I created this piece as a way to express the concept of letting go of whatever it is that eats you up, stresses you out, brings you down, or just holds you back. The imagery seen here was not created using any photoshop effects, it is simply made up of a series of layered, long-exposure photographs I took.

This piece came out of an academic assignment that required me to design a cover for a rap album titled Smash It. Since we were given no other information, I decided to actually come up with a concept or theme behind the music on the album. This ended up being about breaking down people’s ingrained perceptions, their preconceived notions, stereotypes, etc. I represented this album concept through the shards of broken glass containing reflections of people’s eyes. I did both the photography and design for this piece and had a heck of a type smashing up the glass for the shot.

I designed this poster in class as an advertisement for a mathematics conference. I definitely had some inspiration from Herb Lubalin’s Families logo but the idea really developed after I had been staring at the numbers in my layout for so long that I began to see them as forms instead of numbers. When this context disappeared, the resemblance of the number one to a person just popped out to me. I decided to bookend the central figures with consecutive numbers to make sure they would be still be recognized as ones and not just as people.

I’ve been reading a lot recently about human evolutionary, intellectual, and consciousness development. Without really digging down into it, one of the main ideas that hit me was the realization that until humans gained their sense of self, or ego, they were really nothing more than very intelligent animals. This development that makes us so unique also lies at the root of many of the negative occurrences in world. This is the basic theme behind the design I’ve created here.

The technical aspects of this piece build off the work of an amazing designer named Emmanuel Guillod, who creates complex grids that work as beautiful abstract designs on their own. He then uses these as the structures in his design layouts. I tried to follow this style and below you can see the grid I developed for the basis of the finished design.

This was designed for a booklet covering some of the great natural features that can be found across Kentucky like its many rivers, lakes, trails, rock formations, and rolling fields. I wanted it to be about getting people outside and I decided that a light, airy, open look be a great way to remind them of what the outdoors can be like. The window and Kentucky scenery build upon this as a simple push for people to stop peering out and go explore.

Dan Boyarski recently gave a talk and presented his new work at The University of Louisville. In this new work, Boyarski began by creating a grid based off of a quilt pattern. He then inserted a set of photos into the layout that became cropped according to the grid. The results were stunning so I decided to take the same idea and apply it to one of my own photos. I then took the same grid ( a 3×3 set of squares) and used it on a facing page to layout the relating text.

The piece was designed as an exercise to accompany an article on how the subtle nuances of typography can work to bring words to life with feeling.

This design developed from the fact that just about all of my most creative ideas seem to just appear. I do brainstorm, sketch and constantly think about different design solutions but all of these things seems to simply warm my mind up. It really isn’t until my mind is clear of thought that I truly get quality results.

It reminds me a bit of something I read once, I believe about Benjamin Franklin although I could be wrong. Whoever it was, the story went that in order to come up with new ideas, he would hold a set of keys in his hands as he sat in his chair for a nap. Franklin would also set a metal plate on the ground below his hand so that just as his mind settled and he began to drift into sleep, he would drop the keys and be jolted up when they hit the plate. The hope being that he would awake with something new and creative.

This was an intaglio print made from one of my drawings. The process started by taking a copper plate and covering it with a ground. I then etched the drawing into the plate and placed it into an acid bath where the drawing became embedded into the copper. Afterwords, I rubbed ink into the resulting crevasses and ran the plate through a press.

As with several of my other works, the idea for the drawing just kind of showed up in my head. I had been using the little men shown in some of my other drawings at the time I illustrated this one and the stylized tree developed from a design I did on one of my first websites. I’m not really sure why I decided to bring them together but it just seemed right and so I ended up with this result.

This piece was made using the screen printing process. I created the actual design using Illustrator then printed transparencies and used them to expose the screen. As for the content, it comes from a scene that just popped into my head one day when I was thinking about how robots might help us in the future. My mind wondered beyond this initial thought and I began to create scenarios of what would happen if something like a butler robot were buggy or malfunctioned. When I saw this screen printed scene in my head I laughed out loud and quickly proceeded to sketch it out.