Inspired: Antron Carpet Fiber

Client: Antron Nylon / Invista
Role: Tone Development, Concept, Interviews, Writing

I've done a good deal of work for Antron (a company that makes carpet fiber; see the video below for more), but this is probably my favorite project to date. It's a 20-page printed piece that revolves around finding inspiration in carefully handcrafted things. There's not a single mention of carpet in it, actually; this is all about story--and creating Antron as a resource for finding your design spark wherever you may encounter it.

Read the brochure here and, don't forget to take in its gorgeous photography and design, too.

Antron Carpet Fiber

Client: Antron Nylon / Invista
Role: Tone Development, Scriptwriting

Antron makes carpet fiber, which is kind of the Intel inside the stuff that we walk all over every day. Chemical makeup and fancy coatings help this very special "thread" make a big difference to how good a floor looks after icky spills, goopy chemical drips and a hundred thousand or so stampeding feet. Thing is, even designers don't often think about carpet fiber and how choosing the right one can mean the difference between a gorgeous space...and a space that needs new floor covering in a few years.

I worked with Iconologic to write this light little video for Antron to help interior designers understand how "spec'ing" (specifying) carpet is so important to a space's look and longevity.

Whirlpool

Client: Whirlpool
Role: Brand Strategy, Copywriting, App Flow and Content

Your appliances have spoken. Part Jetsons-era idealism, part common sense (Wouldn't it be great if your dryer could text you when your clothes are done?), Whirlpool Smart Appliances are the top of the line in connected home products.

I worked with Whirlpool's in-house design and marketing team to develop a full brand strategy for this new offering (including a friendly voice for washers, fridges and other appliances), then helped develop the flow of and content for connected apps, websites, in-box printed materials and other marketing.

Check it out fully at: mysmartappliances.com and whirlpool.com/smart-appliances

Wellet!

Client: OneView / Wellet
Role: Naming, Tone/Voice Creation, Copywriting, Scriptwriting

College is Haaaaard. Think about it: you're away from home for the first time. Your day is 100% your own, to schedule to the minute...or sleep in every morning. Pop-tarts start to look like the perfect food group. Sleep? Eh. Maybe tomorrow. Before you know it, the freshman 5 has turned into the freshman 20 and you're a raging ball of snot every other week. Wellet--a brand new wellness app aimed at college freshman--can help get you back on track.

I worked with startup OneView to create the name, voice, tone and content for this cool new way to engage the college population in wellness. It's dynamic, social, and full of tips, tricks and opportunities to win school-related schwag. Take a look! Maybe your routine could use some tuning up, too?

Check it out at www.wellet.com

Business Book Review

Client: EBSCO Publishing
Role: Summarization and Synthesis of Business Books

For EBSCO's Business Book service, I summarized, simplified and synthesized thousands of pages of content for skimming, scanning and easy digestion by corporate players on the go, condensing entire business-focused volumes into downloadable summaries available by subscription. From marketing to sales, policy to corporate compliance (and about every other hot-button you can think of), I touched 30-some titles over my relationship with the company.

Visit EBSCO's Business Book Summaries on the Web

Duke Executive Health

Client: Duke Executive Health
Role: Print Content Creation, Script Writing

No one can deny that healthcare is changing in the U.S. Duke Executive Health is ahead of the curve, offering comprehensive, one-stop, one-day health assessments to businesspeople who want an immediate handle on their health at this moment. It's preventative care for the jet set, and it's coming for everyone, just you wait. My contribution: creation of a conversational, straight-forward tone that gets to the heart (and lungs and spleen) of the matter.

See the Brochure

C5 Youth Foundation of Georgia

Client: C5 Georgia
Role: Brand Strategy, Annual Report Content, Web Content, Brochure Content, Online Newsletter Content, PR

C5 Georgia isn't your typical youth development program. The organization takes its time--five years with each student chosen--taking students from challenging situations and turning them into leaders primed for college and ready to return to their communities to create positive change. I've had the privilege of working on dozens of pieces for this remarkable organization over the past four years, including creating a unique brand strategy, writing their website and newsletters, and concepting and writing three consecutive annual reports.

