A selection of books I designed for
Princeton Architectural Press.

Stories of Japanese Tea
The Regions, the Growers, and the Craft
Zach Mangan

The Conservatory
Gardens Under Glass
Alan Stein & Nancy Virts

Snowbound
Dwelling in Winter
William Morgan

Sacred Ground
The Cemeteries of New Orleans
Robert S. Brantley

Winterland
Create a Beautiful Garden for Every Season
Cathy Rees & Lisa Looke

Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin
Architecture and Capitalism in the
Twenty-First Century
Matthew Soules

Visualizing Nature
Essays on Truth, Spirit, and Philosophy
Stuart Kestenbaum

It is a little known and rarely acknowledged fact that Baltimore was a major center of the domestic slave trade in the 1800s. Tens of thousands of people were sold and shipped through the city's harbor to the slave markets of New Orleans. Despite this historically documented past, there is no mention of slave trade on any of the outdoor sign-age that tells the 'story' of the Inner Harbor, which today is a shopping and entertainment district lined with luxury real estate. Designing an app that functions as a historic tour, an educational tool, and most importantly, a memorial to the victims of the slave trade, my thesis project is my attempt to bring awareness to this history.

A selection of books from the Children’s list that I worked on. I was responsible for typesetting and seeing them through to final print production.

George and His Nighttime Friends
Seng Soun Ratanavanh

Otto and Pio
Marianne Dubuc

Little Cheetah's Shadow
Marianne Dubuc

Malo and the Merry-Go-Round
Maria Dek

When I Am Bigger
Maria Dek

The Book of Tiny Creatures
Emmanuelle Tchoukriel, Julien Norwood 
& Nathalie Tordjman

The Quiet Crocodile Goes to the Beach
Natacha Andriamirado & Delphine Renon

A requirement for the MFA program, the primary purpose of the thesis book is to document the process behind our project. My intent was to show more than only my visual process with sketches, instead, I wanted the content to especially focus on the ideas that had influenced my decision to choose this subject. While this was a project first and foremost about the slave trade in Baltimore, my goal, especially with this book, was to speak directly to the larger national conversation about the legacy of slavery and our nation’s collective historic consciousness. The design is intended to present those ideas in a clear and unencumbered form. 

The focal point of the exhibition wall was a map of Baltimore from 1851 with the sites of former slave pens marked in red and wharves in blue. I chose three of these locations which illustrated how the majority of these spaces have now been transformed for entertainment, tourism and luxury real estate and underscored the dichotomy between the present and the reality of what had once occurred there.

Working from the research of Baltimore historian, Ralph Clayton, I determined the number of slaves that were documented to have been sold from each location. Using historic data which catalogued the average price of slaves beginning in 1804 until the Civil War, I calculated the amount of money that was made at at each site and translated that into today’s dollars.

A video showing the app I designed played on the television next to advertisements that had been placed in Baltimore newspapers by slave traders. Finally, as an exhibition takeaway, I designed memorial cards that had the name of an individual slave who had been sold through Baltimore. The cards included their age, the name of the ship they were aboard, the wharf it set sail from and the date it set sail. Each card held a different name, speaking to the enormity of the city’s slave trade.

This project was created for Graduate Design Studio, under the direction of Ellen Lupton and Jason Gottlieb. The assignment was to invent a hypothetical museum and then do the all the branding and design for three speculative exhibitions. Located in Cape Town, South Africa, The Museum of Extinction’s mission is to educate people of all ages about the phenomena of extinction; from plants and animals, to languages and civilizations, with a focus on manmade extinctions since 1500.

These album covers were designed for our “Dailies” assignment in my Graduate Studio class, lead by Jennifer Cole Philips & Jason Gottlieb. The goal of the project was to create a series that involved a creative process we could do every day for two weeks. I worked with the images of William Gottlieb, the famous jazz photographer and Jason’s grandfather. I then explored ways to visually capture the spirit of jazz. After extensive experimentation, I began painting circles, the brush strokes creating a sense of movement that spoke to the music. I cut the portraits into silhouettes and photographed them against the painted backgrounds, which created a sense of depth that would have been lost otherwise.

Created for Jennifer Cole Philip’s Graduate Typography class, the assignment was to redesign several pages from MICA’s student magazine Juxtapositions. The design of the magazine at that time was cluttered and crammed with too much information on each page. This resulted in a claustrophobic visual experience. My primary goal was to open up the white space, providing significant breathing room so the student work really became the focus on each page. I also updated the primary typeface from Griffith Gothic, to Commercial Type’s, Graphik, a more contemporary, neutral sans serif. 

This project was designed for the course User Interface & Experience Design taught by professor Andreas Zapatas at MICA. The parameter of the assignment was to design an app for an IPad that functions as a game for children between the ages of five and ten years old. The game must motivate them to brush their teeth both in the morning and at bedtime for the two full minutes dentists recommend. I've presented ten reasons why the design of this app is effective with children and engages them so they want to brush and won't lose interest over time. 

McGuire Furniture, a subsidiary of Kohler’s Interiors Division, is a luxury furniture company founded in San Francisco by John and Elinor McGuire in 1949. McGuire’s key marketplace distinction is artisan-crafted furniture using the highest quality materials. This fusion of natural elements and modernist design is the foundation of their brand. As their primary designer at Kohler Communications I was involved with all of their printed pieces, weekly email marketing campaigns, as well as print and digital ad placements in industry publications.

