The Brief: Signify Health is the leader in-home health risk assessments in the United States; however, it faces fierce competition, not only in this product line but several others in which it has grown in. The original brand, much of which was carried over through the acquisition of Censeo Health, was several years old and didn’t reflect the variety of services and overall mission of the company. We needed to do a brand “refresh”, that is, to develop tone and aesthetics that would encompass what the company had stood for all along: Bringing Health Homeward.

The Process: In a joint effort with the W2O Group, we started by establishing what our core message was. In the ever-complicated world of healthcare software solutions, we wanted to express the value that we brought, not only to our customers (health plans, payors, and providers), but to their members as well. We needed a message that was “large” enough to encompass that mission, without getting lost in the granular details.

The concept of bringing health back into the home speaks to what we do – building a healthier place for us all to live in. Once the core brand message was established, we went over hundreds of typefaces and colors. We wanted to have a fresh face without completely alienating our history and existing clients. Everything would need to be an evolution of what we already had.

We chose Lato as our primary typeface. Its round shapes were friendly and inviting, and helped serve as a natural progression from our dated Gibson font of yesteryear.

We updated our teal to be a bit brighter, modernizing it. We supplemented it with a very relevant, lime color. We then expanded our limited palette with a swathe of other rich colors, not commonly used in the healthcare space.

We added subtle graphical elements to the overall visual language, including arrows to convey movement and notched images to increase the dynamism of the brand.

Our website was the perfect opportunity to showcase this new visual identity but we decided to take the website redesign a step further and really focus on our users. We restructured the information architecture to make it easier for our users to find the the solutions they were looking for. The updated navigation allows users to parse through the site by audience and solution types. Within each page we also focused on our outcomes, to help drive our click-through rate on our CTAs and keep users engaged on the page.

Along with the website, we updated our presentations, sales support collateral (i.e. whitepapers, sales sheets, issue briefs) and other digital materials.

Today, as a result of the rebrand and coordinated marketing effort, our website has seen an increase in total traffic of almost 50%.

The Brief: Although TAVHealth has been around for almost a decade, the company is constantly reinventing itself, in a very lean startup-esque way. In order to keep the company relevant in an industry where our competitors were constantly gaining marketshare, I decided to push for a rebrand.

The Process: The old colors, a rich green and gold, although sophisticated, were excessively baroque and antiquated. The old logo employed serif fonts and had a very “vintage” feel to it.

In order to keep the brand fresh, modern and relevant, I made the decision to change to a non-serif font, Proxima Nova. I also changed the colors to a lighter green, complemented by a dark blue, and a brilliant orange.

I then coupled these elements with new unique and distinctive iconography. I found out later this style was copied by a competitor. Needless to say I was flattered.

As a result of this rebrand, and a coordinated marketing push, TAVHealth saw an increase in sales, as well as an eventual acquisition by Signify Health in 2019.

The Brief: Redesign the book, Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg.  

The Process: The cover of a book is it’s most powerful marketing tool–it influences the discoverability of a book and ultimately converts browsers into readers. Modern Romance is definitely targeted at millennials and so I focused on their undying sense of nostalgia and their hopeless sense of romanticism. I also wanted to incorporate the themes of the book while not being too “literal” and so I chose the theme of “finding love”. The shapes incite feelings of a map, while your attention is focused on love, represented, in all it's complexity, by a folded heart. 

The Brief: Take a popular website and make it more visually appealing. 

The Process: I'm a huge fan of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf brand. Maybe not some of their color-ways but I do enjoy the franchise as a whole. I picked CBTL specifically because of the current (2017) state of their online presence.

Overall the website looked dated and cluttered. I knew immediately that I wanted to streamline the site and group several of the header links together. Less is more. I wanted to draw the users attention to specific places on the screen rather than have them sort through a mess of information. 

Their brand employs a mix of purple and brown–two colors which, in theory, are aesthetically pleasing combined although here, they seem to miss the mark. I opted to stick with the earthy brown tones and replace the purple with a more modern and clean white. 

Next up was my font choice, Josefin Sans. One of my favorites. It's stylish and modern without being boring or average. The round shapes resemble coffee mugs too!

The Brief: Redesign the Rollin Smoke BBQ brand. 

