Graphic Design & Creative Direction
Design that has to work on a screen, on a street, and on a body.
Most of my design work lives inside campaigns — a festival with a week of events, a weekly broadcast, a holiday program with an immovable date. That means the job is rarely a single artifact. It is a system: something that holds together across a flyer, a banner, a T-shirt, a broadcast frame, and a record sleeve, and still reads as one idea. In each of the three campaigns below, the design brief was the second question. The first was working out what the thing needed to be.
Click any of those to jump straight to the campaign behind it — or keep scrolling for all three, with the artwork attached.
Hotter Than July 2026 — Festival Campaign Identity
Creative Direction · Campaign Concept · Design — LGBT Detroit
The brief
Hotter Than July is Detroit’s Black Pride festival and one of the longest-running in the country. Its logo is a permanent registered mark — but each year a new theme lockup is set in front of it, and that theme becomes the campaign. Past years have run “Thank God It’s…” and a 30th anniversary treatment. For 2026, the committee needed a direction.
The idea
I proposed “You/We Are Hotter Than July” — a turn away from the event and toward the people who make it. The committee adopted it as the year’s name.
The theme then dictated the method. Rather than illustrate community, we asked the community to supply it: people sent in their own photographs and memories from past festivals, and I built the identity’s texture from that archive. Every flyer, the parade banner, and the apparel are printed on a mosaic of the audience’s own images. You is the community, we is the organization, and the artwork is literally made of both.
The palette decision
The previous year ran red, green, and black. I liked it, but read it as too martial for the tone this year needed — the festival was programmed against the noise of America’s 250th anniversary, and the answer to that noise was warmth, not confrontation. Adding yellow kept the work rooted in Black diasporic color while lifting the mood, and the red-to-green gradient became the through-line across every surface.
Art direction past the deliverable
For the Motor City Pride parade I bought red, yellow, and green smoke and handed it out along the line. When the photographs came back, the smoke matched the shirts, which matched the banner, which matched the flyers. The palette did not stop at the edge of the artwork — it carried into the air around it, so every image that left the parade was already on brand.
The system
One grammar, many registers: a diagonal split with a double-stripe rule, event photography washed into the palette, the theme lockup riding the mosaic panel. It had to carry a candlelight vigil and a bar crawl in the same week without either feeling wrong — and it had to survive the jump from a 16:9 flyer to a parade banner to a shirt.
● Four events, four registers — a vigil, a worship service, a bar crawl, and a political forum — running one visual system.
● The campaign also ran as motion. Click here to watch the parade recruitment spot →
LGBT Detroit Live — Broadcast Graphics System
Design · Weekly Broadcast Identity — LGBT Detroit
The brief
A weekly livestream needs a new promotional graphic every single week — new guest, new topic, new date, four platforms. Built one at a time, that is a design job with no end. Built as a system, it is fifteen minutes.
The chassis
I designed the show’s promo frame around a fixed set of positions: the marquee logo anchoring the lower left, the episode question in a centered bar, the guest portrait right, and the livestream date stacked above the four-platform watch block. Guest photography is duotoned into the show’s orange and purple so that headshots, press photos, and phone snapshots all arrive looking like they belong to the same broadcast.
What stays fixed is what makes the show recognizable in a feed. What moves is everything else.
Where it flexes
The upper-left panel is the variable. It becomes festival artwork for a Hotter Than July special, campaign iconography for the Pride Decides election series, or topic art for a standard episode — and the show never stops looking like itself.
One ecosystem
The Hotter Than July specials are where the two systems meet on purpose. I went out and booked the artists performing on the festival stage onto the show, then designed the episode graphics to carry the festival with them: the Hotter Than July mark sits in the frame, the red and green campaign theming runs through the panel, and the promotion for the broadcast doubles as promotion for the festival.
One of those promos uses a performance photograph I shot at the previous year’s festival — the same instinct behind the campaign mosaic above. The festival feeds the show, the show feeds the festival, and the artwork is built from the community’s own record of itself.
● The election series: one sub-brand, a season of candidates, no redesign between episodes.
● Festival artists, booked onto the show and framed in the festival’s own identity — one campaign running through two systems at once.
The system in motion
The frame does not stay still. Every guest gets a custom animated intro built from the same system — their photograph, their moniker, the show’s marquee — produced fresh each week and reused as the lead-in for the episode’s recap Short.
This one carries two guests at once: two unrelated source photographs, two different lighting situations, seated at equal weight inside the same frame. That is the case the duotone was built for, and it is easier to see in motion than to argue in a caption.
The conversation is about the cancellation of Starfleet Academy and why a story does not have to be universally relatable to be worth telling — a reasonable thing for a broadcast to be discussing over graphics designed so that no guest arrives looking like a lesser guest.
The Voices of Christmas 2020 — Program Identity & Release Package
Design · Creative Direction · Executive Production — Historic Little Rock Baptist Church
The brief
A Christmas concert with a runway in front of it. Four soloists, four music videos, one released each week through December, building to a live service on Christmas. The videos were the promotion. The concert was the event. The identity was designed for that shape.
What the design had to survive
The concert could not happen. Nobody could be in the room.
So the four videos were stitched together with a connecting story and a segment recorded with the children’s ministry, and the material built to advertise the concert became the concert. The identity followed it there — the same treatment now had to hold a program it was never designed for.
Getting there
The recording ran from late summer into the fall, one voice at a time, separately, months before any of it would be heard. Scheduling ten people into a studio around a holiday was the work before the work — and it happened while every assumption about the December it was pointed at kept changing underneath it.
The part that was not design
I had never put music on a streaming platform before this project. Distribution, metadata, artwork specification, release timing — I learned all of it while the recordings were still coming in, because an identity that stops at the edge of the artwork is not finished. The EP was live across every platform in that promotion before the first video went out.
One treatment, three formats
A snowflake border, a purple field, a photograph of the church, gold beveled script. It had to read as a broadcast title on a widescreen stream, as cover art in a square, and as a promotional card in a feed — the same identity in three shapes with three different lifespans.
The music videos were supposed to advertise the concert. Instead the videos became the concert, and the concert became the advertisement for the album.
● The program itself lives on the video page. Click here to watch The Voices of Christmas 2020 →
None of this started as a design brief.
A festival needed a direction for the year. A weekly show needed to stop rebuilding itself every Friday. A Christmas program lost the room it was written for. In each case the design job was the second question — the first was figuring out what the thing actually needed to be.
That is the work I want more of: campaigns where the identity has to hold across a screen, a street, and a body, and where somebody has to decide what it is before anybody can make it.