A seasoned senior creative designer with two decades of experience collaborating with marketing professionals at all levels. I excel in design but also managing teams, finding myself as comfortable leading as I am working inside Adobe creative suite. Throughout my career, I've been a driving force behind successful brand and marketing campaigns, earning recognition through various awards. My true passion lies in crafting truly integrated campaigns across multiple channels. I specialize in bringing ideas to life across social, web, print, and video.
Create an event brand that works alongside the Thales brand that can be repurposed year after year with it’s own unique identity.
Results
Working with the inhouse design team, we created a new identity for the 2023 sales kick off and applied to 3 global events. It was applied to all visuals across the event ranging from app graphics, presentations, venue graphics to promotional. I pitched the design concepts and worked with multiple senior stakeholders and internal design team to bring the brand to life.
Here is a showreel i created on behalf of the production company, Dankner Pro to showcase the branding.
December 08, 2020, Tuesday
UX / UI audit and redesign
UX / UI
Role: UX / UI design
Thales required a refresh on one of their website templates for research landing pages. The brief was to give it a fresh new look and increase engagement. I looked at the performance on the page and performed a UX audit before creating a new design for the page.
Research
I identified 4 user personas that would access the site;
Understanding
The content suffered from ‘information overload’ and needed simplifying and organising in a way that would lead the customer through their journey in a structured way, leading them to the CTA. I started by making a list of observations on the page based on some stats from HotJar:
User Journey
I mapped out the existing user journey of the page to see where improvements could be made. It became clear that while the page initially had a clear journey, there were a lot of routes for the user to travel in about half way down and a lot of the routes sent the user away to another page or distracted from the main goal of the page. While the page tried to cater for all users that may have arrived in the right area, but not the report they wanted to see, it did not cater for the people who were actually in the right place.
The new design
A lot of the key data points were repeated in different ways on the existing design, adding noise and distraction for the user. In addition the other recommended assets also added distraction to the user, sometimes sending them away from the site and down a rabbit hole.
Below shows how the top animate on scroll banner works. It was possible to keep the file size for this to 0.9MB so the load time was not over a threshold defined by the web manager.
September 24, 2020, Thursday
GDPR Awareness Campaign
Campaign / Event
Role: Creative direction, Lead design
Brief
Generate awareness of the new GDPR regulations amongst IT decision makers, educate companies on how to become GDPR compliant and promote Gemalto solutions. I was tasked with the creative direction.
Results
The deliverables included branding a double decker bus. I developed the idea of using the EU flag on the bus design so people would make associations with Boris’ infamous Brexit bus and cause a media stir. The bus travelled the UK, visiting 9 locations on the way round, finishing at Europe’s largest cyber security show, Infosec Europe at Olympia.
Woekingnwith the social team, we came up with the hashtag #GetReadyForGDPR and made sure this was in huge letters on the side of the bus to drive people to the social campaign.
The campaign generated 250,000 Twitter impressions, and 200 appointments were booked throughout the 3 week period and several high profile sales were directly linked to the bus tour.
The campaign has been nominated for several awards, including best integrated campaign for the CIM awards, up for best integrated campaign for a large company at the DandAD awards and best vendor marketing campaign at the CRN awards.
November 20, 2019, Wednesday
Gemalto global sales kick-off
Campaign / Event
Role: Creative direction, Lead designer, Project management
The annual sales kick off is Gemalto’s biggest internal event, operating in 3 locations globally, around 1000 internal sales staff, execs and keynote speakers are invited. Working with the creative director, marketing communications director, field marketing director and event management team, I was respsonsible for the creative direction of the event.
Challenge
With multiple stakeholders across the business all with different ideas, managing expectations and having open communication was crucial.
The MoodBoard
I found this visual the most inspiring
The design could apply to any image as a template and encompass the event theme ‘transformation’ with Gemalto products as well as ‘transforming’ the sales peoples mindset. It was a visual play on transforming the object that you see in the image, and it could be applied to any industry, just as Gemalto encryption and authentication products can be applied to any industry as layer of digital protection.
