Career Update Fall 2017

Last time I posted an update on my work was over a year ago, I had recently left my job at Hanna & Associates to freelance. I also began working as a contractor for my church, doing design and visual work. That contract work led me to a full-time position at the church as communications director. I now oversee marketing/communications for the church, which includes visuals on Sundays, promotion of events and classes, email marketing, video production, brand management, and more. As communications director at the church, I’ve brought some big changes and gotten to work on some pretty fun projects. I wish I had more time to present these all nicely here, but this will have to do […]

Career Update Summer 2016

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. So here’s an update on my career… and life in general: I left my job at Hanna & Associates to pursue some contract opportunities including doing some branding and design for the church I attend, Faith Bible Church. I’m teaching a design class this Summer at Eastern Washington University as an adjunct lecturer. I’ve been working with a startup from Seattle a little bit, called Horizon. Some friends of mine have a band called the Eventide. I worked with them to create album art for their upcoming release. Kaitlyn and I are pregnant—well she’s pregnant, and I’m just here helping her as much as I can. Below are some things I’ve been […]

10 Reasons why Freelancing is Awesome.

Sometimes I want a full time job at an ad agency or design firm, but then I remember how great it is to be a freelance designer. Here are the top ten reasons I love freelancing! I can work all day in my pajamas if I want. Unless I have an in-person client meeting. When I send out an invoice, all the money comes directly to me. Of course I have to save some for taxes, but my billable hours aren’t paying for anything but my work. I don’t report to a boss. Yeah, a client is sort of like your temporary boss, but really you’re more like equal partners in business with your clients. I can work […]

What’s Crowdswell?

What’s Crowdswell and what am I doing for them? Crowdswell is a tech startup founded by Eric Dahl and the partners of Magner Sanborn, (Where I did my previous internship.) I am doing a design internship at Crowdswell. You might be thinking: “You’re taking another unpaid internship? That sucks!”But I’m here to say: “Actually it doesn’t! I’m really excited to take part in Crowdswell!” And on a side note, I am still doing freelance work while I intern. Crowdswell’s mission is to crowdsolve and crowdfund ideas, problems and issues on a local level. It’s like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo but for community projects. Plus on an open swell, anyone can solve, not just the person who started it. The […]

Screenprinting

During the Fall of 2013 I took a screenprinting class. I’m still not very good at it, but I did come out with a couple cool projects to show, and I learned something about art versus design. For the first project our instructor wanted us to show the contrast between organic and geometric forms. I used the X from the XX album cover and drew sea life inspired organisms growing off of it – as if the X had been floating in some other worldly sea for many years. For the last project of the quarter we were to take our screenprinting to the next level creating a 3D object or sculpture with screenprinting and try to communicate […]

Portfolio Show

I am finally finishing design school after this quarter. I only have a couple days left! It’s really exciting and a little scary. Design school has been really fun, and I’m happy with the way things turned out. I had no idea what to expect going into it. I just knew I wanted to do something where I could be creative, but I could have never guessed I would have ended up loving it so much and be interning during my last quarter at a great place like Magner Sanborn. I wouldn’t have thought I would be part of a minor that my advisor and I made up so that students could dive deeper into video production without having […]

Big Project

I have been put in charge of all creative for an upcoming owner’s and manager’s convention! Such a big task that I have had to subcontract another designer, Tyler Weinbender, and a my friend at Ferguson Films, the great Ryan Ferguson. We have just gotten the ball rolling and I am excited to see how it goes. It is going to be a lot of work, but it is a great opportunity to build my clientele, and my company. I will be posting more about this job as we go! There are some exciting new developments at FBC too. A new logotype, we have formed a media team and had our first meeting Sunday, as well as the creation of […]

Sometimes You Get Overwhelmed

New Quarter of school, new website launched the 4th of January, new bulletin format, Aspire Conference preparation, helping plan a live recording of a worship night, and 4 meetings in 1 day today. My goodness I am just tired of this quarter already. I am not a morning person… I shouldn’t be getting up at 6:00am. And let me say, I can guarantee you I will never work in a print shop. After 2 days and skimming painfully through 1 chapter in Prepress, I know I hate it. I will make the designs and happily send them to someone who wants to print them. So there’s my rant. And here’s to knowing the quarter will get better once I’m used to […]

Current projects

Winter break has begun. In fact it began last night with a midnight showing of The Hobbit. So with that comes a break from design classes and from my job at the paper. While my job at FBC is keeping me plenty busy with a new website launch on the 2nd of January and a new bulletin format launch on the 6th, I have decided to work on some self-motivated projects that are just for my own benefit in growing in my design. I never want to get comfortable with my skills, my style, my creativity, my ideas, I always want to push myself to get better. Now I don’t want to copy Paula Scher’s Map projects, which […]

Building My Portfolio Site

I am realizing that building a good portfolio site is quite the design project in itself. I’m excited to take a lot of time over this winter break to really build a great portfolio site. In the past I have hated the idea of using a CMS template for my portfolio site because I wanted to code it all myself from scratch. Sounds Nice in theory… but it was incredibly impractical to keep updated in reality. So I found myself a nice portfolio template and am preparing to deck it out!