The assignment.

Ruth’s Chris hosts a series of national wine paring dinners that happen on the same night across the country at most of the Ruth’s restaurants. Each paring features an off-menu five-course dinner, paired with a different wine from top wineries. The assignment was to name and brand the series.

The approach.

We created the name and logo for the series: Ruth’s TasteMaker Dinners, and the tagline: “Be bold. Be innovative. Be a TasteMaker.” The overall look was to remain faithful to the Ruth’s brand, while telling the story of craftsmanship and innovation with a more contemporary feel.

The assignment.

A re-brand and new campaign for family-owned ABC Fine Wine & Spirits in 2015.

The approach.

The project started with a revised logo and a new brand standards guide and a revised in-store graphic look, followed by a new campaign theme "Always Be Celebrating" (A-B-C) which set the tone for everything. The idea was not to think and talk like a retail beer, fine wine & spirits store, but to become people's neighborhood celebration store. From silly little things that make you smile, too big family occasions and important holidays, there’s always something to celebrate. And every celebration starts at your neighborhood ABC. Competition was tough from Total Wine so the idea was to bring a more lifestyle feeling to the work to stand out from the competitors largely retail/price driven approach. So visually & verbally the focus was on celebration and how ABC was there to help make that great for you.

Nemours Children's Hospital is located in Delaware and Florida. The overall campaign is "Your child, our promise." With a lot of hospital advertising is dark and scary. The focus was on kids being kids and a more positive, hopeful picture.

The brand.

Joon provides custom phone solutions and service for businesses. Hardware, and mobile apps using state of the art cloud technology and a more personalized service for their clients than what you would get from big box companies and the ability to work from anywhere.

The approach.

After a brand revise and tightening up the work so it was more consistent, we created 2 campaigns to A/B test. The first campaign “The World Is Your Office.” was based on the Joon tagline and was solutions that spoke to the new landscape of remote working. It works as a brand reenforcement campaign. The second campaign was “Ri” or “Real Intelligence” that used the tagline “Not artificial intelligence. Real intelligence.” to promote one of the brands strengths which was being a smaller company. with a more personal approach. If you had a tech issue, you would talk to real people that work at Joon, rather than a call center that you would encounter with a larger company. If needed, you might actually find yourself talking to the same engineers that wrote the code. So the campaign reenforced that “partnership” approach to client service. Each campaign had its own social & digital media creative that while slightly different still felt like the same brand, each leading to the that campaigns landing page with paths to the main website.

The assignment.

Create a campaign targeting 50 A-list event planners in six cities to showcase the new updated Rosen brand and new facilities.

The approach.

Crafted a Mission Impossible-style event campaign called “Rosen Revealed,” which, at the center of the campaign, featured a virtual reality tour of the updated facilities. The campaign consisted of interactive direct mail brochure and an invitation, a VR experience, upscale swag, secret meeting locations, audio/video and a microsite. It was a huge success with meeting planners and a 120% return on investment.

The assignment.

Mukul Resort is a super-luxury boutique resort on the unspoiled shores of Nicaragua's Emerald Coast. The resort features luxury tree houses and was carefully built to ecologically integrate into the into the local environment. The assignment was to promote the resort pre-opening.

The approach.

Since most of the campaign was to run pre-opening, the early ads were designed to be intriguing and played up the natural beauty and atypical design of the resort with minimal copy. Just like how the resort was constructed to be in harmony with the environment, the ads are designed so that the copy is on a piece of paper laying on top of a full bleed location photo like a tag.

The assignment.

Create a logo and campaign for the pre-opening of a modern urban real estate development in Midtown Nashville that incorporates apartments, condos, shops and eateries.

The approach.

The initial pre-opening campaign was a couple ads that ran locally. These were to bring attention to the Midtown area where Aertson Midtown was being built. They consisted of doodle books from locals who casually mention the things going on around them in midtown.

The post-opening campaign was to be real stories from residents and their life in Midtown with the Aertson Midtown brand look and feel.

