AEJMC 2025 Logo Contest Submission

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Represent the AEJMC conference’s host city of San Francisco in an iconic, black-and-white, scalable logo

Year: 2024

Created in Adobe Illustrator, this logo uses the instantly-recognizable silhouette of a San Francisco streetcar to immediately convey the conference’s location to potential attendees. In the background, silhouettes of recognizable San Francisco skyscrapers including the TransAmerica Pyramid and the Salesforce Tower soar up beneath a round line meant to represent the rising sun. The text on the streetcar’s side is large enough to be easily read even when scaled up or down.

Personal Business Card

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Incorporate essential information into a simple, eye-catching business card

Year: 2025

This business card places my personal logo (created in Adobe Illustrator and also used as the header of this website) in a Canva business card template to convey essential information about my skills and contact information in a quick and easy-to-absorb format. The reverse of the card features QR codes leading to my Instagram, my Spotify, and this very website.

Cool & Composed Promotional Graphics

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Create a distinct and recognizable brand identity for my self-produced radio show, Cool & Composed.

Years: 2023-2025

Created in Canva, these graphics were used on social media in order to promote my radio show broadcast through the University of St. Thomas’ KUST Radio. Each season came with a fresh color scheme and visuals while still incorporating familiar design elements like silhouette-style graphics and a consistent title typeface to give the whole show a cohesive feel. To learn more about Cool & Composed, view individual episode art, and listen to full episodes, visit this page.

University of St. Thomas Center for Writing Social Media Posts

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Use the UST Center for Writing’s brand style to create snappy, engaging social media posts

Year: 2024

Created in Canva, these social media posts took the UST Center for Writing’s pre-existing brand kit (grey boxes, bold and thin font weights, purple and grey text) and attempted to spice it up a bit by adding colorful graphics and snappy copy to catch viewers’ attention when they came across the Center for Writing’s Instagram posts. The goal was for viewers to move directly from the engaging visuals and taglines to the important information such as the writing center’s location and website underneath.

RayTech Enterprises Identity System

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Create a distinct, visually connected identity system consisting of a business card, envelope, and letterhead

Year: 2024

Created in Adobe Illustrator, this series conveys the brand identity of fictional innovation conglomerate RayTech Enterprises (from my forthcoming novel, The Rise of Flippertown). The sleek, angled logo conveys a sense of forward motion, with the recurring thicker lines surrounding the logo make the viewer feel as though they are speeding down a highway toward the future. The silhouette of RayTech Tower and its iconic crowning cowboy hat are visible on the envelope and letterhead, while the mountains visible on the letterhead and business card evoke a sense of steadfastness and trustworthiness to ground RayTech’s forward momentum.

Second Harvest Heartland Yard Sign #1

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Create a simple, eye-catching yard sign that invites viewers to visit a Minnesota food banks volunteer sign-up page

Year: 2025

Created in Canva, this yard sign uses bright colors and soft shapes to reel the viewer in before drawing their eye to the QR code with the contrasting white surrounding it. The design is tailored to be easily editable by food bank volunteers with little design experience through simple-to-replace photo and QR code elements.

Second Harvest Heartland Yard Sign #2

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Create a simple, eye-catching yard sign marketed toward bilingual volunteers

Year: 2025

Created in Canva, this yard sign is a Spanish-language version of the previous one. The photographs were rearranged (and some removed) to accommodate the Spanish translation of the original sign’s message, as the call to action ended up being much longer in Spanish than in English. The sign uses the same bright colors, soft shapes, and contrasting QR code as the English version, and the grammar was checked by a university Spanish professor to ensure accuracy.

Second Harvest Heartland Yard Sign #3

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Create a simple, eye-catching yard sign marketed toward bilingual volunteers

Year: 2025

Created in Canva, this yard sign evokes motifs of fresh produce to put viewers in a mindset of food and hunger when scanning the QR code to sign up for volunteering at the food shelf. The Spanish phrase at the top (“full stomach, happy heart”) was selected to specifically appeal to bilingual volunteers as it is not a Spanish phrase commonly known by English speakers, and was written with guidance from a university Spanish professor to ensure accuracy.

Funding the Anderson Arena

Role: Designer

Purpose: Create an infographic to accompany a news article on the funding of the University of St. Thomas’ Lee and Penny Anderson Arena

Year: 2023

Created in Canva, this graphic splits up the various funding sources of the University of St. Thomas’ Lee and Penny Anderson ice hockey arena within a simple-to-digest circle graph. This graphic was included in TommieMedia reporter Kevin Lynch’s article Anderson Arena nears completion as St. Thomas adjusts to D1 costs, which won a Region 6 Mark of Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Program or Be Programmed Prototype Book Cover

Role: Lead Designer

Purpose: Create an eye-catching cover representative of Douglas Rushkoff’s book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for the Digital Age

Year: 2024

Created in Adobe Illustrator, this prototype book cover attempts to convey the themes within Douglas Rushkoff’s 2011 book on digital literacy. The main picture is framed within a tilted black window, as though we are spying on the computer controlling us through a window or crack in the wall. The uneven spacing and tilted lines of the frame’s three components are meant to create a sense of unease in the viewer—as the type of technology skeptic likely to pick up this book will probably be anticipating. The dull green gradient of the main computer evokes feelings of bulky, archaic technology, while the sickly green light emanating from the sentient machine and the red color of the button beneath its claw are meant to make the viewer feel as though something sinister is afoot, again marketing to the technology skeptic.