The concept applied to a visual showing Gemalto products in the transport industry
Results
The branding was applied across App visuals, all event communications, microsote deisgn, presentation templates, venue signage and graphics, stage design, screen animations and video production.
June 18, 2017, Sunday
Product launch campaign design
Campaign
Role: Creative direction, Lead Design, Project Management
Gemalto needed a launch campaign for a product called SafeNet Trusted Access, an authentication application that enables enterprises to provide single-sign on to cloud applications.
Challenge
Creating a fresh new campaign under strict corporate brand guidelines meant that I would have to think creatively to get this campaign to stand out, yet fit in to the rest of the product portfolio. Working between product marketing, field marketing and corporate marketing, I managed the entire process of the project.
Initially i created a series of concepts, below is one of those concepts, which eventually led to the final design.
Here you can see the colour scheme and how it would apply to a background design element. This looks like an abstract element, but it represents the different cloud software applications that you will be able to access using a single password using the Gemalto technology. I like this because it looks like a cloud and the layers represent well the the different applications.
I developed some icons that could be applied to the imagery to help convey the advantages of the software.
Below shows how these elements can combine to a photograph of someone using the application For added impact for advertising, i cut out the people, making them appear completely on the circle abstract pattern background, to help it lift off the page.
campaign graphic design elements combined for concept
Results
After many iterations and testing on internal staff, the final concept was selected. The deliverables included a campaign microsite, this was used for display advertising, social and PPC. I also designed a suite of online banner ads to be used for affiliate advertising, email design and event promotional design as well as a brand book, so that other designers were able to work on future materials.
The brand guide included digital advertising. To make this stand out more, digital advertising used a darker, corporate purple background colour.
June 18, 2017, Sunday
A virtual reality experience to make Gemalto stand out from the crowd at high tech trade shows
Campaign / Interactive
Role: Creative direction, User experience, Project management
Gemalto; a company in the cyber security industry, wanted to attract attention from visitors at Europe’s largest cyber security event; Info security. Working with the UK Marketing Director, we came up with the idea of creating a custom virtual reality experience to maximise the buzz around the event booth.
Challenge
The main challenge was creating something that would be fun to play, but also relevant to the key messaging. To make this project a success, we needed to create a buzz around it in the industry and go viral.
Approach
After selecting a VR agency, we came up with a theme for the experience that was fun, engaging and had the wow factor as well as being related to the industry. I held regular update meetings with the agency to help steer the creative direction of the experience as well as the UX of the game flow, stepping in on occasion to create elements inside the experience myself.
During the development of the concepts, we decided to use a TRON look and feel which not only made the experience feel futuristic, it also helped with 3D processing, as the graphics could be quite simplistic, with no detailed textures bogging down processing speeds. This meant that it could run on a laptop, rather than a large, complicated Rig meaning we could make it go mobile and be easier to ship to different events.
The key objectives to this project were;
Will people have a better understanding of what Gemalto does?
Is it simple enough to play, with minimal instructions? (so language was not a barrier, and simple to pick up and play)
Is it exciting enough for people to socialise it?
Part of this project required buy in internally, so while the game was being developed, i created a teaser video to help sell the idea into the Sales teams and global marketing to create some excitement around it.
Results
I created a campaign in a box so that field marketing manager could easily take it and have a whole campaign ready to use to promote it at their events. The campaign consisted of a logo, Promotional flyers, email templates, online high score table, hashtag for social, microsite and brand guide. As well as this, we purchased 2 VR laptops and 2x Oculus rift headsets which could then be shipped out to the different regions to use it.
The experience was later brought to mobile so it could be downloaded from the app store and Google Play stores. A PR campaign was created, offering prizes to the top scores that were tweeted using the hashtag #GemaltoCyberHero.
