After earning my Master of Education degree, I spent some time working at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where I rebranded the Active Learning Labs.

These are excerpts from my Master of Design thesis defense. I eventually wound up winning the Directors' Choice Award for my thesis, and proudly lost the University of Cincinnati's Three Minute Thesis Competition (where I presented all 62 pages of my thesis in under 180 seconds). I also submitted my thesis to SXSWedu and made it to the Standby List, and later on I distilled (and reformatted) my thesis and successfully published it in the Creativity and Human Development International eJournal.

My thesis focuses on childlike creativity. Early on, I hypothesized that almost all children tested score as creative geniuses (and all adults tested almost never do) due to the inherent gamification of childhood. I decided to warp childhood games—i.e., Musical Chairs, Duck Duck Goose, and Tag You're It—into design ideation games.

I tested my hypothesis with two groups of students taking the same course. The control group brainstormed logos in groups, and the experimental group brainstormed using the same prompts, but while playing my design games. In the end, considering my five core ingredients of creativity—fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, and utility—the experimental group's ideations proved to be significantly more fluent and elaborate, proving that my childlike design games do, in fact, augment creativity.

This is a freelance project I pursued, in which I rebranded a SoundCloud musician. I helped this artist articulate what he wanted in his imagery and basically ended up making his brand more iconic and in your face, so to speak. The background spiral is a nod to the hypnotic effect the artist's music has on his listeners.

The following images represent the breadth of projects I worked on while at Pure Romance. Duties involved numerous design disciplines including interaction, web, print, graphic, environmental, animation, and motion design.

I have taught Graphic Design twice for the Digital Media Academy, once at Southern Methodist University and once at Harvard University. The first three images here represent student outcomes, and subsequent images represent excerpts from in-class demonstrations and presentations for the Friday Open House events. (Additional images will be coming soon.)

The goal of this assignment was to create a mobile application. I decided to try and make unicycling look and feel the way skateboarding does to most people these days: respectable, extreme, and hip. Thus, I rebranded the Unicycling Society of America and transformed a portion of their website into mobile form.

Visual benchmarking, task analyses (via card sorting), hand drawn ideation and wireframing, paper prototype testing, and Axure RP prototype testing methods (via screen) were utilized throughout. The end product was tested and retested in cyclical phases of iteration via hand drawn explorations and digital refinement.

I spent three years working with government officials and various other technology professionals to reimagine the face and functionality of Medicare.gov. The following images represent excerpts from my wonderful time at Index Analytics LLC and Bellese Technologies.

At my internship at Crown Equipment, the main overall ongoing assignment was to work on redesigning for a series of interfaces. The project is confidential. The process involved a heavy amount of research, as well as numerous, cyclical redesign phases.

Interning at Crown came about because of a collaborative studio course (involving Crown) that I participated in during my third year at UC. At the end of the semester, my team earned scholarships for our work with Crown, and my output during my internship at Crown later earned me the Cincinnati Co-op and Internship Plan Scholarship. My team's research and design ideations were later included in an article entitled, "An Integrated Approach to Workplace Safety and Wellness: Case Studies of Warehouse Communication System Design," published in the Society of Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) Research Journal.

These are posters I created during my time at the University of Cincinnati. The first poster is from my stint as Student Graphic Designer at Campus Services, and the other two are from my tenure as President of the Master of Design cohort and Graphic Designer for the overall Graduate Student Governance Association.

I enrolled in an Applied Trend Research & Analysis course during the final semester of my Master of Design Program. These are excerpts from my final (group) presentation. We elucidated the meaning of our final trend—High[er] Tech—in this way:

The recent advent of the Information Age caused millions to cling to the idea that digital technology should be used in moderation. More recently, the world has begun to adopt a new outlook, giving in to and even embracing the world’s digital omnipresence. High[er] Tech is this new mindset involving technological spirituality: the notion that—when compared with living off the grid—'plugging in' is actually a much more effective means toward spiritual transcendence. Modern technology has even begun to empower people to seriously contemplate and deal with their own mortality, illustrating just how similar digital and religious experiences truly are.

We chose Amazon as a prospective client for many reasons: 

Single-channel retail is disappearing, and Amazon is striving to become a multi-channel retailer (hence, their expansion into physical stores). High[er] Tech can elevate consumer perception of Amazon and attract a greater range of clientele, buffering the company’s new channels with the increased fanbase the channels need to thrive.

This project dictated cyclical research and ideation regarding an original trend idea for each person in the course. Students formed groups for concluding presentations representing our merged trends and subtrends.  

While working at MIT App Inventor (within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory [CSAIL]), I had the opportunity to experiment with rebranding studies.

During an early team meeting, I gave each team member a small stack of Post-It notes and asked them to write something relevant to App Inventor on each Post-It. More specifically, participants were given the prompt: “If MIT App Inventor was a person, what adjective(s) would you use to describe this person?”

Later on, these adjectives were grouped into four main categories and used to inform subsequent rebranding iterations for MIT App Inventor.

Part of my progress presentations entailed explaining how various MIT entities incorporate the MIT logo into their sub-logos. The team's consensus was to simply utilize a typeface matching technique, similar to the logo of the MIT Media Lab.

At STACK Construction Technologies, my responsibilities as User Experience Designer/Researcher included creating processes for solving UX and product problems; conducting user and stakeholder interviews; and working with multiple teams including developers, client support, customers, and stakeholders. My workflow often included wireframing, mockups, and high-fidelity prototyping.

Numerous projects entailed visually educating users regarding STACK's capabilities. This type of thing could take the form of Pendo (modal overlay) guides, email instructions, webpage infographics, and pamphlets.

The images shown here are excerpts from my work at STACK Construction Technologies.

These two icon sets were assigned to me during my time in university—the first set was in college and the second was in grad school. The first set of icons represents the five main senses, whereas the second set represents icons that might be part of an overarching brand guidelines document for a major hotel. Fun stuff!

Blind contours are my absolute favorite method of drawing. All you do is set a timer for 10 minutes or so and draw an object in front of you... without looking at your drawing. You just stare at your object the entire time, which is so difficult, but the final product is always quite whimsical and fun to look at. I suggest you try it some time!

I helped paint this Marilyn Monroe car during one of ArtWorks Cincinnati’s car painting festivals.

These are a few experiments I crafted using Illustrator and Photoshop.

Here are some of the cartoons and comic strips I’ve published over the years.

This is a drawing I made. I especially enjoy gestural/scribbly drawing, so this was a pleasure to create.

This is a concept for a book I wrote in college. (Well, I should say, I wrote half of it—it is unfinished; perhaps I will return to it in the future.) I illustrated the extant half, as well. The story is about a boy who learns that, unlike his father, he cannot fly, but unlike his mother, he is at least able to float.

I made a trilogy of self-published books in college. These books are about the bookmark living inside the book. Such a delight to write and illustrate these stories!