A small batch vodka hand distilled in Northeast Minneapolis.

Outpost Vodka was the first spirit to come out of Wander North Distillery, located in the arts district of Northeast Minneapolis. They believe in using locally sourced ingredients to craft high-quality spirits. You might call that “grain to glass.” They call it good sense.

I designed two versions of the artwork and packaging for the spirit, a clear, silkscreened design and a dark, paper label for their smaller bottles.

Brian Winter founded the distillery in 2013; the first veteran owned distillery in Minnesota.  Production and distribution started in August of 2014. The Wander North name is tied to their personal philosophy that people should push boundaries to find their own way, regardless of what it looks like to anyone else. When in doubt, they defer to J.R.R. Tolkien quite often.

I felt right at home working with Wander North, as I have had a lot of experience working in the wilderness -- I spent some years leading wilderness canoe trips in Lake of the Woods, MN. I also love to camp and to hike; it felt like a match made in heaven.

The bottle is silk screened with the design to produce look and feel that stands out in an over-crowded shelf.  The main symbol of the design is an island with a red dashed-line and X, symbolizing the journey to your destination. The island is overlaid with topographic lines and markings pulled from a map I had used during my time leading trips. The island itself is based on the island I was stationed out of, Oak Island, MN.

In addition to the main 750ml bottle, Wander North has produced a smaller 350ml bottle. With the smaller bottle, it was decided to go with a paper label rather than a silk screened label. To create distinction between the two I designed this black-label for the smaller bottle.

A micro-distillery's first craft spirit.

Outpost Vodka

Plotly creates leading open source tools for composing, editing, and sharing interactive data visualization via the Web.

Plotly is a technical computing company headquartered in Montreal, Canada. They are transforming how scientists, engineers, and business analysts visualize data through precedent setting open-source software. 

I have worked with Plotly for a few years. I have implemented designs for their marketing pages, designed and developed websites for their conferences, and assited with their documentation & support systems.

I had the pleasure of implementing designs for the new Plotly from an amazing designer, Fabricio Rosa Marques. The team worked tirelessly on the new design and I then took the static sketch files and implemented them across all of the marketing pages that make up Plotly. There are numerous product, company and other pages that were included in the implementation. 

The site is a server side rendered react application that pulls data from prismic.io, processes all of its images via imgix, and is hosted on Github Pages as a statically exported version of the application.

The new marketing pages for plot.ly are build in react + redux, using next.js, a framework for universal isomorphic web applications. We're using prismic.io as the headless CMS, leveraging their dynamic content models heavily to produce many different variations in layout. And finally all of the images are processed through imgix.com. 

Documentation is the foundation of any widely used software library. The documentation for Plotly was in bit of a mess when I was brought into the project. Typography, colors and the overall design was inconsistent throughout their many pages of support. In addition to the design updates, none of the docs before were responsive. Now they work on any device of any size. 

I have worked on the docs over a few iterations. The most recent updates included a refresh of the design and markup to reflect the new branding.

The world's most visionary conference for data visualization.

PLOTCON is the conference that Plotly runs focusing in data visualization. They hold a conference every six months, jumping between the east and west coasts. I designed and developed their front-end websites for the conferences. In addition to the website, I created some collateral materials to be used during the conference. 

Visualize Data, Together.

Plotly

An encrypted cryptocurrency portfolio management tool.

Coins is an encrypted cryptocurrency portfolio management tool created on top of Blockstack. Built from the ground up to measure your performance at varying scales, from fine-grain to high-level insights. I lead the branding, design, and frontend development (UI engineering) of this project with my good friend Chase Wackerfuss.

I got a call from my friend and fellow developer, Chase Wackerfuss telling me about a 'bounty' he saw for a portfolio application to be built on top of Blockstack. I hadn't heard of Blockstack before, but I had been wanting to enter the space of blockchain technologies and thought this would be great chance to do so! 

Blockstack is an organization trying to build a new internet based off of the blockchain.

Coins is one of the first decentralized apps built on Blockstack. It lives in the main home screen of the blockstack browser. You can download and install blockstack, or view a demo of the app here.

In addition to all of the UI and UX of the main application, I designed and developed a landing page for the launch of the application. The timeline was tight, and as such I had to design and implement this page in only a few days. I am lucky to know a very talented illustrator, Fabricio Rosa Marques, through my work with Plotly. We hired him to create an illustration for the hero section. 

The landing page is built in react using ZEIT's next.js for SSR it's statically exported and running in GitHub Pages.

We launched the application on December 20th, the day we learned we had won the bounty. Coins was featured on Product Hunt, and we got on the front page of Hacker News for a while. Some metrics of our first day live:

2. Front Page of Hacker News (89 Upvotes and 38 Comments) 

Coins

Album artwork for a band from Duluth, MN.

Many of my best friends are musicians. While I have a deep love for music, I myself have very little musical ability (outside of playing the didgeridoo). In an effort to contribute to the musical renaissance that my friends are a part of, I have designed some art for a few of their projects. In addition to the design, I have done the photography for a few of these albums. 

This is the album artwork for the first EP, everything breaks, from paloma paloma, a group based out of Duluth, Minnesota.

You can listen to their EP here: palomapaloma.bandcamp.com

Everything breaks.

Paloma Paloma

Tamarack & Co is my photography studio based out of Minneapolis, MN.

Tamarack & Co. is the name I operate my photography studio under. The studio has a primary focus in street and travel photography. The name comes from my favorite tree, Larix laricina, or more commonly known as the Tamarack.

I strive to capture authentic moments that unfold in front me wherever I might be. I wanted to create an online portfolio that would render quickly without sacrificing image quality.