I designed a google cardboard as a giveaway / direct mail piece so people could play the game on mobile using a google cardboard and, working with a web developer, created a microsite that would display the top scores which you can see below
Working with the UK Marketing manager, I filmed and prduced a customer event highlight video. I worked with the customers and sales team to secure interviews to make the video successful. I later created a follow up video with customer quotes which the company could use as customer testominals.
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Working with an account executive at Rapid7, I concepted an event design for the Softcat Partner Kick Off. I wanted to create something that pushed the Rapid7 brand guidelines so it stood out against all the other cyber security vendors at the event, but also promote the current incentive program (ski trip). Working with the content team, we came up with the line 'shred the threat and risk landscape'.
During a brainstorming session, I suggested instead of giving away SWAG, we could get sales people to interact with the brand and give them the opportunity to win swag by answering some multiple choice questions. This turned into a mini sales training test as I worked with the business development team and the regional CTO to devise questions on their knowledge of Rapid7 products and created a multiple choice quiz on a flyer.
Working closely with the Channel Sales Director and Marketing Director, I produced, filmed and edited a partner event highlight video which was used to promote the Thales partner program
Thales commissions research reports every year and required a new theme for the 2023 versions.
Challenge
The main challenge was that this year they were going to slice the data up to create multiple reports targeted at different industries (verticals) as well as different markets (authentication and encryption). Creating a template that would be easy for designers in the team to work with and also something that would work across different vertical markets and discuss different solution areas but look like they were from the same family of reports was the biggest challenge.
Approach
My first step was to look at any issues and feedback that was had from the previous years reports, and a common theme was that the report was harder to read online. The previous report was set up to be printed, but the reality was that most people just read it on their device. For this reason i removed the multiple column layout, increased the font size and also made sure any spreads (if printed) would also work as single pages. In addition to this the diagrams also became full width and easily editable within indesign, helping the production time faster.
There was also feedback that a lot of the images used in the previous reports were not diverse enough and it created a lot of back and forth when being reviewed by stakeholders, so the new design featured less photography, and more graphical elements.
Results
Research report cover design options
I developed a theme that would work across regions and verticals, based around using the corporate secondary colour palette and applying it to abstract characters that represented data. Using a different graphical approach to each cover distinguished it from the other. I also applied different background colours for the vertical reports, so instead of dark grey, a blue would be used for example.
Cover design
Inside spread showing contents pages and where sponsorship logos would be placed
Inside spread design showing how the key facts would be displayed in infographic format to keep the content lighter and more easily digested
Thales wanted a social media post for data privacy day. I was supplied the copy as bullet points and produce the post below, intended to be displayed as cards on the Linkedin feed that you swipe through.
Working with the Thales social media manager, I created a simple interactive game where the user had to catch a screenshot of the data inside the lock. This proved to be the most viewed social post by Thales in 2021 so far with 44 comments, 100 likes and over 3000 views
Gemalto approached me to create an infographic to highlight key stats from a consumer research report they had run. The project included laying out a report and an infographic. The research focused on security of IOT connected devices and the public perception of that.
I worked directly with the PR manager on producing concepts and advised on how many points should be displayed and revising content to make the piece work better as an infograohic and below is the final piece.
Creating awareness of a new A3 colour laser printer to the the creative industry. Konica Minolta genuinely had the best quality A3 printer in the industry and needed to get the message out there. They approached me to create an advert for Mac World, Mac User, Computer Arts and Creative Review to help raise awareness. I came up with several concepts, each focusing on different USPs of the printer, but the the selected concept focused on its ability to print to the edge without a border. The advert generated a lot of interest and the company received great feedback from the target audience as a result of this advert.
Konica Minolta required an co-branded print advert for a trade magazine which was co-funded by the partner and Konica Minolta. The advert copy was initially supplied to me and i visualised several concepts and came up with a new headline for the advert. The selected concept can be seen below.
I designed a report showing the results from a global research piece aimed at the retail industry. I created infographic elements to make the complex data easier to digest and more interesting to digest and used imagery related to retail to make it more relatable to the target market. in addition to careful colour selection to make it an easy to read document.
My role: Art direction, designer
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