Projects
I was hired at Author Solutions as an interior book designer straight out of college. During those years I became very comfortable using Adobe InDesign.
A few years later I was given the opportunity to work for a small in-house branch of our company that created legacy books. Someone on our team would interview a person or family about their life story, their wedding story, or about their new baby. I was lucky enough to design the books for these. I would discuss with the client what they were looking for, and as a team we would come up with a design. I would also read the book to determine the best places to place the images the client provided, or search stock photography sites and source some additional images to fill in the pages that needed some additional visual interest.
Eventually I transitioned over to cover design for our whole company, where I really honed my Photoshop skills. I learned on the job more about typography, image composites, and how to make an eye catching cover. I also would do consultation calls with some of our authors to design 3 mockups for their covers. For an hour we would discus colors, imagery, the look and feel that they wanted to portray. Mock-ups for these covers were some of my favorite things to do.
Cover Mockups
When creating mockups for the covers I would try to come up with 3 distinctly different covers during the call with the author. We would discuss the colors, if the book was serious or funny, the type of images they would want. From this call I would then use low resolution images when possible and create mockups, unless I really needed to edit the images to get the look and feel we were going for. Several of the images I have here are not the final product, but simply the mockups themselves.
Typography
I really enjoyed combining different fonts to make covers more visually interesting, and one of my questions was always about the genre and if the story was serious, silly, or spooky.
Image Composit
Occasionally a design would come up that would require me to combine several images to get the look we needed. Nothing feels as good as finding that perfect combination of images that fit together perfectly.
Author Solutions
Additional Covers
Sample Book Interior
GP Strategies
GP Strategies is a company that delivers custom learning solutions. Which means as a graphic designer I have built web-based training in programs like Storyline and Lectora, as well as created logos, mocked up website design, created infographics that are both static and interactive, and created interactive PDFs in InDesign, just to name a few.
Website Mockups
For one of my most recent projects we needed a selection of fake websites for a simulation that will be built in Articulate Storyline to be used as web-based training. The interaction will be when the learner selects a button one of these images will come up with the text filled out and the learner will determine what is missing. For each of these fake websites I came up with the design, a logo, color palate, fonts, and it all needed to fall within very specific accessibility standards.
For another project with the same client, I needed to create 17 logos for fake companies to be used for case studies in a different training. These logos also needed to fit within specific accessibility standards against a dark background.
Logos
Cigna
I was the lead media developer for our Cigna account for several years. One of my favorite projects we created was a course on social phishing, and how to avoid it. We build the course as a game, so the design involved creating various diverse characters and interactive screens.
Interactive PDF
Another Cigna project I was involved with was creating and interactive PDF that looked like a magazine. I was able to play with the layout, colors, images, and worked with the instructional designer to allow everything to fit in a way that was informative and visually interesting.
Electric Boat
Electric Boat was another company that I was involved with for several years. One of the larger projects I was able to help with involved creating training in the form of an interactive PDF using Adobe InDeisgn. It was built in such a way that people without internet access would be able to take the training, saved it, and then email it back at a later time. I created that template that was used for several years across several different projects. Within the template there were text and image pages, click to reveal, knowledge checks, and tabs for each section across the top of the page, all of which was manually created and required a great deal of testing and detailed triggers.
Microsoft
In my time working with Microsoft I assisted in creating new branding for one of their internal projects, which involved creating backgrounds, for Teams meetings, layouts for PowerPoint presentations, and establishing a color palate.
Personal
I use my skills to create personal projects as well. My dad is an amateur photographer, so I created a logo for him to use as a watermark. I've also designed logos for myself, as well as graphics for YouTube thumbnails and stickers for my small business.
