Behind the Glass is a 25-year-old icon Auburn boutique. After 25 years of hard work, it was time for a brand face-lift. First off was a logo re-design, one that says sophisticated, yet funky. Then we designed the bags and clothing tags. Print date is in later December so after prints are in, I will upload photos.

Over 60 tornadoes ripped through northern Alabama in the Spring of 2011 and were followed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Agency (FEMA) being deployed to assist in Long-Term Community Recovery. As part of the long-term recovery process, city planners were brought in to assist the damaged communities in rebuilding in ways that best optimize the community’s desires and resources. I was contracted, along with one other designer, to combine the photos, plan information, and city plan drawings into comprehensive plan books for nine communities in very short order. Below is a sampling of pages from Hackleburg, Alabama’s book:

Faunhouse is a newly-opened boutique in Auburn, Alabama hosting a beautiful array of products from North American designers, much of it hand-made, and DIY workshops are offered weekly.

I often do work for a local non-profit, The Gnu Arts, housed at a local coffee shop, The Gnu’s Room. They have concerts, poetry readings, and the whole gamut of cultural events.

Cover to a brochure book that is waiting to go to print. More photos when I have a printed copy.

While living in Spain from October 2010-May 2011, and traveling around for a month afterward, I was extremely blessed to get to rove with the end of meeting people, better understanding culture, seeing historical sites and art history, observing things around me and making good documentation of it all. See blog extensive posts for photos details of each leg of the journey.

When asked “What is the one piece of advice you would offer to a young, aspiring…designer?”, interior designer India Hicks, replied:
“For a young designer I would say, explore. Travel fuels ideas. Witness the trappings of another life; look for the tradition and beauty within it. Document each trip and all of the details, whether an upholstery fabric or a roof-tile pattern, a wooden fretwork balustrade or an old painted sign. These will one day inspire your work. My father’s famous tablescapes got much of their energy and interest from mixing poor and rich objects, and many of the poor had been collected by him on his travels. As a designer, you should always be looking, looking, looking.” (From Design*Sponge)

Indeed, that’s what I did.

Here is a little sampling of the many sketchbooks that came home filled with inspiration to draw from for a long time:

I lived in Ponteareas, Galicia, Spain for the 2010-11 school year teaching English with a program offered through the Spanish government. My job was to assist in an English classroom at an elementary school, helping prepare lesson plans, activities to teach cultural aspects of English speaking countries, holiday activities, and presentations. A friend mentioned to me that it’s design because it’s communicating the old school way: in a classroom in front of a board.

This also allowed for time to be immersed in a different culture, further practice Spanish, fill sketchbooks with observations and documentations of new styles, ways of life and design sensibilities. See blog posts for further documentations from the journey, especially this one.

My role:

Graphic designer, small business workshop planner, co-director of design space.

Main idea:
DESIGN IS ABOUT PEOPLE.

Tasks:
Worked collaboratively with other designers to design any print/web materials needed for PieLab, made collateral to sell in-store, planned fundraising events, organized community-building events, brought in speakers to lead business workshops, aided local business owners in business plan writing, communicated with press.

Large aspect:

Wrote and received a $12,000 Design Ignites Change Grant from Worldstudio to work with local YouthBuild students (a national program high school dropouts to receive job training) to take pecans, an abundant local resource, and turn it into a pecan butter and brittle, profit-making product. This allowed us to teach them how to utilize local assets, the power of branding, how design works, aspects of marketing, how to communicate with customers, business math, filling internet orders, and shipping. The whole experience was a mutual exchange of learning, as hearing there stories taught me a lot of life lessons in return.

Skills:
Coming in as an outsider to build relationships and trust to gather stories and turn all of these stories and engagement into initiatives; networking, organizing, motivating, adjusting vocabulary and mentality to understand and communicate that it is all a “WE” thing, not an “I do for YOU” kind of thing (as a friend put it, “with, not for”).

Perk:
Through our connection with a University of Alabama student we were invited to be on a panel at a Kettering Foundation Conference centered the question: “How do we strengthen citizen engagement and community problem solving?” We were in the round-table discussion: “Stranger in a Strange Land”-how to come in as an outsider and do anything in a new place? This event was formative in my design-thinking philosophy development. See my post-event blog for further elaborated thoughts.

The story:
PieLab was (it still exists in a slightly different form) an experimental pie shop combined with a design studio in Greensboro, AL (population 2,700). Newly graduated in December of 2008, I spent the spring looking for an opportunity to use design for something that was people focused. Via a shot-in-the-dark email, I connected with a designer moving to Greensboro to work with Project M/PieLab. After spending a weekend there I was hooked. My southern instincts told me that it’s not okay to show up to something empty handed. Ergo, I had made some cookies and brownies. Who knew baking could open so many doors? They asked if I liked to bake which was followed by a “Could you come bake for us and hang out as a designer?” My initial role there for two months one summer was simply baking pies and working as a freelancer from the space. It was a dream summer of slow southern hot days baking, working, floating in the river, finding new ways to use the crops local farmers brought us, and getting a deeper sense of culture. I left for Nashville to find a paying job that fall, but returned the next January as soon as a grant was able to hire some of us. I returned in January to crank out six months of hard work until the grant ended. This has given me a huge notch in my belt of a well-rounded experience. I experimented, networked with people doing similar things, asked hard questioned, sculpted more of my design ideology and philosophy.
Part of the networking included a road trip taken with Amanda Buck and Megan Deal. Read more about the trip here.

