Hi,
I’m a Fortune 500 Graphic Designer and Report Design / Presentation Design Specialist in the marketing & communications space. My professional background is highly diverse, with experience in industries including tech, entertainment, pharmaceutical, law, media, fashion, finance, retail, restaurants, agriculture. After living in the Northwest for 5 years, I am currently back in SoCal enjoying the sunshine and melting pot of culture!
I've had the pleasure of working with some great brands like Hulu, Samsung, Experian, American Express, Circle K, Dolby, Peacock, Digital Realty, Evolus, Vitality Institute, and FETNEH BLAKE CONCEPT. From high tech to high fashion, I'm driven to expand my horizons and seek unique opportunities.
A big highlight of the past year was designing strategy/product roadmap reports for one of the CEOs of Samsung as well as TV show/movie marketing media kits at Hulu, and assisting with industry events at Experian.
My diverse experience between contracting in-house to freelancing with agencies across the country makes me a valuable and agile resource to any design team, whether local or international.
I am always happy to take additional projects when my schedule allows, and remain flexible for high impact projects!
Brand Highlights
Selected Work
Tap arrows for project descriptions and PDFs
Hulu Media Kits
Global streaming service
Due to NDA, I cannot share actual project content. While contracting on the Greenhouse team at Hulu , I was tasked with creating branded media kits for upcoming show releases. Some of my responsibilities included formatting key art layouts, creating information layouts, creating mockups for ad placements, and creating animations for trailer spots.
Samsung Keynote Graphics
Electronics manufacturer
Samsung Store Signage
Electronics manufacturer
Created while contracting on the Product Innovation Team (PIT) at Samsung Electronics America in Mountain View. I had the opportunity to design signage mockups for Samsung's 837 flagship store in New York, providing wayfinding instructions for visitors to interact with dynamic lighting and technology functions in product exhibit rooms.
Samsung CEO Reports
Electronics manufacturer
Circle K Report Template
Convenience store chain
An interdepartmental performance report design template series, created for my client Circle K, a global convenience store and petroleum filling station chain. Working directly with one of the global e-commerce department managers, my objective for this project was to create a uniform reporting framework for various geographical teams to provide performance metrics for their individual sections.
A notable feature of this project is a semi-automated branded map pin visualization technique I developed while I was working with one of Digital Realty's strategy SVPs in 2016. This method is executed via inputting addresses into a mapping software via spreadsheet, and customizing location fields to their corresponding brands.
For this project, I created custom color-coded brand pins to designate locations for regional delivery partners such as Doordash, Instacart, Favor, etc.
View 14 pages of layout samples here (content removed for IP confidentiality).
Dolby Research Report
Audio/video technology creator
A 100+ page qualitative research report design, prepared for my client's client Dolby, a global leader in industry standard audio and video technology. A massive flagship research undertaking with the need for several dozen unique page layouts, my approach towards visual continuity and maintaining audience interest was to create an engaging page flow anchored by alternating high contrast core brand colors.
View 11 pages of layout samples here (content removed for IP confidentiality).
AmEx Research Report
Payment card provider
A 38-page qualitative research report design, prepared for my client's client American Express, a household name and global leader in payment card services. My objective for this report was to interpret and expand upon AmEx's official brand book, to create a branded strategy deliverable for their products & services.
Keeping in mind the complexity of concepts presented in this report, my main priority was to structure each segment into digestible pieces while keeping in continuity with the core American Express brand identity. View 10 pages of layout samples here (content removed for IP confidentiality).
Media Bros White Paper
Carbon filter media manufacturer
White paper design for a filter media manufacturer based in Portland, Oregon. Created white paper layout, illustration, and ad content for a digital marketing campaign. Download the PDF here.
Microsoft Keynote Spec
Computing technology creator
A design sample created for a Microsoft communications team supporting the CCO of Microsoft. Click here to view the PDF.
Nemadji Infographic
Medical billing service
The technical challenge in laying out this infographic was how to show 3 interrelated, highly complex process flows in a narrow vertical format. The client decided on a scroll-down-then-scroll-back-up layout, so that the audience could fully read the Revenue Cycle steps, before going back up to the core service of the Nemadji brand.
Using a very sparse homepage as a brand guide, the main theme followed the logo's soft teals while a punchy electric blue really highlighted the core service.