The Process: This project is very dear to me for two reasons. First, it's for one of my best friends, Kyle Stallings, owner of Rollin Smoke BBQ in Austin, Texas. Second, I initially designed the brand when I first started my design career. I cannot tell you how embarrassed I was with my previous design and how proud I am of the current one. I believe that the maturity of this project is a direct reflection of where I was several years ago and where I am now, both as a designer and as a person. 

Rollin Smoke is a locally-owned small business. Kyle prides himself on sourcing all of his ingredients from nearby farmers and producers. Although you can say that about a lot of restaurants in Austin now, what separates Rollin Smoke, from other BBQ joints, is Kyle. I might be biased but Kyle's personality shines in everything that he does and it was my intention to develop a brand that was reflective of that. 

The Brief: Art direct for a restaurant or bar of your choice. 

The Process: To me, wine has always been something of a mystery. I never knew much about it and was usually too afraid to ask a sommelier out of fear that he would judge me and make me feel stupid for not knowing. Out of this misunderstanding I developed the idea for Sip Wine Bar. Sip is a place where you can go to learn about wine at your own pace. There's no dress code and it's all about having a good time. 

The basic concept of Sip revolves around enomatic wine dispensers. These wine dispensers keep open bottles of wine fresh for up to a month. More about that in just a bit, though...

The first thing a guest does when they come to Sip is purchase a reloadable purchase card. This gift card can be loaded with any amount. After purchasing the gift card the guest will see that the main area of the bar is filled with giant enomatic wine machines. They then insert their card into the machine above the wine they wish to drink. These machines have been set up so that each one can pour a glass, a half glass or a "sip". A sip is a 1 oz pour of the wine intended to give that guest a taste of the wine for a fraction of the cost. This system of sampling wines allows our guests to try wines that are usually out of their price range. 

Sip Wine Bar intends to be a bar that removes the economic barriers that people face when drinking wine. We want to bring people together over a glass of wine. 

To further extend the concept, I developed the idea for an application which allows users to learn about wine merely by scanning the label or bottle, similar to Amazon's product scanner. Although our staff would include trained sommeliers we would like to encourage people to discover the wine and it's depths through the application at their own pace. 

The Brief: Create packaging for a bottle. 

The Process: I don't drink milk. But in all honestly, I LOVE it. Some people think it's gross. I am not one of those people, however, I do believe in treating animals fairly and ethically. Anyone who has done any research would know that dairy is a terrible industry. The cows are methodically impregnated, over and over, just so that they can produce milk for human consumption. This process has devastating effects on a cow's wellbeing. 

What's even more sad is the blatant lies and deceit some dairy manufactures commit by advertising their milk as "fair" or "ethical" when this could not be further from the truth. 

That's why I wanted to develop a milk line that actually treats the cows humanely. WowCow Milk Co. represents a collective of small farms with milk producing cows. Each batch of WowCow Milk is very small and local. Whenever you drink WowCow Milk you know that the cow that produced the milk was never forced into pregnancy and that it will never be over-milked. You can also take solace in the fact that each batch is sourced from the closest ethical dairy farm to your location.  

The Brief: Brand a local lawyer's start-up law firm. 

The Process: Brandon Barnes is a recent graduate of St. Mary's Law school in San Antonio. He just recently moved back to Austin to set up his own practice. He had actually already designed his own using a D.I.Y. web service but was unhappy with the results. He felt that he could have just created the same logo in a word document. 

That's when Brandon approached me to design a logo for his firm. I started by probing into how he wanted to be perceived and who he wanted to attract. Some of the key traits Brandon spoke to me about were, integrity, honesty and being approachable. 

This logo was intended to be simple in design. The open-ended letters that form the Barnes surname imply a degree of transparency. The logo accurately represents Brandon's honest and friendly nature. 

The Brief: Intern at a local company for the art department. 

The Process: My internship experience was a little different than most i'm sure. I actually started my internship when I first started school for graphic design. At the time my knowledge of the graphic design process and methodologies was limited. 

Much of my work as an intern was production work. Although this did not give me a lot of room for creativity it did give me the chance to work on some really great projects. I have created posters, badges, buttons web graphics and menus for the Alamo Drafthouse. 

My mentors were Stephen Sosa and Zachary Short. 

I've included some of my past work here. Hit me up if you’d like to know more about a particular project.