Turning creative services into strategic systems that scale brand and products.
Not just design. Change through design.
I’ll help you build frameworks that deliver meaningful ideas with purpose and precision.
Creative direction isn’t just aesthetics. It’s strategy, storytelling, and execution together.
Visual design
Visual design and storytelling work together to create clarity, trust, and emotional resonance across digital experiences. When thoughtfully led, design becomes a living system, using form, hierarchy, and narrative to create lasting relevance.
At Couchbase, the visual design of the brand works hard to keep the company competitive in a NoSQL database market saturated with brands we all know (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, just for starters). We designed the brand to stand shoulder to shoulder with these brands, while communicating that the users’ data was actually more safe with a modern, boutique database solution.
Brand ecosystems
Modern brands live across ecosystems, not touchpoints. I design interconnected brand systems- product, marketing, content, and experience- so each reinforces the others. This creates coherence at scale without sacrificing speed or creative expression.
At the Ripple Effect Arts Festival, the goal was to empower a set of stakeholders with varying levels of design sophistication, operating on a tight budget, to activate their beautiful brand in a wide variety of placements. I built them a wide set of Google Slide templates that locked the palette, logo and fonts, while giving them content and image dimension options.
Websites that work
Websites are strategic products, not brochures. I lead the creation of sites that clarify value, guide users, and support business goals- balancing brand storytelling, usability, and performance within scalable design and content systems.
The trick with designing a commercial website for street bike enthusiasts was balancing B2C functionality with a gritty aesthetic that reflected well the brand experience of the brick and mortar shops. In essence, the site needed to embody all the most current UX best practices geared toward purchasing, operating just under the radar by skinning the site in a raw, unpolished visual style.
Brand tone and messaging
Brand tone and messaging translate strategy into human language. I align voice, narrative, and messaging systems across teams so brands sound consistent, intentional, and credible, supporting differentiation while remaining flexible as products, markets, and audiences evolve.
The goal here was to communicate that the database company was modern and capable of managing the data needs of the 21st century, with the reliability of data technologies that had been around for 50 years. Database users were experiencing the pains of systems that had long outgrown the technologies of relational databases, but didn’t see modern technologies as yet viable and trustworthy. Authenticity of tone changes that discussion.
User-focused process
A user-focused process embeds design early and iterates often. I build lightweight research and feedback loops that inform decisions without slowing teams down, ensuring user insight shapes strategy, systems, and execution, not just post-launch validation.
While researching cyclists feelings about the purchasing process I uncovered an interesting qualitative insight: users held general trust in bicycle technicians more than any other staff member at bike shops. This led to a recommendation to not just use more bike tech imagery on the website, but to also train more shop staff in technician skills.
Robust guidelines
Brand guidelines should enable, not constrain. I develop practical, living systems that balance governance with flexibility, empowering teams to execute confidently while preserving brand integrity as organizations, channels, and use cases expand.
At Couchbase, the brand guidelines provide clear decision-making tools. When applied consistently, they accelerate execution, improve quality, and allow teams to scale creative output without constant oversight. In competitive realms like the NoSQL database markets, consistency matters. We made sure that all channels and territories were in lock-step, and didn’t appear to be coming from separate operations.