in preparation for its initial coin offering. It was recently featured on Forbes.

user experience and design— Starkey Hearing Foundation provides hearing aids for the world's needy, as well as training long-term local caregives to maintain those hearing aids for years to come. This large interactive globe tells the story of that work through both data visualizations and classic story telling. The user can explore visualizations that explain hearing loss as a symptom of larger global issues, or read rich case studies that document Starkey hearing missions throughout the globe. The interactive display was created for display in Starkey Hearing's offices and conferences. It was was created for MKG and built by frequent collaborators 4real with Lars Berg.

design—For Help Remedies’ Take Less campaign we wanted to draw attention to the excessive number of drug aisle products. Do you need the vanilla-flavored, oblong, night-time, max-relief back-pain-targeting pills or the delayed-release, cool breeze flavored, easy-swollow gel capsules for screen related eye strain? We created a poster that visualizes all choices one has to make before selecting one of the hundreds of products available at the drug store just for headaches. Data processing on the poster performed by Sofy Yuditskaya. This piece was featured as FastCo’s Infographic Of The Day

user experience and design— These large, interactive displays were designed for Comcast Venture's Video Fast Forward Symposium, which explored how video technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and social live streaming are transforming storytelling. Video content and information about event speakers were presented in bubbles users could explore, filter, play with, and upvote. As bubbles accumulated upvotes, they grew in scale, so users could see what new technologies, companies, and content creators other's felt were the most promising. This project was created for MKG and built by frequent collaborators 4real.

branding and design— Marrakesh Express is a delicious Moroccan food operation. Originally a Brooklyn food cart staple, now there is a restaurant and more in the works. They approached me to create a logo that expressed their unique mix of traditional and contemporary values but instead we developed a sort of experimental identity: a limited set of infinitely recombinable stamps and panels. So far, we’ve put them together to make butcher paper, menus, posters, stickers and signage. We have an on-going relationship. Below are a few of my favorite pieces, with some new exciting things coming soon. This project was featured in the book First Thing's First!.