How do you get people excited about re-releasing a shoe that’s only 4 years old?

Our charge: Convince sneakerheads these Unvaulted drops were a glimpse into the next big thing from adidas in 2018: Get them to hear the hype, believe the hype, and act on it come release time.

We built up the story of each shoe in physical and digital, creating an aura of mystery and exclusivity that sneakerheads crave.

Alerting hardcore fans that their favorite Ultraboost colorways were returning from the vault, we amped up the intrigue with four waves of content leading up to drop days.

Created at Swift

My Role:
Art Direction, Concept Development, Pre-Vis

Creative Director:
Eric Samsel

Production Lead:
Cade Wallace

Animation:
Hinge Digital

Sound:
Digital One

TikTok celebrated their Salesforce commerce integration by creating a working TikTok Creator House within the Dreamforce 2022 gathering in San Francisco. The house provided a space for creative show & tells, as well as visually conveying essential best practices for success on the platform. TikTok Creators crafted content in front of live audiences of Dreamforce attendees.

AT A GLANCE

• Packed a lot of storytelling into a 10x10’ footprint

• Optimized a high foot-traffic location within conference

• 180,000 in-person and digital attendees

MY ROLE:
Creative Direction, Environmental Design

ART DIRECTION:
Taylor Richmond

GRAPHIC DESIGN:
AJ Minnis

Project Role:
Art Direction

Writer:
Chase Stevens

Creative Direction:
Pat McCaren

Motion Design:
Martin Warszawski

At Swift, we developed an integrated campaign to help Gatorade roll out their Gx Sweat Patch technology – which measures the rate and sodium concentration of an athlete’s perspiration. This involved the production of multiple video pieces, a photoshoot, and an event series in collaboration with House of Highlights.

The creative appealled to the teen athlete by illustrating the sweat science behind the tech in an adventurous and engaging way. All-stars Paul George and Jayson Taytum added their NBA clout to the content. This helped illustrate the fact that technology once reserved for the pros was now available to athletes at every level.

TikTok Academy aims to educate and empower select external audiences through a series of interactive courses available on a branded learning platform – created using Docebo, an industry leader in learning management systems, that allows the entire platform to be easily localized from region to region.

TikTok 101 is the first course to launch at the TikTok Academy and covers, from a beginner to intermediate level, everything you need to know about how to succeed on TikTok.

AT A GLANCE

2+ hours of video content

8 interactive learning modules

Localized in 21 languages

Enroll Here

PROJECT ROLE

I was the creative lead on the visual side of the brand experience, developing the overall look & feel and how it translated into the user interface, motion graphics, interactive modules, and live action segments.

MOTION DESIGN:
Rodrigo Blergh

Role: Art Direction

At Swift my creative partner Annie Vieira and I developed a TikTok campaign to recruit socially creative teen athletes to the #GatoradeTryouts challenge. We curated a roster of TikTok sport influencers, lead by Overtime’s Chloe Pavlech to rally and showcase example content. This hype squad was supported by pros from Gatorade’s roster, including newly signed Boxer Ryan Garcia, record breaking sprinter Sydney McLaughlin, and NFL wide receiver DK Metcalf. We crafted individual briefs for each pro, each featuring multiple thought starters on how they could participate. We then lead our creative studio in helping to shape the content for the athletes.

Music is central to the TikTok experience, so we worked with Aika Music to develop a custom track for the challenge. The music needed to bring the proper sound & fury necessary for the platform, but also be flexible enough to accompany all of the many types of content responses from teen athletes.

At dotdotdash we were enlisted to create an artistic, interactive experience that would illustrate and guide users through a survey to gauge their attitudes regarding technology in their lives. We strove to contrast the very tech-heavy nature of the content with something that felt a bit surreal and handmade. This was achieved by merging illustrative artwork with 3D animation using the EB-Synth algorithm. Our partners at TBWA Backslash liked the results enough to expand the reach of the survey by localizing it for 6 globe-spanning languages.

Experience ‘The Simulation’ for firsthand HERE

Project Role: creative direction, concept artist, and sound designer

My creative journey has always been driven by an insatiable urge to experiment with the tools of the trade. If you can’t tell by now, I love a nice .GIF (produced like gift, without the T 😉).

I’ve been blessed to be able to collaborate with some incredibly skilled animators and motion designers. I believe these collaborations are strengthened when I can bring my own animation insights to the table, informed by all of the weird ideas I’ve chased over the years.

Enjoy this oddly satisfying assortment of self-initiated experiments from my archive.

What’s Your Story is a social series that aims to encourage young athletes to stay in sports by showcasing relatable accounts from professional athletes about the ups & downs of their own journey.

The stories expressively depict the athlete’s VO through geometric designs and bold, kinetic typography – cutting through the noise of social even without the soundtrack.

