Bonus Portfolio

I mostly work with video and motion graphics, but I also have an extensive background in graphic and UX design.

This page provides an overview of the more interesting or diverse examples of my design work in any medium, both old and new.

Design Style

I frequently collaborate, but what about when I need to come up with a design independently? Here are some examples to help convey my general style…

Fever Dreams Sleep Hygiene Comix modified illustration for Sleep Foundation video — End "hero" board for the *Defining DAS* video for a **Cisco Outshift** Internet of Cognition (IoC) Glossary Series, featuring a voxel-like animated halftone applied to stock imagery floating over a particle system composited over stock video. This board is composited from working animation, but the project was cancelled before production completed.

Poster for the independent feature documentary What The Hell Happened written and directed by Matt Wilkins and Eliza Fox. An oversized stack of five VHS video cassettes sits on a road that dissapears into a rural landscape. Each VHS tape features a tiny taped on cut out photo and some handwritten text. The top of the stack features a man named Tim, with handwritten details saying he's 22, works at McDonalds, lives in a trailer, and has a BA in math. — Video poster for indie documentary **What The Hell Happened** that also demonstrates my digital photo collage chops. I created 16 minutes of original animation for the documentary that drove the style for this poster.

First I designed the “hero” VHS stack, my solution to featuring the five subjects in the context of the documentary being born from archival late-nineties VHS interviews. VHS cassettes have a cultural connection to DIY audio cassette mix-tape label aesthetics. I ran-with-that because it this allowed me to riff on each personality featured in the film with different handwriting and visual styles that hint at key moments in the story.

There are over twelve different versions and sizes of this poster created for different film festivals, digital streaming service branding, promo stickers, and-so-on.

I'm an advocate for creating clear, comprehensive brand documentation — however, good documentation takes time and may not be in scope. Plus top-level brand guides are overkill in some situations.
The above is an example of a quick style guide/design spec reference for a webinar series design package that used both motion-graphics and static assets I designed. This isn't pretty or refined but was a great way to *quickly* communicate core design principles within a mini-design system.

Retro-themed campaign design because even when this was produced depositing checks in person was definitely a retro activity. I was inspired by photos of seventies vans with racing stripes!

Call-to-action button design for centered layouts — The call-to-action buttons I designed for this campaign are a personal favorite.

Call-to-action button design for left or right aligned layouts — The call-to-action buttons I designed for this campaign are a personal favorite.

***“You really should show the design you did for your wedding in your portfolio”***

A long time ago I shot, edited, and animated a stylized video-based invitation and other branded materials for my wedding. The invitation was sent out as a custom DVD with custom packaging, RVSP card, and other materials. The video featured candid interviews with friends (who were also working actors) and featured original art and motion graphics I created.

Above is some of the packaging, a title still, and some of the print pieces I made. Doing this was one way I could get more involved and make my wedding more personal.

3D

I've worked in many 3D software applications over-the-years. I love having unprecedented control of scenes as an infinite creative canvas.

I've mostly worked with Maxon's Cinema 4D, but I also use Blender, along with many specialized 3D or CAD tools that fill-the-gaps.

I like to use 3D as a means of custom illustration or stylized looks but if necessary I also work with photorealism. I'm definitely a 3D "generalist" having touched on everything from modeling, custom shader design, to lighting (HDRI or "manually").

Stylized render featuring a customized model with branded shaders.

Example 3D renderered product prototypes for Aquagenie Corporation. — Examples of product prototype renders for a startup. I converted, textured, and lit these from the product designer's CAD source.

**There's more:** Here's how the above renders appear in a pitch deck slide I also re-designed (view original slide in new window).

I directed and animated a spot featuring this robot mascot. These are various renders with matching props for the associated print and online media launch campaign. The brand has a strong white-on-white look-and-feel which makes lighting and compositing more complex. The shaders I created are based on the reflectivity of car paint.

**3D for stylized output:** I designed this scene to be post-processed with a custom brand-specific watercolor treatment for this animation. I modeled and textured the school bus from scratch using loft splines and booleans because stock models were *too* realistic for this execution.

