A brand is like a house.

Start with a plan and then build a solid foundation. The strategic ground on which everything else is built. To know where to lay the foundation, begin with a few central, guiding questions. Who are you? What do you do? Why do you do it?

I am and have been a contributor to branding objectives in various environments as a writer and creative director. Through years of experience, I have learned how to deliver brand messaging with human emotion to captivate, entertain, inform and inspire. A brand aligned in all its touch points gives an organization a pulse, breathes life into a product, and with its customers has the ability to change hearts, minds and behavior.

Oakley Words & Pictures partnered with John Axelberg, President of General Stamping & Metalworks, when he came to me with an opportunity to establish a market presence for his business for the first time at the 2018 SMU Steel Conference in Atlanta—the event that brings the entire steel industry together once a year. We created a brand presence that included a printed five-panel, 5” square piece that describes the company and its guiding principles, illustrating it with photos that help tell the story. Included below are the front/back cover followed by the inner panels.

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Oakley Words & Pictures embarked on a branding project with a national trade organization during the spring of 2018. This Overview below set expectation for the culminating piece of a branding narrative I created for them—an end line they would adopt and implement. The panels that follow represent two of the five foundational theme areas from which the end lines were built. One of these yielded the eventual winner.

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While at Dangel Advertising, I had the opportunity to work with creative mastermind Lynn Dangel on this comprehensive set of branding tools for a business that specializes in guiding clients through the thorniest regulatory and compliance situations. Our work for them encompassed all the core components of brand vision, a refresh of their identity assets, and a complete set of media recommendations and tactics that included finished work ready to deploy. The images below represent examples of that work.