Aside from a designer, I'm also a musician, avid learner, and lover of lore - Greco-Roman mythology, Norse mythology, fairy tales, Middle Earth, Westeros, Narnia, and Hogwarts. I am passionate about creation, be it a logo, a drum beat, or a roast pork. What I love about the design and development processes is the immersion. Putting myself in someone else's shoes to identify their needs and then creating a solution that can help and empower them is extremely rewarding.

Special Skills

• Senior level portmanteau creator
• Manager of well-timed jokes, at both the wit and low-hanging-fruit levels
• Savvy conversationalist with a highly organized library of situation applicable movie quotes
• see also: song lyrics; memes
• Aspiring sommelier of pizza, sandwiches, beer, bourbon, and coffee

What I'm Doing Now

I am currently a Senior Graphic Designer and Web Developer at Clear Path Direct. Clear Path Direct's client base is largely composed of direct marketing and "As Seen on TV" companies. Our clients source unique and/or independent products, think: the types of items you see on Shark Tank. We first market test products, through surveys and email campaigns, to determine their potential efficacy. If the product seems marketable, we move to building a small “micro-site” and do further testing. The micro-sites tend to be built in 8 hours or less, with limited assets. The pace of this testing process makes time management and efficient work imperative.

When a potential product proves lucrative in this phase, our clients will then source and price the product and produce a commercial, and commission professional assets and packaging. At this point, our team will build a more robust e-commerce website with the updated assets and work with media and fulfillment companies. The marketers then run full-fledged television and social media campaigns, while we handle order processing and site maintenance. Hugely successful products move to retailing at brick and mortar stores. These are the products you find at the end caps of your local drugstore. Some products that I have seen through from concept to production include: Clever Cutter®, Socket Shelf™, Calming Comfort™ Weighted Blanket, Egglettes™, and Secure Heels™. I've also worked with larger brands like Snuggie® and Shake Weight™.

We test hundreds of products a year, in the hope that 1 or 2 make it all the way to the production line. Personally, this position has streamlined my Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and CSS/HTML workflow tremendously. And in order to help the team accommodate that volume, I built creative and code templates for these testing sites, so we can “drag and drop” as much as possible. We now can put a test site together in just a few hours, which frees up our time to work on marketing those products that prove to be successful.