Read the 2011 AR
Visit C5 Georgia on the Web
See C5's National Case Statement

Le Caveau

Client: Le Caveau Fine Wines
Role: Content Creation, Web

Le Caveau means "The Cave", an intimate, fantastic little place to grab a glass and some inside information on a favorite vintage. It's also a real space--a lovely little wine shop in charming Chamblee, Georgia run completely on the boundless energy of its world-traveling owner, Eric Brown. I had the pleasure of talking grapes with Eric, and writing some web copy that communicated his passion for one of the world's oldest beverages.

Visit Le Caveau on the web

Georgia Holiday Ball

Client: The Tourism and Development Alliance of Georgia (TDAG)

Role: Brand Strategy, Copywriting

Georgia's TDAG organization joined forces with the Georgia music hall of fame in late 2010 to celebrate something that our state has in spades: diverse musical heritage. In collaboration with  Dopp Kit Media , I defined brand strategy and messaging, wrote invitations and press releases, and themed the signature event--The Georgia Ball--a night of celebrity auctions, great food and music from every corner of the state. The revelation (and the Ball's theme line): Music Moves Us--to explore, discover, and enjoy every corner of our little part of the South.

Check out the event's signature piece--our theme immortalized in spray paint in Atlanta's Castleberry Hill Arts District.

Lawyers! On the Web!

Clients: Moebes Law, The Partin Law Firm, The Mabra Firm, Mykkeltvedt & Loftin, LLC

Role: Web Content Creation

They help people in distress. They give great advice on the law. The wear a lot of ties. Who are these people? The proprietors of small law firms; in the trenches helping ordinary schmoes like you and I stay on the right side of the law every day. I've written a handful of websites for these enterprising men and women in well-tailored suits. They're an interesting bunch, and while this might not be the most pants-on-fire exciting content on the planet, differentiation, clarity and consistency are all key skills demonstrated here. 


Case, as they say, closed.


Visit: Moebes Law, The Mabra Firm, M&L, Partin Law

doc.

Client: doc. Furniture
Role: Brand Development, Web Content Creation


doc. makes modern furniture with a sense of humor. Forget that sterile, sharp-edged glass coffee table in your mid-century obsessed grandmother's living room, this is modern furniture that really works with you, lives in your space, plays nicely with your other furnishings--even that stuff you picked up at Target. The nice folks at doc. asked me to help them define their brand (sly, quirky, with a wry sense of humor), write their web copy (of the same ilk), and sit in their chairs with great regularity. They're exceptionally comfortable.


Visit www.docbuilt.com

InterContinental Hotels Group

Client: InterContinental Hotels Group
Role: Concept, Writing/Content Creation

InterContinental Hotels Group manages properties that you'd absolutely recognize anywhere in the world--InterContinental Resorts, Crowne Plaza, even Holiday Inn. So many, that they had a great idea that makes perfect sense, and probably makes travelers and conventioneers very happy. Why not, they thought, reward front desk employees for helping stranded travelers get settled into another, close-by InterContinential property when the location of choice is overbooked? From this, they created the LeadShare Program, which designer Stephanie Aron and I worked into a fun do-it-yourself guide that makes following the leader a (literally) rewarding experience.

We created a number of pieces, from a brochure to introductory letters and reward vouchers.

Terranova Landscape Design

Client: Terranova Landscape Design
Role: Brand Development, Web Content

Landscapers are a lot like those of us in the creative field--just with a bunch more dirt under their fingernails. They've got vision, passion for their art, a sense of color and scale, and loads of personality. That last one though, you've got to dig a bit to find. (Pun intended. Why not?) For Terranova, web designer Sheree Hill-Kim and I created a web look and feel with a lot of beauty, a little wit and a few thorns. (Ok, now I can't stop.) Just check the whole thing out here.

SMFD

Client: SMFD (Skylar Morgan Furniture Design)
Role: Brand Strategy, Web Content, PR Creation,

SMFD designs and builds furniture that pushes every hot-button headline point possible in the interior design biz. Made of reclaimed or sustainable materials, covered with do-no-harm varnishes and designed with an eye to both sleek modernism and quirky, almost rustic usibility, their desks, benches, shelving units and whole-business renovations are beautiful, and beautifully earth-friendly.

