I have been working as a Product Designer at Pow Interactive for 3.5 years. This is some of the work I completed in my first year. This year represents a transition in my career from print design to product design and I couldn’t be more motivated to keep growing in this field. I’ve been lucky to get the opportunity to work with a variety of clients and on in-house projects. From wire-framing, collaborating with developers, doing the visual design for sites and applications to crafting UI style guides… I’ve enjoyed the entire process.

I have been slowly teaching myself After Effects and doing frame-by-frame animation in Photoshop in an effort to expand my skillset and bring my illustrations and designs to life digitally. Looking forward to learning more and getting better!

For the past six years I have been the creative mind behind Maple & Belmont, a design studio based in Norfolk, Virginia. I got the inspiration to start my own company after working for a stationery company in NYC. I’ve always enjoyed designing for print but I truly developed my visual voice through vintage inspired hand-drawn typography and illustrations.

Our first logo was a very basic attempt to get something out into the world. Maple and Belmont are the streets that my partner and I grew up on and those combined streets became our name. So the first logo is reminiscent of a street sign. Shortly after developing that logo we began to grow beyond our product line and took another approach to our logo and website. We began teaching lettering workshops and providing other custom design services.

This is the moment we moved past being a stationery company into a design studio. Our new logo is a more sophisticated typographic lockup that can be used a variety of ways to convey our brand. The original letter forms were hand drawn and then vectorized into the current logo.

Included are some ways in which the logo is represented on the website, newsletter, our business card, packaging and more. As a small business owner, I have been very hands on throughout the branding process. I built our website through Big Cartel to help facilitate online transactions and showcase our portfolio. I also manage our Facebook and Instagram pages. All of which play an important part in the overall brand of Maple & Belmont.

For three years running I’ve designed the poster and social media assets for the Hermitage Handmade Festival which is an event that draws in a variety of makers to the Hermitage Museum and Gardens in Norfolk Virginia. The poster measures 11”x17” and then I create an Instagram image and Facebook cover image for the event.

This piece was created as a gift for a friend who wanted to celebrate his wife’s promotion as the Policy Director for Woman’s Advancement in Boston. A hammer seemed like the perfect object that would represent strength and resilience. The customer wanted the phrase “Smash the Patriarchy” on one side and I decided to pair it with “Shatter the Glass Ceiling” on the other. I first stripped the hammer of any markings and then used paint markers to apply the lettering.

I had the pleasure of painting a series of title murals for the MOCA in Virginia Beach. These titles lived in their ARTLab where people are invited to interact with activities that brings them closer to the current exhibits. There were seven titles in total, including the ARTLab entrance title. One of the aspects that I enjoyed about this project was working in a bright color palette and having free range with how I painted the titles. I pulled inspiration from the title and activity itself to craft each typographic piece. These were up from March through August of 2018.

This New Years Card for 2018 was a fun project for me to design and screen print. I styled a photo of me with my pug, Petunia and came up with the tagline “The Future is so Bright.” From there the other elements fell into place.

I cut out the shutter shades from white card stock and used the white brick wall in my studio as the backdrop. I had the cards printed up without the text so that I could screen print the lettering and pattern in neon coral.

To complete the card, I used vellum envelopes so that the recipient could get a sneak peek of the card’s design when they received it in the mail. When they opened it, large confetti spills out as a fun surprise along with a hand written note. I created 50 cards that were sent out to family, friends and a couple Maple and Belmont fans.

The design studio I started turned 5 years old last October, so I threw a party! The theme was brunch, lettering and cosmic vibes. I setup at the annex building at Toast and got Doughnut holes from Doughminion Donuts. Then for a couple hours, I did an open lettering class that folks could drop into. There were prizes drawn hourly and free buttons and prints.

I had a blast planning, executing and celebrating! From the promo balloon that I drew on in sharpie, to coaching my intern on how to execute the five crafted from balloons to the day of celebration going smoothly.

pro tem is a pop-up restaurant by Keith Hunt and Bridget Goeke that focuses on approachable, yet elegant tasting menus, using the freshest ingredients possible. pro tem is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase, pro tempore, meaning "for the time being”.

I designed this logo with another fellow designer, Derek Munn. When we took on designing the logo, we wanted the letterforms to be influenced by traditional Latin letterforms while also giving the logotype unique qualities of it’s own. The end product is a refined logotype with a stippled gradient inline.

I screen printed the logo onto a sandwich board that they provided and hand-painted the outline around the edge.

Out of necessity to find an inexpensive way to create prints after college, I turned to screen printing. With the help of a basic kit and video, I taught myself how to screen print so I could reproduce my designs. Through this relationship, I found a deep appreciation for print design and making something with my own two hands.