Platt 99 is an ultra-modern, cutting edge mixology lounge located in downtown Indianapolis inside The Alexander. Artist Jorge Pardo created 99 blown-glass pendant lamps above the lounge and 20 lamps above the staircase as well as working with designers on the interior space. Everything from the menu and cocktail napkins to the design of promotional materials were created to perfectly blend in with the style of the lounge.

The assignment.

spaceflorida.gov asked us to do some high level “blue sky” concepts for space tourism. Their mission was: “To make Florida a place for space” and attract future commercial space flight operations to the state. So we had to come up with a brand name for a future company and high level campaign ideas.

The work.

We had very little to work with visually at that time, so we used Virgins ships for comp purposes and came up with a potential campaign for the “Mercury X-Plore” that would be geared toward a very high end, aspirational and thrill seeking clientele.

The thinking.

Settling on 3 concepts that made a well rounded campaign, touching on all the key highlights. I created a look for that campaign that emphasized the vastness of space with very understated copy in smaller than usual pt. sizes and a scale graphic on the left of the ads that depicted how many Km above the earth you would actually be. We presented the idea that a trip to space would be right up there with some of earths greatest challenges like Everest or the Dakkar Ralley. We worked into the copy the weightlessness, which is always an intriguing thing, We actually worked the cost of a trip into the ad in a way that makes it seem like it’s totally worth it for the view you would get.

Everglades is a high-end sport fishing boat manufacturer. The company needed a look and feel that reflected brand superiority in its category. The branding needed to be every bit as well crafted as the boats themselves, and the photography needed to have a style that set them apart from all the other manufacturers.

Huckins Yachts is an 85-year-old custom yacht manufacturer. They built PT boats for the Navy during World War II, and in their long history only created around 300 yachts. A perspective owner can look back through the Huckins designs from the last 85 years and pick what was once a wood hull design, and have the design reproduced in fiberglass with jet drives. Nearly all of the yachts they built are still accounted for and many are passed down within a family. This explains the company’s longstanding tag line: “One at a time. One of a kind.”

The campaign had to be flexible so different aspects of the brand could all be explored and tied back to the brand tag line. Verbally the work needed to be independent and intelligent. Visually the work needed to reflect a combination of classic craftsmanship and, of course, style. The photography needed to be more than just the same three quarter running shot that every other yacht manufacturer uses. It needed to reflect the beauty and classic design, but beyond that what? So we took a yacht to Bimini for three days of shooting and put a classic yacht design in a more travel oriented setting. Show, not just the yacht, but what you can do with the yacht. Where you could go. Not just the style, but also the possibilities.

Huckins owners, and prospective owners, tend to be older wealthier people who still like to read ads. Yacht magazines are some of the few magazines that still have an audience so much of this campaign was geared toward that demographic. So there will be print ads here.

Dealership sponsor ads for the Jaguar Clubs of North America publications.

My music projects deliver a comprehensive suite of creative services. Beyond just artwork, there’s integrating music composition, lyrical development, instrumentation (including drums, bass, guitars, and percussion), as well as engineering, mixing, and mastering.

Superfizzee is a collaborative initiative established in 2009, specializing in melodic mashup of surf rock, shoegaze, and dream pop. This project leverages long-distance collaboration between myself, two partners, and occasionally DJ Bonebrake from the band "X" based in Los Angeles. Our mastering is handled by KRAMER in Miami. My portfolio includes two albums, four EPs, and five singles, with a notable track featured on the New York Times Spring 2024 playlist at #22.

Fink Tank is a garage rock project bringing together talent from Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Orlando. My portfolio includes two 5-song EPs, and we occasionally perform one-off shows.

Chevy VanGogh is a jangly indie rock collaboration between artists in Orlando and Nashville, My portfolio includes: one album, one EP, and three singles.

Android Kitten is a project designed specifically for Sync licensing, incorporating a diverse array of genres anchored by a drum & bass core, catering to varied auditory requirements from reimagined covers to original material.