Creative direction

I help founders and small teams find the words and the look before they go public — naming, positioning, and the first version of a brand that can grow.

Recent projects span a few industries but share a method. For a climate startup, I built a name and a plain-spoken voice that let a complicated idea fit on a billboard. For a members’ club, a wordmark and a set of rules that a small team could run without a designer in the room. For a publisher relaunching a forty-year-old magazine, a redesign that respected the archive without being trapped by it. In each case the work started with a week of listening — to founders, to customers, to the people who would have to live with the result — and ended with a kit simple enough to actually use. I don’t hand over a hundred-page guideline nobody reads; I hand over the handful of decisions that matter and the confidence to make the rest.

I spent a decade in agencies and in-house teams before going independent, which means I know what it’s like on both sides of the brief. I work directly — no account layer, no hand-offs — and I keep a light client list so the people I take on get real attention. I’m most useful early, when a few good decisions save a lot of money later.