The beauty of being in a small town with only a handful of your peers who are all creatives as well is that there is time to experiment and create-even random things like our awesome garden we planted. Long dinners with each other were the heart of the experience where conversations centered around design’s role in society, the changing direction of design, the emergent importance of design thinking, what is our calling as designers, etc, all found form over homemade pizza and wine. Dance parties often materialized.

PieLab Videos:

http://vimeo.com/7044555

http://vimeo.com/9386150

PieLab Links:

Bon Appetit Article
Garden & Gun Article
Fast Company Article
Fast Company Article about James Beard Nomination
NY Times Article
Southern Living Article
Pecans! Grant
Pecans! Article
Pecans! is soon to be included in this book.

Photo credits from above: Interior photo by Brian Jones, Bags/postcards by Dan Gavin and/or Amanda Buck

My role:
Graphic designer

Skills:
Branding, communication, marketing, educating company employees in offices across the nation on how the new brand should be used, updating Healthcare Realty’s methods of communicating within the company and approach towards communicating messages to clients, assisting in copyrwring, high level of professionalism, speedy attentiveness to needs from the offices around the country.

The story:
Healthcare Realty had just been rebranded by Pentagram in Austin when I came on board. They needed someone to distribute their new brand identity onto all printed and web material, and in addition use to to further develop new marketing materials. It was a fantastic opportunity to see what an in-house design position looks like and what all is involved in implementing a new look. I worked with the marketing vice president to develop brochure designs, signage, revised versions of business cards and stationery, a new website and subsequent property-specific ones, property information booklets, and a new company information book. There were moments to take good note of what happens when a designed identity is handed off from a design studio to an in-house designer.

After my initial few months at Healthcare Realty being in-house, I moved back to pursue more of my dream at PieLab. However, I was able to continue working for Healthcare Realty under a wonderful set-up as a contracted designer through September 2010 when I moved to Spain.

Extras/Freelance:
During this time spent in Nashville I was an active member of the Nashville AIGA and helped start a book group that met to discuss design literature. I also attending other weekly/monthly networking events where I received further marketing education and exposure to other areas of technology. I freelanced for Gradient Overlay on several projects. I also worked with Ethos3, a presentation design company working on the front-lines of innovating presentation design and methods.

Forte is Kate Kirby’s new nutrition consulting company for which we worked together to develop a logo. The mark conveys strength through  it’s curves that suggest muscle, motivation by its reference to an exclamation mark, and nutrition indicated by it’s spoon shape.

Spero is a company set up with a one-to-one plan: for every soccer ball bought, they send one to a child in need.  “Soccer offers a platform to pursue education or even a career. Through a partner network, we can distribute our soccer balls to organizations using soccer to change lives.”

Abroader Look was my senior project for which I received the highest award of A Commended.

Idea:
Abroader Look is a company whose primary goal is to provide resources for people traveling to Europe on a deeper level than just breezing through popular monuments. Its main method products are books on various cities throughout Europe that focus more on the culture of each place instead of simply maps and lists of train times. They include interviews with locals, descriptions of the music and art scene, specifics of culinary culture, and quirky tidbits of history.

Learning about the Bauhaus and their philosophies, ideologies, work methods, etc. always interests me. When I was traveling through Germany I got to see several art exhibits that included work by Bauhaus affiliates and some of their buildings. What I especially loved seeing was an exhibit in Cologne with pages and pages of point/line/plane sketches by Bauhaus artists. Seeing early sketches of some of the ideas from which most modern day design teaching methods and curriculum are derived was very powerful and inspiring.

Auburn University’s College of Architecture Design and Construction started a new Masters in Real Estate Development. I worked with some of their faculty to develop a website to attract students and communicate the program’s goals.

We also designed a half page ad for a national architecture magazine

Zdenko Krtic is a local artist who works in mixed media making exquisitely lovely paintings. I worked with him on his site so he could have a platform to display all of his works and artist statement.

I attended Auburn University and loved my time there. The atmosphere of a large university brings lots of variety and a well-rounded education in many subjects. I was able to explore more than just design and participate in many extracurricular activities. The Graphic Design Department hosts a slue of fantastic professors and I greatly value my time spent in classes there. The camaraderie of late nights in studios with peers and the engaging discussions during design critiques all contributed to a formative design education.

Here are some miscellaneous tidbits of other projects not displayed elsewhere in the site:

Atlas jar (like the quintessential southern Mason jar) illustration for some stationery.

Apron sewn at PieLab:

Cake that I made the fondant type on for the reception of my school’s senior project: