David Edward JohnsonThis redesign of pet products giant Purina’s Petcentric website is about the balance between clean, usable layout and gestural design touches. The site uses a “boutique-ish” feel to establish visual interest and build on the popularity of the personal touch of neighborhood pet stores — giving a more personal face to the Purina corporation. Overall, a very fun approach to the rework.
This campaign, targeted at large organizations, uses the concept of “social norming” to increase participation in a home delivery prescription plan. The idea was to devise a catchy, punchy way to engage consumers and encourage a “bandwagon” mentality to spread through a company, increasing participation and bringing both the consumer and the organization large savings.
We came up with the concept “Wise Up” as a playful and attitudinal way to bring to life this “social norming” idea — “everyone is doing it and you should too because it would be stupid not to.” Visually, the campaign uses bold, visually arresting graphics to cut through the clutter of the corporate / retail end environment. I brought a custom campaign identity to the mix, digital and print executions rounding out the package.
Mark, site and poster collateral shown here. Campaign goal poster also shows end-user-generated handwritten text to show participation progress.
Great college educational opportunities are all about personal touch. The appeal of smaller schools is that they afford students those unique “touchpoints” throughout a student’s college time that make for lasting memories and life-changing experiences. Those concepts are at the center of this viewbook.
Conceptually, the book is built around 10 central differentiators that best describe the unique aspects of the Principia College experience. The concepts are each expressed in different ways at the college and the book brings that to life for prospective students.
The design itself is immersive with bold typography and large, compelling photgraphy and leverages the idea of “personal touch” through a layered, “hand-wrought” approach.
Shown here in cover and sample inside spreads.
This visual approach for depression awareness organization The Walk balances information design principles with a bright personal call to action. I designed this around the central concept that although the issue of depression awareness is a serious one, advocacy marketing for the cause does not need to be stiff or dark. The result was at once compelling and visually involving.
NGAGE has become 4ORCE. It’s a compelling rebrand that embodies a reimagining and broadening of the agency scope and capabilities.
I created the new 4ORCE mark as a subtle nod to the existing NGAGE brand I developed. It is bold and progressive and uses custom-created letterforms to convey a sense of “digital.” The brutish nature of the type also brings a decisive strength to the brand as well.
One major portion of the agency’s expanded service offerings is the opening of our new User Experience Lab. I created custom brand elements for that as well, building on the main 4ORCE letterforms. The result has the same sense of presence as the main mark with a touch of “science fiction” sprinkled over the top.
I also created custom iconography as a part of the overall brand to show the unique blend of services present at 4ORCE. Though capturing complex concepts like “Insights and Intelligence” might appear difficult, I approached this with clarity and a touch of whimsey at the forefront of my thought. The icons are stylish and do capture both the essence of the departments themselves with a smile.
As Creative Director and Vice President, I take great pride in having been a fundamental part of the growth and development of NGAGE, a progressive digital agency in St. Louis with a very progressive culture.
This piece, targeted at all NGAGE employees, gelled both my personal thoughts on culture as well as agency owner Dan Curran’s attitudes, feelings and approach to running an agency. This content, coupled with policies and perks, made the book a wonderful statement about the ethos and soul of the agency. I acted as both the copywriter and the designer on the piece. Bringing together straightforward, boldly stated copy, whimsical photography and a heaping helping of attitude, I leveraged forward the NGAGE brand in a new way that reached audiences both internal and external as the content found a home on the NGAGE site.
Shown here with cover spread and selected inside spreads.
These three annual report concepts reflect a new openness for self-directed investment leader Scottrade. All give a contemporary face to the financial services company, balancing compelling, fresh-faced imagery (including client-supplied assets) with clean lines and optimistic colors. In total a progressive, friendly and fun take.
Shown here in cover and inside spreads.
Information design at it’s best is transparent. Simple, clean information design puts content and above all users at the center of the action. This should still remain compelling, however. It should not lose a sense of interest and emotional connection.
These ideas are at the center of these concepts for a redesigned Saint Louis Public Library website. Using only minimal system typography (Verdana), content and touches of bold jewel tones, these strike the balance between making content king and retaining that all-important emotional connection.
With brands like UGGS and Simple on their roster, the Deckers Corporation had a PROVEN track record for bringing great “brands on the verge” into their brand family. MOZO was no exception.
