One of Enterprise Mobility’s lines of business, Entegral, commissioned a whitepaper from Reuters. The document that was sent to us used too many pages, and wasn’t aligned with Entegral’s brand guidelines. I was tasked with setting the type so the document had a lower page count, as well as making the document consistent with the Entegral brand, so that it could be posted on the Entegral website and LinkedIn as a Document Ad.

I used the basic layout of previously published Entegral whitepapers as a base. However, getting the copy to fit within ten pages without feeling cramped required a significant amount of typographic wrangling. Working with larger, multipage documents like this was a great challenge and bolstered my skills with typesetting, especially with constraints such as these.

I was asked to animate three sets of retargeting advertisements. These were meant to be aimed towards those who had gone to the Enterprise website and left before they had booked a rental vehicle, to convince them to come back and complete their booking. I reused the web ads mockup from the Award Mockups project to present these to the rest of the team.

This was my first time using Adobe Animate and working in a banner ad format. These animations did not need to be complex, so it allowed me to focus less on keyframing and more on things like speeds and easing that I think made the animations look more refined. These ended up getting published through AdSense!

One thing I’ve learned as a design student is that making your own mockups is a valuable skill. While using any sort of mockup is a surefire way to elevate your work, a mockup precisely tailored to your work allows you to add a level of polish that can’t be replicated.

These mockups were created for Enterprise Mobility’s submission to the IHAF In-House Creativity Awards. The underlying work by the rest of my team was strong, and my task was to elevate their work even further and prepare it for submission.

Both CAMPliance and Enterprise Car Sales’ consideration ads became full motion graphics projects, as showing those projects as static images wouldn’t do them justice. The mockups were also made reusable, so my team could present their work in the future.

During my time at the Lindenwood Makerspace, I was tasked with making the poster (and surrounding media) for Lindenwood University’s 2025 production of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. I found the use of typefaces similar to Franklin Gothic really common when it came to things like 50’s album covers, and after looking at a ton of Christmas catalogs on the Internet Archive, I found a really nice set of illustrated Christmas ornaments that I knew I had to include. The brief also came with a very strict set of rules from the musical’s rights holders as to how the text should be laid out, and in what sizes, to give proper credit to the original creators. This was difficult at first, but as the design of the poster began to take shape it wasn’t so bad.

I continued to take cues from those Christmas catalogs and came up with something that I think did a great job of calling back to the time in which White Christmas was filmed. It was really well received by the students and patrons before and during the show!

This logo was created as part of a logo design competition held by Lindenwood University for the Lindenwood Showcase (archive), an event showing the achievements of students and faculty across all departments. Each logo was voted on by faculty, staff and students, and mine was the winner!

Process

From the very beginning, I began to think about how to visually represent the idea of showing something, as well as appearing academic but agnostic to any specific discipline.

After spending some time in my sketchbook, I settled on the nib of a fountain pen to represent academics. After all, any academic endeavor, whether it’s art, writing, math, biology or otherwise, relies on making or reading marks to work. Using a writing utensil to represent academics isn’t a new idea, but I think the form of a fountain pen’s nib is a much more unique and less used form than a pencil (which seems somewhat elementary) or quill (which can come across as dated).

I also settled on using radiating lines to convey showing something. This also isn’t a unique idea, especially in the context of the competition. Many of my competitors used the same thing, and even previous logos for the competition used radiating lines. However, it is the most straightforward way to communicate this concept, and gave me the opportunity to use some of the alternate colors that were provided in the Lindenwood University Branding Guidelines.

Once I had both of these ideas I sat down and got to work, ending up with this:

Results

I think that what made this logo better than the others and different from the previous winners was that it appeared much more contemporary. Many of the logos that were submitted relied on Lindenwood’s history, using things like books, quills, pillars, etc. Many also used Bembo Std after seeing the Lindenwood logotype, which at times worked with the rest of their designs but sometimes would have been better served by Trade Gothic. I thought that something that focused on the university’s history didn’t serve this sort of event, as it is fundamentally about what students are doing now and showing their future potential.