Created at Swift

My Role:
Concept Development, Art Direction, Sound Design

Creative Direction:
Pat McCaren

Design & Illustration:
Salomée Souag and Seunghoi An

Motion Design:
Martin Waszawski

Role: Art Direction

To prepare it for a global launch, we updated Red Bull Sound Select's logo & brand standards toolkit. This fatured a complete with a set of physical assets that allow the brand to shine in music venues from Auckland to Oslo. The pinnacle of the experience is the 30 Days in LA series - a November marathon of 30 shows held at iconic venues throughout Los Angeles. This concept was then continued the next year as 30 Days in Chicago.

Created at Roundhouse

 Role: Art Direction

Designed & Illustrated by Ben Smith

Created at Roundhouse

This seeding kit highlighted Red Bull TV’s Season of Festivals programming – allowing viewers unprecedented access to six legendary music festivals, all from the comfort of their couch. The kit itself was styled as a suitcase, packed with a can of Red Bull, a streaming TV device, and an illustrated map to help music fans navigate the global slate of festivals at their fingertips.

At Roundhouse I led the development of an integrated campaign to launch the Spring-Summer 2017 iterations of adidas’ popular NMD silhouette. To bring the theme of past empowers future to life we assembled a premiere roster of digital creators to remix a lookbook photoshoot, each in their own unique style. These visuals were then deployed as a social / digital campaign.

For the next phase of the campaign we linked socially native street photographers with legendary shooters Estevan Oriol and Jonathan Mannion. They opened up about their own creative process and then led their respective groups on nighttime photo missions through iconic locations in NYC and LA. The creative results were showcased the following day in an immersive gallery show / party in both cities.

Role: Creative Direction, Experiential Design
Created at Roundhouse

The goal of the rebrand was to create an iconic mark for supporters of this organization to rally around. The word mark is kept clean and concise, to reflect the fundamental notion of basic rights. The geographic outline of the state of Oregon rests on the word mark, symbolizing the role this state plays in the fight for basic rights.

Role: Brand Design
Created at Roundhouse

Roles: Art Direction / Environmental Design / Motion Design
Created at Roundhouse in collaboration with DotDotDash

To hype the launch of the adidas Originals Fall / Winter 2016 apparel capsule at Urban Outfitters, we created virtual reality experience, coupled with a live music performance. Guests got the chance to take a 3D portrait, and then customize it in VR. Their creation was projection mapped as part of a live show, featuring Phantogram, Remy Banks, and Andre Power.

Role: Art Direction

At Swift, my creative partner Annie Vieira and I are leading the charge to evolve the social presence of the navigation app Waze across all of their platforms – from the day-to-day posts, through thought leadership initiatives and larger campaign rollouts.

Our approach is always social first. We interpret the insights provided to us by our strategy and data teams – translating them into engaging creative executions. We reject the notion that one size fits all, and instead adopt a bespoke approach that adapts creative to the unique behavioral and tonal nuances of each social platform.

At DotDotDash, we were tapped by regular client HTC to develop an interactive installation to showcase the capabilities of their new VIVE mixed reality headset at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The concept began as an interactive mixed reality piece, where users get to help build their own city of the future. It ended up pivoting to become a flight down musical wormhole, a bit Willy Wonka meets Tron. Users were able to utilize the control cube to move between environments and steer the experience. Each scene had a layered musical track associated with it. This allowed the soundtrack to elegantly crossfade between scenes in unique ways for each user.

To launch Vol. 3 of Harden’s shoe in 2018, we developed mysterious visual stories aligned with five colorway releases: Voyager, Cosmos, Mission, Invader, and Supernova.

To hype the styles, we took fans on an insider journey behind the scenes of an epic Harden studio shoot with legendary basketball photographer Atiba Jefferson. Using that footage, we built custom, undeniably Harden stories — dynamic, vibrant and unpredictable.

We rocketed each one into viewers’ orbit with eye-popping takeovers on Instagram, giving followers a glimpse of the drops to come.

Personally, my favorite aspect of this project was the full IG grid takeover of the adidas basketball account. Early on in the project I created a handful of experimental animated GIFs to guide the look and feel.

Project Role: Art Direction and Design

Animation: Martin Warszawski

Illustration: Tony Aguero

Created at Swift

adidas and Roundhouse partnered for the Fall/Winter 2017 NMD launch, creating two immersive camera obscura installations in LA and NYC. As the literal beginning of photography, the camera obscura showcased the modern style of urban explorers and debuted the new NMDs. Visitors experienced the intersection of the past and future by being photographed inside an analog projection of the outside world.

Role: Art Direction, Environmental Design
Created at Roundhouse

Kinetic Spirits represents my efforts to establish digital art within the greater context of art history. I drew parallels between the two by inserting kinetic ‘sculptures’ into the space created by the old master painters. These interactions between past and present show that the creative impulse may look different from era to era, but comes from a similar place within the human consciousness.

The series was rolled out as a digital show via Portland’s OneGrand Gallery, and went on to receive earned media coverage from Hi-Fructose Magazine and Vice Creators Project