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Graphic Design
Big Apple Chocolate Festival
(Conceptual)
May 2020
This fictional project was created as the final project for my last visual design class my senior year in college. The goal of the assignment was to create an event on any topic of our choosing and design a flier, ticket, and t-shirt for it. We had to show our professor we could take an event and make a cohesive brand concept for it. I chose doing a chocolate festival because I am just a huge chocolate fan and love events centered around food. All designs were done in Illustrator using a combination of the shape tool, pen tool, and more.
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The flier design came to me first because Easter had just recently happened a month back and I remember seeing all of the chocolate bunnies in the store. I figured it would be fun to do a spin on that and make the iconic Statue of Liberty out of chocolate and have the New York skyline made out of chocolate.
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The ticket with this design also just fell into place. The most iconic kind of chocolate is of the bar variety, and it just made sense to take a typically rectangular shape for a ticket and turn it into a chocolate bar, where the tear point was a block of the whole bar.
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Finally, the t-shirt came from the iconic marketing campaign for New York City of "I Heart New York" designed by Milton Glaser. I pictured this event being sponsored by New York itself, and thus thought turning the iconic design into a Valentines' heart filled with chocolates was the perfect brand decision.
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This project was immensely fun to design and has some fun cohesion. I think all of these designs really sell the chocolate theming of the festival and take iconic concepts and landmarks known to the public and put a spin on them in a unique way.
Festival Poster
Festival Ticket
Festival T-Shirt
Old 1K Logo and Thumbnail
Made by Previous Graphics Artist at Susie Fims
New 1K Logo and Thumbnails
1K Podcast
July 2019
While interning at Susie Films, I was asked to update the branding for their 1K podcast, a podcast related to the 100 Word Film Festival, in which each episode is about the entertainment industry and is 1,000 seconds long, or 16.67 minutes long.
Recent to my arrival, Susie Film's main graphics artist had left. All they had that remained of the 1K branding was a few thumbnails saved in .jpg and the logo, also in .jpg, which prevented them from making high quality thumbnails for future episodes.
Due to this, they had me work on completely rebranding 1K. I recreated the logo as a vector image in Illustrator, and I also recreated all of their previous thumbnails using Fireworks and Illustrator, along with making brand new ones for upcoming episodes.
This internship opportunity allowed me to work with a new brand and recreate it and slightly re-imagine it from the ground up to make new, high quality images and templates for the company going forward.
RiftMasters Cards
April 2018 - Present
Before the official founding of RiftMasters, LLC, I had already started a lot of work on preliminary card design using Fireworks and Illustrator.
Most of my original concepts were based around other TCG card layouts, with the character in the top half of the card, and flavor text in the bottom half. It looked like a stereotypical card that did not have its own identity.
My first major design change was that all of the necessary "stats" required to play the game were represented with symbols, instead of words, in the top left hand corner in a banner style. This change came because I was annoyed with other TCGs that would require you to pull the card out almost all the way in your hand to see all of the card's abilities. I wanted to design a card that players could understand at a moment's notice.
The next major design change was rotating the card and taking out the flavor text. This was done to further the card game from the stereotypical TCGs and to develop a cleaner design. Since each card is coming with a code at launch that players can type in on our website to have access to the character's lore, I found it unnecessary to keep the story on the card. This way, the focus was on the character, now taking up the majority of the card, and on the stats, still kept to the left of the card for easy access.
Finally, the last update came when I decided that the last design had too much white space and would feel awkward in the hands of players. To rectify this, I simply made the card square. I also played with the border on the card, so the border design would match that of the character's element to add a pop of color, to encourage players to collect at least one of each element, and to add an important element to what would otherwise be the bleed for printing purposes.
*Note: The character portraits on these cards are not by me. I am responsible for the layout and design elements of the cards themselves.
Concept Design #1
"Typical TCG"
Concept Design #2
"Banner"
Concept Design #3
"Horizontal"
Final Design
"Square"
Logo Concept Designs
Logo Final Design
Party Game Bros
Title Card
Party Game Bros
End Card
Video Game Footage
Webcam
Party Game Bros
Main Screen
Party Game Bros Branding
December 2017 - December 2019
When I originally started my YouTube channel, I had no organized plan on how to brand my channel. At first, I just used the question mark block from Super Mario games as the logo and only displayed gameplay on my channel without a webcam or other brand elements.
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Eventually, a friend made me a logo for the channel, but I was not happy with it. It was too colorful and did not have a distinct color scheme. It was not very gaming or community driven, as I had wanted.
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A few months later, I decided to make a new logo and brand myself using Illustrator. It went through a few variations until it became the way it looks today. The color scheme of blue and yellow was chosen because the colors are seen as serene and confident in color theory.
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The design itself was to make puzzle pieces look like people. This way, the logo includes a "game" aspect, but it also showcases that the channel is supposed to be a place where people can come together to play games.
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The rest of the brand quickly fell into place once settling on the puzzle piece design. I knew that the intro video (and closing card) that played at the beginning (and end) of each stream would revolve around puzzle pieces.
I decided to place the logos on a wooden texture because puzzles are tactile and something that many people might associate with using on their kitchen tables.
