Freelance designer · Providence, Rhode Island
Independent brand and packaging design for small food, drink and home companies. One designer, start to finish — the person you brief is the person who draws it.
Identity and packaging systems, mostly for companies making fewer than twenty products. Each one is drawn, specified and prepared for print by me.
Pell & Wick
Beeswax · No. 04
A candle company with nine scents and no system holding them together. One label architecture, numbered by scent, so a new fragrance drops into the range without a redesign.
Identity · Label system · Print specification
Sour Cape
Small batch hot sauce
Three heat levels that had been three unrelated bottles. Now one silhouette, one type lockup, and colour doing the work of telling them apart on a crowded shelf.
Identity · Bottle labels · Shelf test
Bright Harbor
Credit union · Est. 1948
A seventy-year-old member-owned bank that wanted to look its age in the good way. Wordmark, branch signage and a card design their printer could actually hold to.
Wordmark · Signage · Card design
Quill & Field
A field guide series
Jacket design for a six-book natural history series from a two-person press. The grid stays fixed and the illustration moves, so book seven costs an afternoon instead of a project.
Series design · Jackets · Typesetting
Ostro
Single grove olive oil
One oil, one grove, one harvest a year — and a bottle that had been saying none of that. The vintage now leads, printed on a band that changes while the label does not.
Identity · Bottle label · Annual band
Published because you should not have to open a conversation to find out whether I am in your range.
A single product, or a range that needs one system holding it together.
Wordmark, palette, type and the rules that keep it consistent after I hand it over.
For work that does not need a project around it — a new flavour, a trade-show stand, an art-direction pass.
Everything above is a range because the honest answer depends on how many products share the system and how many people have to approve it. I quote a fixed figure after the first call, and that figure does not move unless the brief does.
Three stages, and you see something drawn in the first two weeks of every one.
Forty minutes about the product, the shelf it sits on and who reaches for it. I write the brief back to you and we agree it before anything is drawn.
Two or three genuine directions — not one real option and two to make it look good. You pick one, and the rest of the work develops it rather than starting over.
Dielines to their template, colours specified, a spec sheet naming stock and finish. I talk to the printer directly and stay on the job through the press proof.
About
I have worked for myself since 2015, after six years in packaging studios in Boston and here in Providence.
The studios taught me the craft and also what I did not want: a client briefing one person, a second person drawing it, and a third explaining afterwards why it came back different. So I kept the work small enough that I can do all of it. You brief me, I draw it, I take it to press.
Most of what I make ends up in someone's hand in a shop — a jar, a bottle, a box, a jacket on a shelf. That is a specific discipline. It has to survive bad lighting, a printer's tolerances and a two-second glance, and it has to still be legible at the size the bottle actually is rather than the size it looked on screen.
I take on two projects a quarter, which is the honest number for one person doing the drawing and the press-checking. It means I sometimes cannot start when you want to, and it means the project you do book is not competing with five others.
Availability
Send me what the product is, roughly when you need it on a shelf, and what you are working with. I answer every enquiry within two working days, including the ones I have to say no to.