I often struggle to answer, "What to do with the work that doesn't fit into a larger case study?"
So, in an effort to keep my portfolio a little more condensed, I've filed away several miscellaneous projects on this page that didn't warrant a case study for one reason or another.
Some of the projects are older, some were one-offs, and others were personal projects. Despite their lack of scope, I wanted to keep them on my site!
I was hired by EGC Group to design a website for Beacon Dental Health. With 14 different practices coming together under one name, Beacon Dental Health knew their brand needed a cohesive website to replace each practice's individual site. During the kick-off call, EGC Group expressed that the client was looking for a modern site with a New England feel. Working remotely, I built designs and simple prototypes in Figma that were shared with both parties.
During the process, I pulled different imagery and inspiration from the 14 individual sites, but since they varied greatly, I left much of their content and functionality behind in preference for a more unified approach.
Thanks to some initial research and content strategy work from the EGC Group team, I was able to step in right at the start of the design phase. Since the client did not have mature brand guidelines, we used the first milestone, the design of the homepage, to set the tone and define the visuals of their digital brand.
The biggest challenge of this project was to define what a modern site inspired by New England would look like; their brand was not very developed and much of my initial research for similar styles landed on overly nautical or kitschy designs. Using softer colors, wave imagery, and photos reminiscent of the landscape, I helped build a more modern dentistry brand that references its heritage without being too stereotypical.
Brand Identity, Web Design, UI/UX Design
I recently worked with Stefan and Evan at tweetwith to design two new landing pages to promote their start-up. One landing page focused on attracting brands to use the service while the other focused on recruiting writers.
As part of the project, I was also tasked with creating some hypothetical screens to entice both audiences by the possibilities of what this app could look like as well as adjust their basic brand styles to be more dynamic.
Since Stefan and Evan have development backgrounds, they coded the landing pages themselves and tweaked copy, imagery, and styles as they saw fit, even swapping out mocks for their product screens when possible.
Web Design, UI/UX Design, Branding
I made this design one day during that weird period between Christmas and New Year's using Photoshop and Illustrator. A few months later, I opened After Effects for the first time in years to make a simple animation.
Digital Collaging, Animation
One day I saw one of those 30 Days of Songs posts floating amongst my friends on Instagram. The premise was simple: share the graphic and the song that fit the prompt once a day for thirty days. Since music is a huge inspiration to me while designing, I wanted to take this one step forward and share a graphic I made every time I posted a song! To further challenge myself, I tried to utilize different design skills and make each post (from picking a song and concepting to creating and posting) in under two hours or less... Some designs were more successful than others, but here I've included a few of my favorites!
Illustration, Digital Collaging, Digital Lettering, + More
As an avid reader, the list of books I’ve read and those I want to read keeps growing. To keep track of all my book-related goals and accomplishments, I use an app called Goodreads.
I love the app because I can search for books, scan barcodes to add to my TBR list, and check for reviews. On the downside, the current version of the app has a navigational structure that makes it not very user-friendly. I also feel like the app downplays some of its more interesting features. As a personal project, I chose to redesign the app while also learning how to use Adobe Xd.
After designing the majority of the app, I began to brainstorm ways to highlight my favorite feature of the app: the reading challenge. Each year, users are asked to set a goal of how many books they’ll read that year; when the goal is completed, a simple confetti animation pops up on the screen to celebrate.
I chose to make multiple reading challenges available at any given time in order to flesh out this feature and help gamify the app. For instance, there would always be the on-going yearly challenge, but there would also be monthly ones, author-related ones, and ones submitted by prominent bookstores and public figures.
To further play up on the challenge aspect, I decided that each challenge would have a badge associated with it; once a challenge was completed, the user would have the badge displayed on his or her profile. I created several badges using Illustrator to showcase this concept.
UI/UX Design, Mobile App Design, Illustration
I decided to make a fictional collector’s edition compilation cd for my favorite band, Brand New. I have always felt that Brand New had this collage-style sound to their music and I wanted this project to evoke that kind of atmosphere.
To get started, I began by writing out lyrics from each of the four albums that I felt were impactful and could tell some sort of visual story (Science Fiction, their fifth album, hadn’t been released at that time). I wrote down ideas for imagery and text treatments. I made Pinterest boards about Photoshop collages. I started gathering stock source materials.
But nothing seemed to fit together the way I imagined in my head, so I put the idea on hold and continued on with my days. In the meantime, I found myself walking around Wilkes-Barre with my iPhone and talking pictures of everything: buildings, dead leaves, brick work, anything.
With lyrics that hinged so heavily on a sense of nostalgia and internal conflict, I felt a pull towards making this project about the lyrics and imagery being created from “found” objects rather than perfect stock imagery and the bright collage-style I loved.
I went back to my iPhone camera roll for texture photos of concrete I had taken while walking around Wilkes-Barre. I ripped pages out of water-logged books to string together song lyrics. I wrote heavily with a Sharpie and photographed both sides of the paper. I had a photoshoot with a friend and manipulated her body into a few different images. I found graffiti in NEPA with an album title on it.
From there, the project started to form in my mind, in my hands, and later, it was compiled on the computer.
Print Design, Photography
