Sketchbook, Inc.

I was hired by The Creative Company to redefine the branding for Linfield College in McMinnville. Creative Company at the time had no creative lead, so I basically directed myself regarding creative approach. CC provided me some historical background, photos, and a lot of research which was gathered through focus groups and surveys which were conducted with current students, potential students, as well as faculty.

The overriding goal of this project was to create a vibrant, contemporary and energetic face for the college. Linfield has a lot of history, and the collateral which the college produced in the past had been very conservative/dry. They were looking to attract more students, and this new Identity hit the mark. Results from the project can be found at the Creative Company’s website. They also won several awards for the Linfield work.

A while back Nike hired me to work with Ziba Design to render out some concepts for a new store concept. My contact at Nike was Paul Loux and my contact at Ziba was Jonathon Irick. The renderings turned out ok despite not having VRay at the time.

During my stint as senior AD at ZCom, I re-designed the corporate identity while the company was going through some major changes. On my first day as an employee, the company was purchased by Emerald Solutions, a giant interactive company which was on track to going public. So It was almost like starting a new job with 2 separate companies in the same day.

Emerald was a technology company. An engineering company really. ZCom was a small, creative-driven web design firm. This created a number of problems, however the biggest for ZCom was the loss of our identity. As part of the acquisition, ZCom changed names to Emerald Interactive. This new name plus the fact that the .com bubble had begun to burst resulted in our work suddenly disappearing. It wasn’t even clear how to position ourselves any longer.

So we decided to re-brand the company and to change our name back to ZCom, while still remaining under the Emerald umbrella.

As part of the discovery phase on this project we identified several key visuals which were important to our brand. Some of these included our Portland location, our studio space, architecture, industrial design, some key words, and a somewhat edgy, non-corporate look and feel.

Chris Miller our CD researched dozens of sites which we liked for one reason or another, and after discussing potential directions I produced 4 styleboards which we presented to the ZCom owners Dennis Hahn (now owner at ID branding) and Sharon Peterson.

The decision was made to work from the board on the right, and while I started on the print collateral Elmer Bancud, one of the other AD’s worked on the website design. Chris made sure we both stayed on course and both the print collateral and the site turned out really really nice in the end.

Here’s a project I worked on in my first stint in Nike Brand Design.
Style wise, this marketing book was pretty wide open and the product focus was to be a new line of sun/surf apparel which Nike had not tapped into yet.


As you can see the overall style is warm and pulls lots of inspiration from the vibrant colors of Miami Beach. I used an illustrative look which I felt helped convey the sandy warm feeling and flowing, wavy organic graphics atop to give everything movement.

This store is massive from a real world and 3d perspective. When working on 3d stores, it’s always a challenge to render a store out with as much product as this has, let alone work on it. The polygon count is enormous. This being the case, I planned to render this store using Vray, which was not available for Cinema 4d at the time. Vray is arguable the best render engine for architectural renderings.
I hired a 3ds max contractor and we began converting a massive amount of files from c4d to max. This process took quite a while.

As with most retail projects, my role is to model, light and texture scenes, position cameras, as well as providing initial merchandising. Visual merchandisers are often hard to find on a project until the project is almost finished, so typically once I am given rough direction as to which categories go where, I usually will toss together all the merchandising, and then run this past the VM’s. It’s just faster this way – especially on a store this size. Occasionally a VM is available at the beginning of a project, and some are very specific while other are quite vague. Totally depends in who I work with.

Here is one of many 3d renderings I created for Pop Art which were used by LP Corp. The idea here was to show a warm attic in the dead of winter due to the roll-on TechShield Product. I also created some 3d animations of the installation and use of this product. This was rendered with VRay.