Designed with the belief that chefs are lateral athletes — moving fast on their feet for grueling 14 hour shifts, MOZO delivers unequaled comfort. Like a Kershaw Shun knife or an Imperial gas range, a MOZO shoe is an essential tool for the professional chef.
I led a full rebrand of MOZO. It started with a rework of the mark and wordmark, progressed to packaging, business papers, collateral and a complete relaunch of the MOZO site. In this case, all of the work was my personal positioning and design work.
Designed to convey a sense of history while serving as an inspirational “call to arms” for current Principia College athletes, this installation was a bold and textured tribute to the “gold and blue” of Principia. lauded poet painter of the Midwest Frederick Oakes Sylvester gave the colors of gold and blue to the college to stand for “purity” and “courage.” It is in the spirit of these qualities that I created these designs.
Full-bleed custom wallpaper featuring Principia athletes from the past treated in the school’s colors serves as the anchor for the installation. Stainless steel doors were added throughout the space with custom door pulls styled to reflect a new athletic mark I designed for the college. three-dimensional panels, display cases and glass walls completed the design.
I think that great poster design is so often ignored in the marketing mix. It is a tangible link to our past as designers and I relish the opportunity to work on posters whenever I can.
Michelob Amberbock, the craft side of a brand with a storied history. These site designs give a new and decidedly hip face to the beer, one not based on darts and your father’s oak bar. Ranging from textural and nuanced to progressively traditional to clean and contemporary, these concepts speak to different aspects of both the brand and the target audience. All convey a new sense of personality without losing the flavor of tradition and quailty that has become the hallmark of Michelob Amberbock.
Again, I led the visual aspects of this project and was a key contributor on the conceptual aspects of the redesign. sadly, changing priorities at Anheuser Busch left the project unfinished.
Once a favorite confection of King Louis VIV, Bissinger’s chocolate has a rich history stretching back to 17th centruy Paris. Even the famed Napoleon gave Bissinger’s chocolates to his beloved Jospehine. That’s a lot of history. The brand had a beautiful site, but a beautiful site with a problem. It wasn’t usable.
I led a redesign of the Bissinger’s site, both rebranding the digital face of the company in a very rich way and significantly reworking the information design of the site’s content itself. the transactional components were brought out in a more simple, elegant way that puts the users’ needs at the forefront.
Faced with a target enrollment pool that were either attending the “feeder” Principia private boarding high school or being pushed by their alumni parents to attend, Principia College had an image problem. The college needed a way to differentiate itself from its’ high school “sister” while conveying to an international student audience that this was definitely not their parents’ Principia College.
To combat this, I led the “itsatotallydifferentexperience.com” campaign. The fully branded campaign featured a compelling site with real stories from real students wrapped in a progressive design that differentiated itself from the more stately main Principia College brand. I also created video motion graphics pieces set to music recorded by college students themselves to help convey the “PC” experience. Live events at unique locations also carried the brand and the campaign directly to select groups of prospecive students with video pieces and live Q / A sessions with current Principia College students. other promotion materials such as posters and a “Summer Survival Kit” helped prospects take the brand home.
Moving away from the overused beer advertising paradigms of beautiful people in beautiful bars, this elegant redesign of Michelob.com put food pairings at its center. Celebrity food network chefs Ming Tsai and Todd English added an air of authenticity to the mix while creating special featured Michelob recipes for use on the site. The redesign also featured a fully interactive “Recipe Finder” that allowed users to search for executive chef-created food recipes by beer, course or ingredient. I led the Design / User Interface aspect of this rework and was a key contributor on concept here as well. Overall, a huge update to the digital brand for this iconic beer.
How do you connect with guys 18-27? Well, there are a few ways. Namely, hot girls, huge burgers and live events. with the Hardee’s “French Me” campaign, we gave guys all three.
To promote the launch of the new featured “French Dip Thickburger” (the lovechild of a Thickburger and a french dip sandwich), we put 4 hot maids on the road on Segways at the hottest events of the summer, on local media and heavily in the digital social media space. Guys loved it. Period.
I led the full brand / design effort here. My site design drove the look and feel for the whole campaign. I also took this to social media skins and created the video style and motion graphics portions. I creative directed the photoshoots for the campaign, collateral, promotional items including a vehicle wrap and signage, a full social media video initiative and the mark for the campaign.