For the end card, I also have puzzle pieces with gameplay in them to give the feeling that each game I play is a piece of my overall channel brand. The same can be seen with the main screen that appears for the majority of the stream, except here the puzzle pieces act as "windows to another world." One puzzle piece displays my webcam, another sponsorships, recent followers, etc. Green screen was used in some cases to add these elements.
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Each part of the video and channel, from start to finish, had to have this digital yet tactile feel to it associated with my logo's puzzle piece design and have a great amount of cohesion. This branding was used for almost two years, for the remainder of the time that I did work for Party Game Bros on YouTube.
Pattern Design Assignment
April 2020
These patterns were created for an assignment in my final visual design class my senior year in college. The point of the assignment was to try to make a couple of patterns based around typical pattern types. I chose to do a character, geometric, and minimalist pattern because I had quite a few ideas for what I would want to do for each.
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For the character pattern, I created an ocean scene, a pattern that might be displayed on a beach towel or maybe at a water park, or perhaps on the shower curtain of a kid's bathroom. The inspiration here came from having an aquatic themed bathroom when I was a kid, and I tried to imagine what a pattern might look like for that themeing if I tried to add to it.
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The geometric pattern's inspiration came from Gallifreyan, a fictional language from the show "Doctor Who." The language is entirely geometry based and I wondered what it might look like if I made something similar as a pattern. This is one of my favorite patterns I have made. I really like the circles within circles and how the circles make circles themselves. Plus, I really like the monochromatic brown color scheme.
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The minimalist pattern came from thinking about the title "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles." I thought doing a small pattern based around vehicles would be a lot of fun, and when I hear trains, I once again reflect back to a childhood obsession I had with trains and train sets. Because of that, I kind of pictured toys in a toy box and made the pattern look like something you might see on a baby blanket, also opting for the use of pastel colors due to this.
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This was a fun assignment done entirely in Illustrator that helped get my creative juices flowing.
Character Pattern
Geometric Pattern
Minimalist Pattern
Light - Sunrise
Space - Stars
Magic - Mystery Triangles
Water - Waves
Dark - Graveyard
Life - Vine
Electric - Circuits
Fire - Flames
Air - Clouds
RiftMasters Card Borders
June 2020
Once the design of the cards were finalized, it was decided that the border would need to change based on the character's element, or type.
In the lore of the game, there are nine elements: Light, Dark, Space, Life, Magic, Electric, Water, Fire, and Air. Each border needed to feel distinct and exciting, and the final design for each is pictured.
The idea of presenting this information visually this way came from looking at what other card games don't do. The bleed in other card games typically is just kind of there and boring. It feels out of place because it needs to be there for printing. I wanted the cards to utilize that space for a purpose, hence making them indicate an important feature about the character.
The design for the borders was decided to be something simple yet easy to understand. The borders were decided to be just a singular color and to be a pattern. This way, the border was aesthetically pleasing and each type of character had a specific color associated with it.
Each pattern was work-shopped a couple of times until the pattern was something that could clearly be made out on a 3 inch card, felt like it instantaneously would tell a consumer what element the character was if they saw the card in marketing material, and that the color and pattern was fluid and fun.
Some of the designs might be expected, like flames for Fire or waves for Water, but others are a bit more unique, such as the graveyard for Dark, and the circuits look for Electric. I wanted people to know exactly what element it was, but also try to subvert some expectations here and there.
These borders and the layout of the cards were fun to design and they greatly emphasize each element's style (and the cartoony style) for the game very well.
Party Game Bros Titles
April 2019
Party Game Bros, my old livestreaming job on YouTube, was a lot of fun because I played video games and I was paid for it. But beyond playing games, Party Game Bros also allowed me to use my graphics skills to create stream layouts and the intro sequence for my channel.
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This intro sequence was updated every once and a while, using a compilation of Premiere Pro and Illustrator. I really like the intro sequences to shows like Joss Whedon's Angel and Alfred Gough and Miles Millar's Smallville, which the Party Game Bros sequence was highly inspired by. Everything in the sequence was made and animated by myself using a combination of pathfinder in Illustrator, and keyframes and chroma key in Premiere.
The exceptions to this are the avatars, who were drawn by Sam Porozok, and the Party Game Bros theme, composed by Anna-Noelle Kassing and arranged by Tavion Dixon, all in collaboration to make the music and avatars exclusively for Party Game Bros. Video game footage was all captured by myself, but the games and characters shown are property of the respective companies' franchises.
Concept Designs
Final Design
RiftMasters Logo
October 2018
RiftMasters has been a personal project of mine for about six years. I've always had an interest in designing a card game.
It wasn't until 2018 when I had someone that was willing to financially back the project and friends interested in helping out that the dream really began to pick up beyond just a concept.
Once the business was founded, I also knew we needed a logo. This logo, designed in Illustrator, went through many variations. I ended up with the final design that is pictured.
This logo was chosen because I wanted a 70s/80s vibe and because I wanted the logo to exemplify being like a rift between worlds, but also be vague enough for the player's own imagination. I believe I captured both with the final design. I also decided on monochromatic orange as the color scheme because it feels unique, since most logos go the direction of having two or three complementary main colors.
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