Collaborating with a team of editors, photographers and printers, I conceptualize new product ideas, packaging formats, create mockups and product concepts, manage project style guides, and work with editorial to execute design and layout.
I create beautiful, innovative, and cohesive book and book plus products. The scope of my work ranges from complete concepts to single covers, interiors, and packaging.
Over the years, I have also created annual reports, brochures and newsletters for non profits, museums, real estate companies, and financial institutions.
outside
clouds lush
pigment deep
swirling, crimson
orange craves blue—
green
gray, yellow
sting like wild wind
authentic and rich
my palette
my century
glow, evolve.
listen.
a lesson in enduring
magenta pauses,
cobalt blinks.
raw and bold.
it’s not a question.
but an art agenda
allow the texture to emerge
a beautiful circle chronicle
a gallery royal
plain paper painted
stars folded
fallen from the sky
into mini-manifestos.
I have a passion for the process of letterpress and the vintage wooden type created in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, as well as more modern typefaces and polymer plates. My work includes artists books, small cards and greeting cards, broadsides and experimental lock ups and compositions.
I rediscovered Artists’ Books when I was in grad school and began creating these structures to contain my written and visual ideas. Many of my books are experimental and play with text, folds and bright colors.
Wish You Were Here (Summer 2021), is a collaborative book arts project containing postcards from 30 participants in seven book arts organizations across the US. Each postcard was hand crafted and mailed. I compiled my collection of postcards into this creative boxed set.
Pieces of the Sun, a double accordion book, was in the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center’s 12th annual Illustrated Accordion, Online Exhibition, May-June 2020. Media used is acrylic and tempera paint, marker and wax pencil on paper, folded, stitched; ends covers are book board covered in red book cloth. Measures closed: 5.5 inches wide x 11.25 inches high; expanded open measures: 18 inches wide x 11 inches high, 2020
Dialogue is Exposed, an accordion book structure I created during my second semester in grad school was featured in Abecedarian’s August 24 - September 28, 2018 exhibition (Artist Book Cornucopia IX). This book was purchased by Baylor University, Special Collections Library.
Inspired by the 1957 poem, A Ball Is For Throwing by Adrienne Rich, I created a flag book that celebrates freedom and life. With a bold color palette and die cut orbs, the playful design encourages the viewer to engage and experience visual joy within the multiple panels, reinforcing the meaning of the poem. This book was part of the San Diego Book Arts Louder Than Words exhibition at the Frances Parker School in January 2020.
A Spider Sewed at Night was featured in Biblio Spectaculum (June-August 2020), a national juried book arts exhibition of artist books and text-based visual works. This book was also juried into All Stitched Up, a Puget Sound Book Arts exhibition in 2019 at the University of Puget Sound. This book was one of fifty books selected from 198 submissions. My accordion folded book showcases my writing and collages inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and is a complement to my MFA in Graphic Design thesis.
Mother: Accordion book structure with pop outs and pamphlet-sewn pages, with family photos featuring three generations of mothers— my mother, my grandmother and great-grandmother. The muted colors and multiple layering of text images mirrors the complexity of these relationships within my family and illustrates a very personal story. Also tucked inside is the 1951 poem, The Mother, by Ruth Stone. This book was juried into the Philadelphia Center for the Book’s Variations of the Artists Book exhibition at City Hall (August-December 2019).
Using bright colors, vivid imagery + thoughtful messaging I craft invitations for organizations and non profits. I often work within small budgets but my goal is always to make a memorable impression on the recipient, sharing the organization’s mission and identity through compelling, custom design and creating excitement for the event.
As creative director/graphic designer, I have a deep understanding of storytelling through branding and advertising, designing brochures, direct mail appeals and other collateral. My clients trust me to craft beautiful, highly visual and strategically engaging material that champions their expectations, mission and always comes in on budget!
Presented here are some projects that I have designed for diverse clients — non profits, medical research organizations, local community centers and museums.
Print has endured and the tactility and hand craft I celebrate in my work is becoming more and more relevant. It is my way of gathering all the bits of my poems, writing and work I have created into a tangible space.
Letterforms and doodles dance from panel to panel, as if they were joyously moving objects and the play of pattern, repetition and energy of these pieces inspires my more corporate design work.
Colore Abondante, a repurposed board book, was completely transformed by my expressive lettering, doodles and drawings done over a two- week span during April 2020. Each page is an explosion of color, and dense imagery — hand colored with pencils, crayons and markers. Colorful wires add more color and dimension & extend out from the pages.
Pop ups and die cuts are featured on each of the pages.
This book was featured in the September 2020 Escondido Municipal Arts Gallery’s West Coast Fiber and Book Arts Show and placed third in the juried exhibition.
Presented here are designs I have created over the past five years for various non profits’ social media outreach — banners, infographics and posts to promote appeals across broader platforms and raise awareness of various issues and campaigns.
We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. — Virginia Woolf
Collage is not an exacting craft, no guides or rules, just paper and my imagination. It is an integral element of my design practice, allowing for thoughtful ideation grounded in a documentation and regeneration of ideas.
My work was featured on the cover and inside the 2020 Winter issue of Kolaj magazine.
“…it’s the thought behind all that scissoring and gluing, the choice and arrangement of elements, the savvy collusions and chance associations, the proverbial whole that becomes more than the sum.”
— from Mark Polizzotti, John Ashberry — They Knew What They Wanted/Poems & Collages, September 2017.
Explore. Play. Learn.
Creating personal work is imperative to me as a graphic designer. Over the past year, I have developed projects that motivate me and keep me inspired. My passion for color, bold typography, packaging and photo styling allow me to constantly experiment, develop + learn new skills.
During the past year, I have been creating assemblages, created from all the discards—bits and pieces of things that are found in my garage. There is beauty and magic in discovering how random objects nailed, glued and attached into unusual combinations, make powerful ideas and visuals.
I know nothing that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine. — Emily Dickinson
Pictured here is my final thesis project, A Lady Red & The Em Dash, which I completed as part of my MFA in Graphic Design. Inspiration for my process began when I was searching for a poem to design and print letterpress in October 2017, and I was reintroduced to the work of Emily Dickinson, the enigmatic nineteenth-century poet. She trusted her words and process, defied societal norms and combined writing and design, adding her hyphens, confident that we would arrive at our own interpretations.
After considerable research and reading I united Dickinson’s words with my interests in feminism, typography, collage, poetry and book making. I created a portfolio of broadsides and large posters, small chapbooks, and designed, of course, a hand-bound thesis where I explored the visual beauty of her words, her mastery of “painting with color” and her Dadaist spirit.
Experimental work with color, fold outs, and pop ups.