The Grace Churches International (GCI) website design project was a ground-up full scale endeavor that began with assessing the GCI brand identity, surveying website administrators and visitors, and creating a solution that would meet the users’ needs and the goals of GCI. Wow that was a mouthful. It sounds really boring too—but it wasn’t! It [...]
Wake Forest University has a Translational Science Institute (TSI) which is dedicated to finding practical ways to help people with scientific discoveries. The TSI needed to do some fundraising with government and private agencies, primarily through a new online presence. I was brought on board to first develop a Content Management System (CMS) platform to [...]
Jon Fox is my brother-in-law, and has a blossoming music career. Blossoming is such a weird word. Jon is a singer songwriter who lives in a small cabin on a mountain in Tennessee, writing raw & honest songs about his passions. Jon hired me to do his album photography, package design, website design and to [...]
I’m having one of those moments as a designer in which I can barely stand to be online. You see, over and over, I keep seeing people creating terrible designs because they can’t afford to hire a professional designer. Now, I realize this applies to all areas of design—furniture, interior, decorating, et cetera—but I can [...]
Tammy Crowley-Deloatch owns and operates a family fitness center in Roanoke Rapids, NC called Crowley’s Fitness Center. She recently got married, and has had some other significant life changes happen. She found herself re-examining her business and realized that while she had changed, the business had not. She began looking for a way to move [...]
This is the first product from a new company, Satisfy Your Soul. They are two professional chefs in Burlington, NC who use all natural, locally-sourced ingredients to create unique recipes inspired by their worldwide travels. This Apple Chutney is inspired by the authentic flavors of India, and uses Winesap apples from the 2010 North Carolina [...]
The Greensboro Pregnancy Care Center (GPCC) wanted to launch a new pregnancy awareness campaign on college campuses in the Greensboro area. Their goal was to create a new brand identity and marketing materials around a theme that would attract male and female college students in the Triad area. GPCC wanted to let students know that [...]
Atkins Ad Agency in Roanoke Rapids, NC hired me to design a new tee shirt for one of their clients, Quality Landscapes. The client wanted a tee shirt that would appeal to its 20–30 year old employees. Something grunge, modern and organic. In addition, the client was initially open to changing their old logo (seen [...]
Jessica came up with this slogan, in true copywriter style. “Set a Trend…Be Yourself” encapsulates a major part of our message as branding consultants and identity designers. The first (and most important) step for a business to become a trend-setter is to be yourself. Know who you are and be that! You are unique, and [...]
Jessica and I were on vacation at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. It was our last day on the Estate and as we were exploring the banks of the French Broad River, I saw this small plant—dry and cracked but still clinging to life. It seemed to me to embody the seasonal transition from [...]
From the basement of a pre-Civil War era home in Jamestown, NC.
Potting some new plants in a small, square terracotta pot.
While walking Pippen (our dog), I found this little turtle in a stream. The little kid in me got all giddy and I had to examine him! He immediately withdrew into his shell, but he got curious when I set him on the ground and started taking pictures. He never fully came out of his [...]
Found this little guy on some ivy. I love how he almost glows amid the dark green ivy. It seemed like he was as curious about my camera as I was about him!
Another one from our small garden. I played with the saturation of this one.
Found this little guy in our yard after a light rain. He was hidden, but as you can see he’s very vividly colored and reflective.
A longtime client of mine, Wellspring Women’s Ministry is changing things up this year. Wellspring does a large retreat each year, but in 2010 they are doing three smaller regional events. This essentially takes the large scale yearly event and distills it down into two days, localized to three areas around North Carolina. My job [...]
I was a part of the group logo design project for a new church plant in Boston, MA called Netcast Church. During the fundraising portion of the process, the church plant team decided they needed a good prospectus to send to potential donors. A prospectus is a common tool for business startups which shows highlights [...]
I was asked by the Greensboro Woman’s Club to create a new website design for them. They had an older site that no longer served their needs or their audience and needed a fresh look that would represent their now-younger members. The new site needed to convey the vibrancy and activity of the Club as [...]
The Affinity Art Gallery is a new non-profit art gallery located inside the facilities of Kernersville Community Church (KCC) in Kernersville, NC. Kernersville is at the dead-center of a region of North Carolina known as the Triad. It’s an area consisting of Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point. KCC is home to several artists, and along [...]
This was a new logo, and by extension, identity design for a college and career ministry at a long-time church client of mine. They wanted to communicate humor while also showing themselves to have high quality standards. They had a name: The Tap, playing off the ideas of both living water and beer. I thought [...]
This was done for my church to advertise a city-wide worship and prayer meeting. I came up with the name and look for it – the imagery of a city being flooded represents the worship and prayers of the people “flooding” the city with hope and blessing. This was a somewhat new direction for me, [...]
I have been asked before “How can somebody be trendsetting?” The answer isn’t exactly cut-and-dry. The short answer is this: to be a trend-setter, you have to think differently. As in, different from everybody else. Being trend setting doesn’t necessarily mean doing things that are always new and/or different. Sometimes, the most trend-setting thing you [...]
Branding an organization is primarily an exercise in getting to know a person. When I am tasked with creating a visual identity for a company or organization, I try to get to know—on a personal level—whoever is the main decision-maker for the company. Usually it’s the president, sole proprietor or in some cases, a board [...]
This is another photograph I took while in the mountains of Tennessee visiting my brother in law. This was a stream/river that runs along the Appalachian Trail and Iron Mountain Trail. The original shot was a wider angle, but there was so much foliage blocking the view that I could only salvage this small cropped [...]
This shot was taken in the mountains of Tennessee during 2009. My brother in law lives in a small cabin near Iron Mountain, and while visiting him, we can across this small lane going through the woods. I was struck by the almost foreboding forest tunnel at the end of this image, and simply had [...]
I am a co-curator for the Affinity Art Gallery in Kernersville, NC. The Affinity Gallery is a non-profit art gallery that showcases local artists’ work in a commission-free space located on Main Street in Kernersville. The gallery space is in fact donated by my church, Kernersville Community Church. We repurposed the interior hallways of the [...]
Part of the branding project for Awaken City Church included a promotional build-up to their Grand Opening in January of 2010. The whole project has used an “underground” “power to the people” kind of vibe, so instead of investing into traditional media such as radio or television ads, we saved costs by creating business card-sized [...]
If you haven’t checked out the Identity and Branding Project: Awaken City Church post, you’ll probably want to. The website design is based upon the brand mentioned in that post. Awaken City Church needed several things: a way to quickly showcase upcoming events and sermon series, play videos, have realtime Twitter updates from various Twitter [...]
I was approached by the pastors of a new church in Greensboro, NC about developing a corporate identity system for their launch. In the beginning, I was given a design brief that was fairly vague, as often happens with any brand new organization. Over the course of several months of doing sketches and meeting with [...]
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