This zine was a final for my Print Design and Production class. I decided to make my second zine about things that I had figured out over the last semester, and would like to share with others. I tried to adhere to the grid I had set up, and decided to go with stickers to display my information on the page alongside handwritten blurbs to add extra information. I think it turned out really well, but I wish I had more time to add some more information in the section about Obsidian. It’s a really good tool!

For Typography II, we had to come up with hand-lettered phrases to put on T-shirts. I instantly gravitated towards making up some bad band names and throwing them on shirts. I immediately got to work and started sketching some ideas:

I picked the best sketches of the three and cleaned them up, and threw them onto T-shirt mockups.

I even ended up screenprinting the “CRISP RATT” design onto an actual T-shirt, and a ton of people wanted them! I ended up printing around 20 of them, so that design was a hit. I also thought the “Gallium” design ended up looking like the Gorrilaz logo as well, and I printed a few of those as well!

I got a ton of practice on working with hand lettering and making some cool band logos and I think I did really, really well with this one!

This is a tri-fold brochure made about one of my favorite designers, Aaron Draplin, for my Typography 1 class. I decided to pull from the design of Field Notes, one of Aaron’s creations. I also thought about how often, a trifold brochure is often something that is thrown away. You read it, and discard it, and the format allows for that. But, what if the trifold had something for you to keep? I added the triple fold pocket ruler to the bottom so you have something that’s actually useful in a pinch, and you’ll always have something to remember the brochure by. It also brings in a bit of Aaron’s aesthetic too! I thought it turned out great.

This was a book cover made for my Print Design and Production class of one of my favorite books – A Japanese novel titled Kafka on the Shore, written by Haruki Murakami. I chose the image of a crow because the main character identifies himself as Crow, and that theme stretches throughout the book. The use of blue was also chosen as it evoked the ocean, another important symbol.

Many other book covers for Kafka on the Shore have really unusual or odd imagery – Probably because Kafka is a weird book – and I think that a more simplified version would bring in more people to it’s story. Other versions of the cover took the same approach as me, but they all looked a little plain. I think that I made it seem a little more interesting than the other ones.

Something I would love to add to it would be an obi, or belt, which is often included on Japanese book releases to add things like marketing claims. On one of my books, Designing Design by Kenya Hara, it has it’s own obi with the title and some accolades for the book, and it adds a really interesting tactile feel and makes it seem a little more premium.

I haven’t had the chance to design very many book covers, so this gave me a lot of insight as to what goes into it, and I think that it turned out really well for one of my first attempts at something like this.

Double Take

Double Take was a zine made for my Typography I final, and the first zine I have ever made. It is a collection of things you overhear that make you stop what you’re doing and do a double take, as I had been hearing a lot of those sorts of things over the last week, and continued to hear them as I wrote the zine.

Some of the imagery was taken from found items, such as the bottom of an Apple Magic Mouse on page 6, and the small notebook on pages 9 and 10. Many of the others were manipulated somehow, and I fell in love with Lindenwood University’s high-quality scanners, so I used those as much as I could. I learned a lot about page layout, what works, and what doesn’t. The copy on pages 7 and 8 are not my best work, but I’m pretty proud of the introduction pages.

The cover was adorned with handwritten variations of “WITH SPECIAL ISSUE”, and the last page before the rear cover contained handwritten citations for my images, as well as a small illustration and serial number to make each copy unique.

SPECIAL ISSUE

As I was looking for a quote to use for my final spread on or around December 6, 2023, Lindenwood University decided to cut many of its NCAA Division I sports teams, affecting 284 student athletes. This announcement caused a wave of anger throughout the student body, and came at a total surprise to everyone. The announcement itself made everyone do a double take, as the announcement given in the Lindenwood Theater lasted no longer than three minutes. The president wasn’t even present during the announcement, which made the entire situation seem callous.

“SPECIAL ISSUE” was a letter size sheet of paper folded in half and included in every physical copy of Double Take, finished just hours after the announcement. It reflected my frustration on that day, with the sports cuts and rising tuition making me feel like the student body was being exploited. It focused on showing the dissonance between the luxury contained in the president’s mansion (which had been the target of vandalism that night) and the University’s apparent need for money in an absurd way. I thought it fit well within the context of my zine, and within the broader history of zines as a medium for protest.