KALLISTA, considered Kohler’s boutique subsidiary, sells luxury faucets and fixtures. Collections are centered around celebrity designers, who are directly involved in the design of the product lines and whose personalities are integral to KALLISTA’S brand. As KALLISTA's primary designer at Kohler Communications, I worked on all of their printed pieces and email marketing campaigns. I was also involved with trade show graphics, the development of their brand guidelines and product photo-shoots.

Baker Furniture, a subsidiary of Kohler’s Interiors Division, is known in the luxury furniture market for their heirloom quality pieces that are passed down through the generations, the true epitome of luxury Old World craftsmanship. Baker works in close collaboration with celebrity designers, who attach their name and personal brand to Baker’s furniture collections. I worked primarily on their designer catalogs, the accompanying collection brochures and event invitations. 

This project was designed as the final for Lindsay Ballant’s Information Visualization class at MICA. I was inspired by George Packer’s piece for The New Yorker, “The Other France” and wanted to visualize the main concepts of his article. Packer explores the present day impact of France's colonial history and its connection to a deeply segregated French society. The impact of this discrimination and lack of economic opportunity on France’s Muslim minority becoming fuel for the kind of radicalization that can ultimately lead to terrorism.

This poster was designed for a data visualization workshop lead by the Boston based studio, SOSO Limited. Using a digital tool they created we were able to search through every State of the Union address and then pull data sets of our choosing. I calculated the number of times a country was mentioned in this speech throughout the span of our nation’s history. Divided by geographic regions, with size indicating frequency of mentions, and to increase immediate recognition, I included an image of one of their most iconic political leaders.

This project was designed for the course Signage, Exhibits & Displays. The assignment was to create an exterior signage proposal for the Parkway Film Center, a building project that was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University, MICA, the Maryland Film Festival and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Their vision was to renovate the theater to it’s former glory as an icon of Beaux Arts architecture and then building a new addition which would house the offices for the Film Festival and classrooms for the JHU / MICA Film Program. The challenge was developing signage that was in harmony and united the two very divergent styes of architecture. The concept behind my final type treatment is the idea of intersection. The intersection of past and present, of Beaux Arts and Modernist Architecture, of entertainment and education and finally, the intersection of the physical location of the theater which is situated on the corner of North Ave and Charles Street, both major thoroughfares in the city.

This project was designed for the course Motion & Interaction taught by Jason Gottlieb. The assignment was to create a motion piece about any topic of our choice, that persuaded an audience in a certain direction. Using sleep deprivation as my subject, and found archival footage as my source material, I created somewhat of a parody of public service educational films of the 1950s. This assignment was also meant to demonstrate that we could use the effects in the AfterEffects to communicate our concept, intelligently and appropriately, without falling into cliches.

This project was designed for Graduate Typography, taught by Jennifer Cole Philips at MICA. The assignment was to take an aspect of our daily lives and translate that into an infographic. Since I lived on a very busy street, and I decided to visualize the sound from the road that traveled into my apartment. I measured the decibels made by each type of vehicle, which is represented with a different paint spatter, and then for one day, I kept track of how many drove by and the time. This gave me approximate measurements of the sound from the street made over the course of a typical day.

This piece was designed for Information Visualization taught by Lindsay Ballant at MICA. The assignment was to interpret a work of fiction and translate it into an infographic. I choose Paul Auster’s novel Ghosts. The characters are all named after colors which I represented with circles. Each page visualizes a significant scene and a segment of text is chosen that gives the emotional context of the moment. The power dynamic and relationship between the characters is shown through the size and proximity of the circles. I used imagery and a color palette that spoke to 1940s New York City, the setting of the novel.

This piece was created for a Poster Design workshop taught by Leander Eisenmann at the Basel School of Design. The assignment was to “Choose a neutral term, one that doesn’t suggest a certain opinion. Play with our collective consciousness and bring the term out of balance, shift it from the neutral zone into an affected zone.” I began by choosing two simple words ‘then’ and 'now'. Speaking to the increase in racist incidents and open hostility since the election, I used images from the past in the word ‘now’ and images from the present in the word ‘then’. My intent was to visualize William Faulkner’s timeless and famous quote, "The past is never dead, it’s not even past."

This is selection of my work was taken during a summer photography workshop in the Southwest while I was at RIT. We drove from Rochester, New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico and then spent three weeks traveling across the Four Corners region, camping and photographing. With twenty other students in the workshop, my greatest concern was that my final portfolio didn’t look like everyone else’s. This was a challenge since we were essentially photographing the same locations. I purposely tried to avoid landscape shots or other symbols of the Southwest that were cliched. Above all else, I didn’t want my photographs to look like a stereotypical travel postcard.

For several years, I took weekend screen printing classes at the MIAD. I was drawn to the photo emulsion process from the very beginning and using historic photographs as the source for my imagery. I was allowed to use class time as an independent study, and I intentionally gave myself this space to create without a set of objective and or clearly defined goals. I have come to view this series of images as being more or less personal meditations on moments in history. Both during the process of creating them, and when looking at them afterwards, I think about who I would have been during those historic moments based on my actions now. It’s a thought exercise that forces me to take an honest look at who I really am. Not the way I want see myself, but the way history will one day objectively define me, because that is when the divide between thoughts and actions becomes the most clear.