SMFD asked me to get to know them, learn about their work, their mission, and then write a couple of press releases and a web site. Check out two recent releases here and here and visit smf-d.com to really get a feel for who they are.

Oz Magazine

Client: Oz Publishing
Role: Recurring Column Editor, Feature Writer

A few years back, when I was just beginning my freelance career, the editor of Oz Magazine (a creative industry publication here in Atlanta) approached me about editing a recurring column. They called it "OzCetera," and the deal went something like this: "Call agencies. Find out what's new and interesting and big-budget going on in their shops. In absence of any real news, read their press releases. Write up a little blurb about how great business is. Rinse and repeat." To be honest, the blurbs weren't that interesting, and I wasn't allowed to embellish or play anywhere beyond the timbre of each agency's prescribed press voice. But, it was a great experience. And, eventually, it got me this: a cover story.

Click the link to read about the "great film vs digital debate." And remember, this was 2003, before 10 mega pixel beautiousness and post-production folk out-ranking photographers on the pay scale.

Here Magazine

Client: Cooper Carry Architects
Role: Writer

I'm proud to have worked on the award-winning Here Magazine—a 200+ page publication for Cooper Carry Architects. This is the third Here. Each edition explores a topic of immediate worldly weight, viewing it through the lenses of architecture and cultural significance. It is, as we say in the publication, an exploration of an issue at the intersection of time and place.

This year the topic was energy. Among other things, I contributed articles regarding embodied energy in everyday objects, a comparison of the electric power structures of Africa and China, commentary on vertical farming, sustainability in suburbia, and a little rant about conspicuous consumption of clean, green energy.

Read a few of my favorite pieces. Check out the entire magazine here.

**Here Magazine, The Energy Issue has been honored with a number of awards, including a One Show Pencil, an AIGA SEED Award, and entry into both Print magazine's Design Annual and its Create + Commerce archives, among a number of other accolades.

Auburn University - CADC100

Client: Auburn University College of Architecture, Design and Construction (CADC)
Role: Writer, Interviewer, Primary Researcher

In 2007, the Auburn CADC celebrated its 100th anniversary, setting a milestone as the oldest accredited architecture school in the southeast. To celebrate, the college commissioned a coffee table book be designed and written for distribution to alumni, friends, students, and the general public. What we ended up creating was a 200-page volume chronicling 100 fascinating, historic, emotional, personal, academic, and utterly random things about the school (presented through found artifacts, documents, letters, snapshots, lists, endless conversations, interviews, and personal narratives).

The Auburn CADC100 book was included in the Communication Arts Design Annual, 2007, and won a 2008 AIGA SEED Award.

View a Few Spreads from the CADC100 Book

InReality

Client: Amtico Flooring, UK
Role: Writer, Art Director

This piece is one in a series of four brochures designed for UK-based Amtico Flooring showrooms and direct mail distribution. Titled InReality, each brochure subverts the typical contract interior case-study format to look at a space from the view of those who are most affected by it: those who live and work within its walls. Volume II (shown) profiles an installation of non-toxic Amtico flooring in an assisted-care facility in upstate New York. Others in the series profiled installations (and people) from schools, retail, and other public-facing locales where Amtico flooring makes a difference.

See the Whole Brochure

Zeftron Nylon

Client: Honeywell
Role: Writer, Art Director, Photo Assistant, Location Scout

Zeftron Nylon (a division of mega-chemical corporation Honeywell) makes some interesting products. Among them petroleum-based carpet fiber that is 100% recyclable, and can be made again and again from the same materials without using any more oil. They call the process "Closed-Loop Recycling," and I was commissioned to create a series of ads to illuminate the sustainable glory of this rather cool carpet. The ad above (and the remainder of the campaign, available via the link below) was shot on-location in Los Angeles by Gregory Miller, and appeared on the back cover of Contract Magazine.

See the Whole Campaign