Production Art/Design Role
(Bear with me—this is a work in progress!)
Broadhead
Broadhead, a marketing agency based in Minneapolis, MN, is a constant swirl of digital, print and packaging collateral. Bh’s client profile is primarily agricultural but its portfolio is ever-expanding under the maxim: Eat, Move + Live. Volume is intense. I learned how to triage, cope and to keep moving in a steady manner as a Production Artist, but also how to execute with proficiency, grace and even style. This is just some of the work, but a good example of the production projects that I have devoted a lot of time and energy to in the past 3+ years.
Packaging/
Media Kits
As part of a 2023 promotional campaign Broadhead designed a very elaborate media kit for Boerhinger Ingelheim’s Aservo EquiHaler, a product which disperses an inhaled anti-inflammatory treatment for equine asthma. The kit included a soft touch base, a spot gloss layer and even a little texture. It was such a knockout visual and tactile experience that the box itself became part of the promotional materials.
1st layer: Soft Touch base (blue)
2nd layer: Spot gloss (pink)
3rd layer: texture (yellow).
Each layer fit together like a jigsaw puzzle in the print-ready packaged file.
Equine Product Tower 2024
Complex, multi-component unit made print-ready. Each component had to laid out individually within its own diecut template and then fitted together.
Estrotect Breeding Indicator Packaging
I was given one color version and had to recolor make five additional versions with each of ETech’s brand colors, for 5 new indicator packages. There was a lot of textural graphics that needed to be cleaned up and grouped together both to reduce file size and for everything to fit together properly.
Trade show booths
Broadhead does a lot of trade show booths for its clients. For Firestone, I keylined, proofed, edited and dealt with image size and resolution, before I packaged up all print-ready files for the enormous trade show booths at their tradeshow, in Houston, TX in early 2024.
For one booth, I took a successful Firestone print ad that broadhead had created in 2022 (left) and enlarged it into one of the larger fabric-backed walls of the booth (12’x15’).
Some of our team went to visit the vendor, nParallel here in Minneapolis, to check out the work before it was sent out. The pics below show both the scale and some of the detailed planning it took to make
it all come together .
We were amazed when we saw all the materials rendered to full scale at the nParallel warehouse, and I was relieved to see that even at 150 dpi, the resolution of the booths were strikingly clear and the colors richly vibrant.
For it’s trade show in 2024, Lallemande Biofuels & Distilled Spirits (LBDS) featured booths with futuristic designs to emphasize it’s cutting edge technology. The booths included interactive animations to illustrate the complex distillation processes which enable LBDS to
Design
Some general design work in my time at broadhead, some mere pitched designs,
––but all good times.
Western Star Social Post Templates
Bus “King” Ad and “Tail” ad for Portland, Oregon’s city transportation service, TriMet.
A ton of creative layout work happens frequently.
Brochures
We do a lot of product lists and educational brochures for our clients. Often my job was to re-lay designs out in templates that didn’t match the original design template, as well as uphold brand colors and make print-ready.
Digital Banner ADS
Digital banner ads are a constant which means constant resizing for both static and animated ads. Here are some examples of the types of banners and some of the resizes, each presenting their own problems in terms of legibility and layout.
Branding
broadhead rebranded East Coast-based Mini Melts in late 2024. Besides the prodigous prepress work for the rebrand itself, it was also immediately applied to three different types of freezers and vending machines as well as a cart. This meant that since each graphic element set the precedent for all other ensuing graphic elements. Colors needed consistency out of the gate, backgrounds that wrap around freezers and vending machines had to align correctly, and everything had to fit within the machine’s template with it’s very precise dimensional specifications. There were so many elements to corral and make consistent because of its multiple applications, it became an immense task.
Two of the three types of vending machines that had to be wrapped with the new designs.
A freezer lid, with new flavor display
and their corresponding color branding.
…And a cart with a sneeze guard with flavor options and a full 360° wrapped display and base.
The freezer’s colorful backdrop, which had to be reversed when keylined for it’s double-sided display.
There are 6 primary brand colors and 16 secondary colors* at use throughout the MiniMelt rebrand. There were many different parts for every machine wrapped and each part had it’s own mix of graphic elements—everything had to fall within the brand as well as fit into each specific template and dieline.
Printwerk
Print ads are a staple in any agency, even in the digital age, but we create a lot of scientific tech bulletins and educational advertorials as well. The Equine Vaccine “One-sheeters” on the left, though scientifically detailed were branded and designed for optimal comprehension. Print ads featured below feature specific types of ads that show the breadth of the work and the complications that we can run into.
Once a print ad is designed it is resized frequently. Every publication has specific size, bleed and live area requirements for it’s ad space.
An example of a press-ready full page plus an extra 1/3 page ad attachment, to grab the eye and allow for more information or design elements. It can require a lot of troubleshooting to fit into each publications print specs.
Sometimes print ad are designed to span two pages, requiring a lot of layout tweaks depending on the pub.
These Norfolk Southern ads, had to be retrofit with grayscale backgrounds in order to print with consistency.
Product detailers. Informative,
branded, and in this case the images required some retouching work.
Cl!rty
is a Shoreview, MN-based THC-Seltzer company started in 2022. I began working for them in
Cl!rty
My work with Clr!ty centered around the packaging of both the cans and 4- and 12-pack packaging— with all the different vendors we had to use as the company expanded. With more volume meant constant resizing as well continual design updates—including the name of the product itself— and then the new designs had to be refit into new templates for each new vendor. “New” means a lot of work, basically.
Early Cl!rty sell sheets.
Name and can update in 2023.