Aside from campaign design, I was responsible for multimedia design in my last position as well. When we launched a campaign to raise $100,000.00 to fund projects entirely OUTSIDE our church, we needed to convey our message in a compelling way.

I designed the branding for the campaign, wrote the piece, incorporated some motion graphics (Apple Motion), edited some footage together (Final Cut Pro. Some we shot, some was provided by the organizations we were pledging to support – charity:water ‘s video work is some of the most exceptional, most beautiful work I’ve seen on the subject), and did some audio editing (ProTools) to put together a title package  that was incredibly effective. You can watch it below.

And yes, we did meet our financial goal. It was awesome.

Walker Audio hand builds the finest audio equipment in the world. Their flagship product, the Proscenium Black Diamond II turntable, has won more awards from major industry entities than I have time to list (find a complete list at www.WalkerAudio.com), and was just named the best turntable in the world by The Absolute Sound magazine. You truly have to hear this stuff to believe it. Phenomenal.

Their recent success is a result of years of building a name in the industry by making great products. But while their name was gaining a reputation, their brand needed a face lift. Their previous website had been around forever, and while it was somewhat functional, it had need of improvements from both an end-user and an aesthetic standpoint.

The new site grew out of a re-brand process that began with the important questions: who is your target audience, and what are they looking for from Walker Audio?

Walker’s typical customers seem to be divided into two groups, and their product lines seem to create that dichotomy. They have the typical high-end audio customer (Walker Audio’s “Reference” line), and their high-end Accessory line customer. The two demographics are somewhat divergent in age and income level, and we had to brand the company in a way that appealed to both audiences.

The site had to be constructed in a way that meant ease of use for the end-user and was presented as a unified whole, yet gave immediate access to both product lines on its face without being text heavy. A Walker Audio customer (like any customer) wants to know what’s available, what it costs, and where to buy it. All of this information needed to be immediately accessible from the home page. I used a program called Sitoo to construct the site. The customer purchased the license for future use, as it provides a pretty straightforward yet highly customizable interface for design and implementation. Felicia, Walker’s VP and Business Processes specialist, has a background in PR, and had some input into the site’s aesthetic (i.e. accent colors, etc.).

In addition to logo and website design, I’m working on a catalog piece for Walker at the moment. We’ll be heading the same direction with their print collateral. There has also been talk of some promotional video work. And my wife, Megan, did all of the product photography on-site at the Walker Audio research lab (another service we offer).

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the result. And if you haven’t heard a Walker turntable, and you’re in the market for the best audio quality on earth, I strongly recommend you check them out.

The client, CLK Consulting, requested corporate branding for their growing business. Located in Austin, TX, the client’s previous branding used a photograph of a local bridge. I recommended an iconic approach that would reproduce cleanly across a variety of media. The resulting logo and business card achieved that quite well.

422CHURCH.COM is the online home of Victory Christian Fellowship, and is fast becoming the church’s brand identity. Victory’s proximity to Route 422 was the inspiration for the name. For the last 2 years, I was responsible for the development of that brand from a media and marketing standpoint, with the church’s executive pastor handling implementation.

We met with a great deal of success: the church more than doubled in size over those 2 years, thanks in part to those efforts. The website itself is template driven (a coder I’m not ), but I did hack the template to meet our specific needs, and to make it more visually appealing. We also launched marketing campaigns based around one of the church’s four basic
tenets (Experience God), including direct mail, Google AdWords, invite cards, Facebook advertising, billboards, and a local TV commercial (which I had the privilege of storyboarding, producing, directing, editing, scoring, and voicing. See below.). “Experience God. Experience Victory.” was our tag line for most of my tenure at 422CHURCH, and remains so.

In my two years at 422CHURCH.COM, I was responsible for marketing and design. I authored this campaign to combat most people’s antiquated view of church. The hook was well received. It was used for a direct mail campaign, with cards published in two different formats. Campaigns like this one contributed to the church’s more than doubling in size in the two years I was employed there. I’d like to take some credit, but I have a feeling there were other factors at play.

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New SocialVibe Widget

For those of you who actually follow this thing, I’ve just added the SocialVibe widget to my sidebar. The charity I’m supporting (charity:water) is awesome (some of you have seen me walking around wearing one of their fashionable arm bands), so please click.

You’ll see in an upcoming post that they were included in a video piece I did while working at 422CHURCH.COM. Their footage is as beautiful as their cause.

When I was approached to do some freelance work for ClearChannel Communications, I was pretty excited about it. I’ve been designing advertising for them for a few years now, and I enjoy the work because it’s quite different from anything else I do. They give me a photo of a space, a client list, and a list of spots in that space where they would envision advertising opportunities. Then it’s up to me to design an ad and place it into that space. The renderings are designed to look “hyper-real”, in that the eye should be drawn to the designed advertising  more readily than anything else in frame, but the ad should still look like a natural part of the space (shadows, reflections in the floor, perspective, etc.). I’ve included a few before and after photos.

Before/After

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Before/After

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Before/After

The idea behind this campaign was to convey that people can actually experience the supernatural in the temporal – and do so in a friendly, uncomplicated way. This design was featured in both direct mail/magazine advertising, as well as on a business card sized “invite card” that congregants could distribute to people to invite them to church. The church logo (flame icon) is my design as well.

For the series titled “Flawed: Imperfect People, Extraordinary Lives”, I went with a storybook feel. We were focused on the stories of people in the Bible who were hardly perfect, so it made sense to me. I used this concept art to create a bulletin cover, CD label, web graphic, podcast thumbnail, and stage backdrop. We would often use current message series for direct mail campaigns like the one below.

When we decided to do a message series on Mayhem, the branding pretty much took care of itself (thank you, All State). The videos (there were 5,  I think) were fun to shoot – we had no budget, no cars to crash or houses to collapse… so we played jazz. On this project, I did the design, writing, direction, shooting, and editing. And I was the best boy grip. Whatever that means. And I used this concept art to create a bulletin cover, CD label, web graphic, podcast thumbnail, and stage backdrop.