Retail Design

I created original illustration, design, and layout for the following retail spaces. I also did all the production work and created visual documentation for dimensional assembly prior to handing files over to large-format print vendors for fabrication. Additional direction, copywriting, and interior design were handled by the fine folks at Strum Agency when I worked there.

Re:Think Banking

This tiny retail financial branch was concepted, designed, and produced under a tight three-week timeline that included getting all materials printed and fabricated at external vendors. Working with an interior designer and architectural firm I designed the artwork/illustration exactly for the space.

During the design and production phase the architectural plan changed several times, which required making the artwork/illustration as a modular series of parts that allowed for shifting dimensions and orientations.

Elevation of the complete wraparound wallpaper design, including mocked-up plexiglass standoff panels.

**Showing my work:** here's an alternate wallpaper design I explored in the concept phase. I generated the background art from photographs of local geology using various vectorization techniques.

A variation of the "head" art used for the backlit ATM header.

Hollywood Type

I designed this retail merchandising program for a Hollywood-based financial institution that serves movie and television industry professionals.

Most of the weights in the Franklin Gothic typeface family were used for copy-heavy displays printed on translucent acrylic — the most kerning I've ever done on a single project.

Type-driven dimensional hanging double-sided retail window display.

Behind-the-Scenes Anecdote

Due to its unique stunt context, the stock photo of the car is an expensive rights-managed asset. Ironically I had to significantly retouch the photo, removing much of what made it so expensive.

Original licensed stock photo — Type-driven dimensional hanging double-sided retail window display.

Behind-the-Scenes Anecdote

Due to its unique stunt context, the stock photo of the car is an expensive rights-managed asset. Ironically I had to significantly retouch the photo, removing much of what made it so expensive.

Type-driven design for Retail signage and displays.

Custom themed artwork for retail greeter, intentionally riffing on a certain famous Hollywood landmark that doesn't allow rights for reproduction. The dimensional lettering is manufactured from proportionally rendered 3D paths and the background artwork was built from a composite of 3D rendered hillside and custom textures.

Web / UX / Front-End Design

Though I've been focused on design, video, and animation since I was a kid, along-the-way I picked up HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. My web design and development experience has come up in more non-web projects than I could have ever imagined.

Web Site Re-brand: Same Markup, New Coat of Paint

This web site re-brand was done without altering the existing HTML markup generated by the existing content management system.

I reverse-engineered and re-wrote the site's Cascading Stylesheet to apply more than just a new coat of paint; This is an efficient and often underused method for designing for any web site. It took roughly three working days to fully adapt the rebranded design guidelines to a working CSS prototype.

It should be noted that this was a transitional design to accommodate a re-branding while the site's CMS markup was properly adapted for a "mobile-first" re-write.

Move the slider below to compare the rebranded CSS "skin" with the original.

Five page web design recommenation I wrote and designed — **Documentation is important:** Once the design was approved I wrote and designed a five-page site-specific brand guideline to accompany the updated CSS hand-off to site developers.

Branded Inbox Automation

Onboarding email series I designed and coded for a small financial client. The whole series is built on top of a fully responsive HTML email framework I customized for client use in Campaign Monitor's CMS.

The client was able to drag and drop custom branded layout modules as needed, make content edits or add new copy, and populate specific regions with content arrays linked to live recipient segment data. The entire series was automated to trigger whenever a new customer was onboarded and opted in to receive feature-based emails.

I designed these to match the client's existing brand while bringing a little something new, especially with the abundance of content making these "busy".

I adapted an existing icon library to generate new original icons for this series — financial-industry themes are not well-represented with stock icon libraries; It's a common necessity to create new illustrations to match an existing series.

Album Cover Illustration & Design

I created most of these from concept-to-design, in some cases including design of the physical packaging. These feature a varied mix of original illustration, photography, or digital artwork — while others utilize appropriated imagery from the public domain.

The Wig Out - Motorboater single cover artwork

The Wig Out - Sounds Like Fun cover artwork

The Wig Out - Keep Your Joy A Secret cover artwork

The HooKHeaD Project - Hasty Philosophies cover art

The HooKHeaD Project - Fortune Smiled, My Dream Complete cover art

Thanks for taking a look at some of my work!

Email Eric