They just don’t make audiophiles like they used to. Those gigantic room-filling systems are a thing of the past. Two channel headphones, computer speakers and stereo televisions rule the rooms and apartments of the young men of today.
That’s where the technologists at Astound Sound come in.
Using “psycho-acoustics,” Astound Sound has found a way to “broaden the stage,” making your two-channel speaker systems powerhouses of full sound. The technology also allows sound to match time and distance. For gamers that means hearing the click of a trigger behind them just in time.
I led a full rebrand of Astound Sound, including a new identity system, a new site, collateral materals, ADS and environmental design. I set the style for the entire brand. Here, I am showing the pieces I directly designed here. I creative directed the rest.
Designed as a living extension of the main NGAGE brand I created, this site is about embodying the concept of “intelligence.” I designed this to be elegant in its simplicity, content rich, imminently usable and fully dynamic. I love this as an example of how compelling the basics of great design can be — color, type, layout and imagery. Though I LOVE some Photoshop and Illustrator wizardry, this type of great simple design is so often what I look to encourage in younger designers. Without those solid basics, the rest is often meaningless.
Hanes needed to reach males 18-34. But the brand assets they had weren’t going to work. Outtakes from Michael Jordan ads? I don’t think so. To the target they were looking at for this campaign, Kobe Bryant was an old player. They needed something brand new.
We sent an average guy (Dave — a real estate agent from Illinois) on the road to challenge celebrities to feats of smarts, strength and skill to show that anyone can be comfy in their Hanes Comforsofts in any situation.
The results were overwhelming. Dave arm wrestled rapper 50-Cent for watches, Challenged Paris Hilton to a pose-off, jumped rope with Cuba Gooding Jr. and got in Tom Brady’s face to name a few. The campaign lived on Dave’s site, in social media and on affinity sites like ESPN and Comedy Central.
I was a design and creative direction lead for the full campaign. I have shown two selected elements here.
These concepts were driven by the firm belief that the time had come for a new approach to the iconic Budbowl campaign, one that reflected the current trends in social media and consumer interaction. Each idea does this in a different way. I was the design and ideation lead on these ideas.
David McCullough: best-selling author of historical hits including “1776”. “John Adams” and “Truman.” Recipient of numerous honors and awards including 2 Pulitzer Prizes, The National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. ONE heck of a nice guy.
I led a branding effort for this celebrated author’s events at Principia College. The campaign bridged the gap between the subject matter of our nation’s early history and a contemporary college audience through bold, unexpected imagery and a wink. I took the campaign to NPR advertising, a full banner inititative throughout campus, a postering campaign on and off campus and into the digital space as well.
With a roster of luminaries like Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Jane Goodall, George H.W. Bush, Corretta Scott King and Erin Brockovich among others, the Principia College speakers series is a truly unique opportunity. Consequently, it needed a brand that reflected that uniqueness as well as communicated the nature of the confluence of ideas that the series represents.
The resulting brand uses a spectrum of colors and concentric rings to communicate that confluence and black and white photography and clean, simple typography to underscore an unadorned sense of equality. The campaign lived online, in posters, banners and in NPR ads.
I was the Designer and Creative Director for the campaign.
Daily Me was another consumer subscription commerce exploration focused on women. This was not a popular concept as a CONCEPT, but the identity, app designs and overall look and feel were quite universally loved, so I am sharing it here.
I also wanted to share it because it features a powerful tool in my arsenal on the branding and digital sides alike :: the STYLE TILE. I love these. They exist somewhere in between the loose gestures of a mood board and the specificity of final designs. I have shown them on the Whole Foods Wine Club work as well. I use them whenever I can.
Shown Here :: Identity, Style Tile, App Designs
Rock and roll should feel dangerous and what could feel more that way than a blend of horror and metal? Bands like The Misfits, Alice Cooper, Bauhaus, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and others have lived at that intersection, marking their careers with a unique, spooky quality. That’s what this ID system is designed to do. It leverages a custom blackletter approach to the mark and wordmark into an entire system that feels somehow both modern and at home in a mouldering castle with coffins in the crypt. I created all of this personally and had a great time doing so.
Shown Here :: Mark, Wordmark, Colors, Apparel, Responsive Web Designs
