SELECTED PROJECTS • BRAND + DESIGN + COPY + DIGITAL
A Few More Projects Worth a Look
Not every project becomes a years-long brand story.
Sometimes the assignment is a campaign, a website, an identity, a brochure—or a problem that needs to be solved quickly.
Over nearly 30 years, I've worked across agencies, in-house teams and my own marketing agency, sometimes leading the work from beginning to end and sometimes contributing one piece to a larger team effort.
Here are a few that are worth a closer look.
01 • STEM EDUCATION
Three weeks. One very important audience.
YOUNG ISAAC • COPY + CONTENT DEVELOPMENT + PROJECT COORDINATION
The assignment came with a hard deadline: Ohio legislators were preparing to vote on legislation affecting STEM education, and we had three weeks to create, print and distribute a piece that would help them understand what STEM education actually looked like in practice.
That meant we couldn't build the story from information sitting in an office.
We traveled to representative STEM schools around the country, photographed students and classrooms, and interviewed students and teachers about their experiences.
Then we came home and turned all of it into a cohesive piece—deciding what mattered, organizing the information, writing the copy, working with the design team, getting it through production and into legislators' hands before the vote.
Three weeks from assignment to printed piece delivered to legistlators.
The legislation passed.
My role: Copywriting • Content development • Interviews • Project coordination
02 • HUMAN TRAFFICKING AWARENESS
Making something difficult harder to ignore.
COMMUNITY AWARENESS CAMPAIGN • STRATEGY + COPY + DESIGN
Human trafficking can feel like something that happens somewhere else.
This community event was created to confront that assumption and raise awareness of trafficking in Sheboygan County, through a joint effort between the Pine Haven Affiliate Church Program, the Sheboygan Falls Chamber Main Street, and the Sheboygan County Police Department.
The creative needed to stop people long enough to notice the subject without sensationalizing it. It also needed accuracy in representation, provided by the Police Department specialists. I developed the campaign concept and messaging, wrote the copy, designed the print materials, and adapted the campaign for Facebook.
The result was a simple, direct visual system built around one uncomfortable idea: It's happening here.
For this project, I handled the entire communication process—from deciding what needed to be said to creating the finished pieces that carried the message into the community.
My role: Concept • Messaging • Copywriting • Graphic design • Print • Social media
03 • DOCUMENTING THE UNKNOWN
BRAND + WEBSITE + STORYTELLING
Documenting the Unknown began with something my husband noticed during decades of working as an ophthalmic technician: People occasionally came to the eye doctor after seeing something they couldn't explain. UFOs. Bigfoot. Other encounters that made them question what they'd seen—and sometimes question themselves.
Before telling anyone else, they wanted to know whether something might be wrong with their eyes.
What he discovered was that simply giving people a place to tell their stories without ridicule could bring an enormous amount of relief.
That became the idea behind Documenting the Unknown.
He wasn't trying to prove what someone had encountered. He wanted to document experiences people were often reluctant to talk about and create a place where they could share them without first having to defend themselves.
My husband conducted the interviews. I created the brand and website and edited the recorded interviews into podcast episodes that could preserve and share each person's account.
For one of the first stories, we created UFO Over the Rainbow, based on an encounter connected to the Rainbow Restaurant. We printed and framed the finished poster and gave it to the restaurant. They hung it in the main dining room.
The more experiences that are documented, the more there is to examine—and the easier it becomes for the next person to say: Something happened to me, too.
My role: Brand identity • Website design • Visual design • Podcast editing & production • Story presentation
Making room for stories people are afraid to tell.
Brand & Identity
Building an idea into a mark.
Sometimes the challenge is much smaller in scale: take what makes a business distinctive and find a way to capture it in a visual identity.
Katrina's Curiosities
LOGO DESIGN
A curious cat hiding in plain sight. Its body and paws form the K, while its tail completes the C—building the initials directly into the character at the center of the mark.
JT Shelton Locksmith
LOGO DESIGN
A custom identity built around the trade and the owner's faith, designed to be immediately recognizable and useful across the practical places a locksmith's brand needs to appear.
Oostburg Area Chamber of Commerce
LOGO REDESIGN
An evolution of the Chamber's existing identity rather than a clean-sheet redesign. The goal was to create a stronger, more usable mark while retaining enough familiarity to bring an established organization along with it. The redesigned identity remains in use today.
Blue Sea Solution
BRAND IDENTITY + STANDARDS
Identity development carried beyond the logo into practical brand standards—creating guidance for how the visual system should remain consistent as other people put it to use.
Web & Digital
Manitowoc Yacht Club
WEBSITE DESIGN
A polished, contemporary web presence for a local yacht club, balancing its waterfront identity and history with the practical information members and prospective visitors need.
Your website is how you show up when you're not in the room.
People don't experience a bad website and think only, "This website isn't very good." They make assumptions about the organization behind it.
Your website is the way your company presents itself when you're not there to explain, reassure or make a better first impression. Like the way you dress, carry yourself and walk into a room, it gives people clues about your judgment, attention to detail and competence.
It doesn't have to be flashy. It does have to make people feel confident about what they'll find on the other side of it.
Because once you've lost credibility, getting someone back is much harder than getting it right the first time.
Lakeshore Dental SC
WEBSITE DESIGN
A professional, approachable website designed to distinguish Lakeshore Dental from another local dental provider with a similar name—using rotating hero messaging to make it immediately clear which practice visitors had found.
LiveWright
WEBSITE REDESIGN CONCEPT
A complete website redesign that shifted the focus from the company's founders to the prospective customer—using layout, imagery and copy to help visitors recognize their own needs and see where LiveWright could take them.
Copy, Content, and Creative Direction
Work Beyond the Design
Safety Boost Project
COPY + CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Working with Nationwide Children's Hospital's Center for Injury Research and Policy, I helped translate research about booster-seat safety into communication for the parents who needed it most.
The piece accompanied free booster seats distributed to families who couldn't afford them. The goal wasn't simply to tell parents to use the seat. It was to help them understand why continuing to use a booster mattered, even when a child might seem old enough to go without one.
Over the years, I've also worked alongside designers as a copywriter, account manager and creative partner—figuring out what needs to be communicated and giving the creative team the content to do it.