Talkable White Paper
E-commerce retention platform
An 11-page digital white paper, detailing the early pandemic's effect on consumer shopping behavior. Using their homepage as a brand guide, I extracted key typography and color codes, then improvised the rest while riffing on page decoration floater art. Calming shades of blue were used to try and make the visual environment a little less stressful than the context implied..
This was an extremely data-heavy project with hundreds of unique data points that were manually drawn from dozens of raw Excel tables. Definitely the kind of project to be doing while stuck inside. View the full doc here.
Jacoby & Meyers Billboard
Personal injury law firm
20-40' billboards for a high budget awareness campaign all over Los Angeles and Orange County. We kept the classic yellow and black "phonebook" colors while juxtaposing it with a text message bubble and crispy smartphone art. One blog had this to say about it: "Aimed at millennials, it does a great job of reducing the fundamental logic of personal injury law to a form anyone can understand using emojis."
The best part of this campaign was getting Slacks from my boss and coworkers whenever they saw one on the road, almost definitely while stuck in traffic.
Makemerry Infographic
Medical bra manufacturer
There was no brand guide or any existing brand colors for this particular project. Keeping in mind that this product was designed for women with medical sensitivities, I created a soft color palette of muted tones with energetic pops of color for an approachable look. Hard edges were intentionally minimized, instead relying on demure organic shapes to anchor the information as gently as possible.
For something so personally affecting for a woman, I wanted to make this piece the furthest thing from threatening or authoritative as possible, creating a comfortable encouragement to buy the product.
Custom.io Key Art
Automated messaging platform
A spec exercise to visually communicate a complex SaaS product in a single image. Starting with a rough digital sketch, the illustration's focus centers around a lively dashboard experience that shows multiple user phases. The dashboard is surrounded by visual representations of the end product, which are push notifications, email, and SMS. These components spatially dominate the composition in order to emphasize the end goal of reaching multi-channel audiences.
Restaurant Adia Article
Fine dining startup
A 2,000 word original piece about a popup fine dining concept started by two chefs formerly of the Studio restaurant at the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach, widely considered one of the most artful and refined coastal dining destinations in Orange County. I sat in on two dinners, the first of which was their first ever. After doing the staff interview, I then staged a photoshoot at a coworker's family member's beachside home in Laguna Beach... which was a synchronicitous offering, for certain reasons related to microgreens...
I re-mocked up the page layout to be 4 pages instead of the 2 as published, the actual photo of the article is at the end of the slides.
To view my PDF mockup, click here.
Bond & Taylor Booklet
Personal injury law firm
I had the privilege of completely rebranding every single touchpoint for an up-and-coming law firm in Orange County. One of the biggest projects of the year was a 36-page client booklet that would be used in high stakes client signups as well as partnership brokerage. Simultaneously a firm overview as well as personal branding for the directing attorneys and staff, this booklet exemplified the polished white-glove service style of the firm. View the full doc here.
Janssen Family Farms Branding
Hazelnut farm
My second ever independent client after moving to Oregon, this was a super fun project creating a new brand identity from scratch. The client provided photos of an actual hazelnut and sunset view of Mary's Peak from their property, which I illustrated against a sunray background. The entire composition is framed in a hazelnut-shaped badge, which the client was thrilled with. After completing the logo, we moved onto an informational notecard which they could hand out to potential stockists along with small bags of samples.
It's hard to describe how ridiculously good and fresh their Sacajawea varietal was, from their first mature harvest ever.
Bond & Taylor Homepage
Personal injury law firm
Updated styling for the first version of the site we launched. Working closely with the directing attorneys, we built a page concept that was modern yet no-frills, to convey their vision of a white glove professional office. This version highlighted personal branding and real client testimonial videos as a way to build trust with potential clients.
Motivational Sticker
Nice words for dark times
A simple color study of first morning light on Mt. Washington from my backyard, imagined from the shore of a nearby lake.... Meant for a matte sticker print, gradient layers range from soft to hard to create depth. This mountain peak is the centerpoint of the incredibly vast Central Oregon mountainscape, which is something that can only be appreciated in person.
I wanted to capture the feeling that despite collectively going through a tough and sometimes bleak year in 2020, that dark times don't last forever.
Get in touch
Drop me a line or 3! I'd love to learn how we can work together.
© Karolyn Kay 2024. All rights reserved.