Ten years later I’m still using screen printing as a way to reproduce my work primarily for my design studio, Maple & Belmont. I have a studio space at Fawn Street Studios in Norfolk, Virginia. There I prep my screens for exposure and pull all of my prints by hand. This is a small collection of those prints, most of which I sell through my design studio Maple & Belmont.

Shortly after I started Maple & Belmont, I got requests from local shops to teach a Hand Lettering workshop. I had no experience teaching previously but after taking a look at my work flow and how I approach each project, I was able to assemble the bare bones of a lettering workshop. The more I teach, the more I refined my workshop. I pride myself on holding smaller classes where each student gets one-on-one time to guide their abilities and skills. I soon expanding my workshop to include Brush Lettering and Chalk Lettering. Here are a couple photos from over the past six years. I’ve always partnered with local businesses to provide these classes because I enjoy working with other small businesses and groups to pool our resources. Such partners include: Kitsch, MOCA in Va Beach, 1701, Birch, Maker’s Space, HIP in Newport News and TinTop. I truly enjoy connecting with each of my students and watching them pick up the techniques I’m teaching within the span of a two hour period.

As long as I’ve been running Maple & Belmont, I’ve been attending various juried events where I sell my products. These events require a lot of planning to prep for product inventory, booth displays and vending my table.

I attend a lot of local events in Hampton Roads, Richmond and I’ve even traveled as far as Greenville, South Carolina. Most only last for a day or two. I love that each event is unique and holds the challenge of setting up, being on your toes for last minute changes and most importantly connecting with people who share a passion for handmade products. It’s satisfying being able to converse with attendees and tell them about my process and how I go from the design phase to screen printing my work.

Some of the events I’ve attended:

Indie Craft Parade, Greenville, SC

Crafty Bastards, Washington, D.C.

Richmond Craft Mafia Events, Richmond, VA

Crafted, Norfolk, VA

Selden Market Pop-Up, Norfolk, VA

Hermitage Handmade, Norfolk, VA

Hand to Hand in Greensboro, NC

I’ve gotten the chance to work on several large scale lettering and illustration projects over the years. Here’s a sampling of some of my favorites. All of them had a good deal of sketching, planning and scheming to get them to their final place. Some of them have been done exclusively in chalk but for projects that need to be transported or have some other parameters, I’ve either painted them or used chalk markers which are semi permanent.

Red Chalk Studios is a creative agency in Virginia Beach that focuses on branding. During my time there, I worked on designing and producing a variety of print and digital deliverables for ongoing clients.

One of my favorite projects that I took lead on was the logo, branding and packaging design for The Aroma Therapy Shoppe. For the logo, the “AT” ligature was hand-drawn to create the balance that allows the rest of the logo to fall into place. I worked with the owners one-on-one to capture a fun but soothing vibe that they wanted to project throughout their product line.

Other clients that I worked continuously were Jim White Fitness & Nutrition Studios and askHRGreen. Here are samples of some of the production work I designed.

I was a designer and illustrator for Mr. Boddington’s Studio in New York City. I worked primarily on wedding invitation suites. I would work on a suite from start to finish. This included doing layouts, typographic treatments, map designs and illustrations. I had a blast being able to work with my hands to craft the quirky illustrations that were part of Mr. Boddington’s style. Here are a few of my favorite suites.

I also worked closely with a digital and letterpress printer to create the print-ready files. For letterpress we were trained extensively on file set-up for color separations.

Business card design for a glass artist, Dorinda Gayle. Dorinda was looking for a new identity that would capture the essence of her work. After attending a gallery opening, I learned that her work was often hung incorrectly. The irony was that no one (except Dorinda) knew unless they were told. "It wasn't the first time it's happened," she told me as she shrugged it off.

I wanted to create a mark that reflected the abstract quality of her work, and could also be viewed from multiple angles. The mark also conveys the transparent nature of glass with the overlapping layers of colors. Finally, the logo was printed with a spot UV coating on matte paper to further this idea of glass.

The contact information was presented so the viewer would be more likely to turn the card and experience the ambigrammatic quality of the logo. To take this concept one step further, the card was printed double-sided with one side rotated 180º. This gives the card no front, back, top or bottom. This ambiguity captures Dorinda Gayle's work completely.

This business card design won two awards in the 2009 AIGA Grade 5 competition: Judge's Choice Award and Best in Category for Logos, Icons & Stationery.

In the summer of 2014, Distinction Magazine published a feature article on my studio Maple & Belmont. This was back when my partner and I had started the company. Distinction is an award-winning lifestyle magazine from Virginia that features relevant people and places, and compelling stories and experiences from the region.

Not only did they do a seven page spread on us but they shot this really rad video that shows a time-lapse of the chalkboard we created for the article along with highlights from our interview.