Over the last few years, I've had the fortunate opportunity to travel to different parts of the planet. I've always been pretty interested in photography, and I purchased my first, and current, digital camera in February 2016. Since then I have taken it everywhere I've gone, and found a love for street photography.

I am absolutely captivated by people everywhere, and love to capture the authentic little moments that unfold in front of us everywhere. I have shot in places such as Tokyo, Valparaíso, Copenhagen, Berlin, Kyoto, Paris, Barcelona, and more. 

My main profression is as a web developer and designer. I wanted to create a home for my photography that would take advantage of the latest web technologies. The site is a react application, loading data from prismic.io and all of the photos are processed through imgix for on-the-fly compression, resizing and other adjustments.

A home for street and travel photography.

A photography studio.

Tamarack & Co

During my teenage years, I spent a lot of time both watching Star Trek and playing on the computer. These are pieces of digital art I did pre-2012.

I still remember the day I first used photoshop. My brother had just downloaded a copy of it, version 7 I think, and wanted to show me. He's the reason I am a designer today. Without ever using it, I don't know what I'd be doing today.

I spent a lot of time watching and reading science fiction, Star Trek and Farscape being some of my favorite shows. I had played around with making some of the space scenes I saw in TV, and over the course a few years, 2005-2011, I spent countless hours teaching myself photoshop, learning how to recreate some of my favorite science-fiction scenes, while also exploring my own made up scenes. 

These are some of my favorite pieces from that time period.

“I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”

Space Art

One of the oldest autumn festivals in Minnesota.

Sever's Fall Festival is one of the oldest autumn festivals in Minnesota. They are most known for their corn maze which has a different theme each year. In 2016 they started an initiative to rebrand themselves, moving away from being only known as a corn maze to being known as the fall festival they are.

I refreshed their branding and designed and developed a new website for them.

To help convey their autumn and fall meaning, their new branding brings in many of the colors you'd see during autumn. The colors are all the things I imagine when I think of autumn; a bright blue sky, oranges and yellows with accents of green. The mark itself is a badge that still displays elements from their past, a corn maze, while their name now speaks more directly to the fall festival. 

The design of the site continues on with the style and color palette of the new mark. I wanted to be able to display their beautiful photography very prominently on the site with large, full width imagery.

The site is a progressive web application built in AngularJs and it uses a custom-made, headless CMS as the backend. The images are processed through imgix and loaded through a CDN. Prerender,io is used to allow for accurate open graph data and metadata to be shared on social media. 

Working with the Sever's was fantastic. They truly love what they do, and it show's throughout the whole festival. If you find yourself in Minnesota in autumn, do yourself a favor and attend Sever's Fall Festival.

The Midwest's original Fall Festival.

Sever's Fall Festival

A product that combines a CMS, CRM and event management tool.

Symposia is an event management platform that I helped create. It has a focus on being more configurable and customizable than other off-the-shelf products to manage events. I was the lead designer, front-end developer, and I created the name and branding associated with the product. 

Running a conference can be hard enough without thinking about how you're going to process tickets, show speakers, workshops, and other content. We wanted to create a product that would allow anyone to administer and run a conference with ease. We also wanted to allow for ultimate flexibility in the type of conferences that could be run through the system.  This platform allows for event management to operate the same way you would operate a blog or personal website. Define some content models, and then create relationships between them.

The product can be tailored to specific types of users: event planners, CEOs, and developers.

The most robust event management platform.

When brainstorming and thinking about what this product does, I kept coming back to ancient Greece. I am a big fan of philosophy, and Plato is a particular favorite of mine. The name Symposium was what I was thinking over and over again. I thought it made perfect sense.

Taking into consideration that this would deal with many such events, we opted to pluralize the name to Symposia.

A headless event management platform.

Symposia

A custom designed and developed email template.

IDUN is a modern boutique storefront that offers collections from MYKITA, Young Frankk, Le Mont St. Michel and others. They wanted to up their emails to the next level after a period of rapid growth in popularity. They had been using various off-the-shelf templates through their email platform but felt that it was lacking and did not provide them with enough control.

I took their existing brand and extended it into a 100% custom email template with abstracted out components to provide them with as much flexibility they needed.

During our conversations, IDUN mentioned over and over again at how little control they felt they had over the look and feel of their email. They were forced into typical layouts and designs that didn't really match up with their aesthetic. They wanted an easy-to-use template that could be used in a number of different contexts: product spotlight, highlighting a blog post, event announcements, and a standard product grid.

I made the recommendation to stay with their current platform, Mailchimp, and I opted to leverage Mailchimp's markup tools to abstract out the differing layout blocks.

The design is inspired by the effortless style that is IDUN—a dancer, suspended in a moment of weightlessness; beautiful and confident. I wanted the design of the emails to be transparent, lifting the items and products showcased by IDUN above everything else.

An additional requirement that needed to be met was how the template would look on mobile devices. Developing for responsiveness with standard websites and applications is pretty straightforward in 2017. However, with email, we're stuck in the early 2000's. With dozens of clients to support and a wide range of rendering engines, developing responsive emails is... annoying. IDUN's emails will render on your Iphone X with a notch, or your dad's old Compac running Windows NT.

You can sign up for their newsletter on their site. shopidun.com

A modern boutique located in St. Paul, MN.

Shop IDUN

Website, branding and photography for an internet based radio show.

The podcast is a product of love. Love for music, vinyl and community. The branding is a reflection of the idea, simple and straight-forward. The mark highlights clean typography and bold contrast.

The website extends the branding, reflecting a clean grid layout, allowing for easy access to past shows and all the music that was spun during each episode. Each episode also has a special musical guest who performs during the hour. 

select work