A strong brand is rooted in guidelines, standards, and style sheets. Rather than limiting innovation and creativity, these types of guardrails work in the reverse. Whether it's a small company with one designer, a large organization with many design teams, or even an organization that hires design contractors, a graphic standards guide will drive creativity while ensuring each piece that is created is looks like the last as well as the next.

Corporate Brand Guide

A 42 page document that details everything from how to use and not use the logo, fonts, and illustration styles. The previous guide was only 16 pages and lacked clarity on a number of areas within the brand. With an internal and external version, this new guide allows not only the 5+ design teams within Alarm.com to align, but sheds light on the design system for other departments and third parties.

Product Summary Style Guides

This style sheet highlights font styles and do's/don'ts when designing these 1–2 page documents (accompanying an InDesign template). When evaluating the collection of 50+ Product Summaries, there was an obvious need for a document to reference when creating these to keep them consistent and looking like they live in the same family.

Social Media Style Guide

The overall look of the social grid and feed is arguably the most important aspect when visitors land on a page. This guide features 9 different templates and defines 4 styles for 3 main sizes to form a unified look and feel across posts and platforms.

Corporate Iconography

An official corporate icon pack of over 200+ icons was developed to ensure Alarm.com brand cohesiveness across projects and team members. This is crucial to maintaining the brand and creating consistent work.

All Aware

All Aware is a start-up that provides a sense of security and awareness to assets/areas of customer's lives that may have lacked clarity prior—think boats, sheds, barns, gates, and heavy machinery. The design task was to re-do the logo before market launch, as the original logo was crowd sourced. Additional materials like font selection, color, and subsidiary logos were created and packaged in a brand guideline.

The Process

Always starting with market research and competitive audits, the process is broken into steps including sketches, vector exploration—with rounds of review including Creative Team members and key stakeholders built in along the way.

Initial Sketches & Vectors

The Result

A 21 page Brand Guide was developed to help jumpstart the brand. With the potential of some internal support mixed with external freelancers, this guide creates a clear path for all designers to follow.
Exhibit display booths allow brands to sing on a grand public stage. Designing exhibits for tradeshows and branded areas for events give a sense of personal gratification as well when seeing the work larger than life. Messaging, business strategy, visitor experience, and visual design collide to create a unique space for conversation and brand awareness.
Layout in print is like putting together a puzzle when analyzing how each piece of the design—such as text, images, and other design elements like white space—come together to form a balanced page. Optimizing a reader's experience and understanding of material is the driving factor to create effective designs.

Alarm.com Hardware Catalog

This catalog for B2B partners features Alarm.com devices as well as third party ecosystem products. The strong underlying grid allows for easy updates as products come and go, as well as provide space for lifestyle imagery of products in real space.

Building36 Hardware Catalog

Building36, an Alarm.com subsidiary, has a hardware catalog featuring devices and hardware bundles aligned on a strong grid structure with serene imagery to drive ideas of both security and comfort.

Speed of Life Brochure

This residential consumer brochure (B2B2C) provides security and automation information in a streamlined way. Use of rounded shapes, vibrant imagery, a structured grid, interesting UI elements, and unique spread layouts create an engaging piece to help drive sales.

Lucketts Excavating, Inc. Business Cards & Newspaper Ad

Repetitive, bold, contrasted imagery that spans multiple touchpoints makes for an impactful, cohesive brand across print ads and business suite materials.

New Hire Guide

Being a new employee at a new company can come with many questions—this guide was designed to help mitigate any questions. Kitchen locations, building features by floor, general culture, and nearby lunch spots are just a few of the useful pieces of information that can be found in this guide.

PointCentral Ad

An industry magazine ad with a design focus on composition, bold use of brand color, and overlapping elements for interest. 
Multimedia design creates a multifaceted designer. Front end coding was once a large part of my vocabulary, which allows me to understand the visual design aspect of the digital world that now has my focus. Types of digital projects I create include: animated HTML5 banners created in Google Web Designer, animated GIF ads in Photoshop, build-your-own-website redesigns on sites such as Weebly and Wix, email visual design, and web redesign in Sketch.

"Go Explore" Campaign
​HTML5 Banner Ads

Working with campaign managers and copywriters, I designed 12 HTML5 banner ads ranging in size from the smallest of 300x50 px to the largest of 1920x480 px. The process included Photoshopping the background image for color/image corrections, then were organized and laid out in Illustrator, exporting individual assets, setting those assets to motion in Google Web Designer, and then running an HTML5 validator to QA the work.

Lucketts Excavating, Inc.

Working to create a consistent campaign and brand, I worked with Lucketts Excavating, Inc. to create a slogan, "We Raise the Bucket and the Bar" to describe their nature of work and the quality of it. Since the launch of their website—with significant focus on SEO optimization—the company has seen a record number of contact forms submitted leading directly to a surplus of in-person estimates and securing more jobs.​

Sweet & Savory by Karen

Requirements for this project included restructuring and reorganizing the site, with an emphasis on showcasing images of the catering menu items. Now, 60% of menu items feature photos next to their descriptions to help increase customer experience and sales.

I also needed to be within 10 feet of a cupcake at all times during this design to keep the hunger at bay when staring at all of her yummy treats!

Alarm.com Academy Online

Over 1,000+ internal employees, hundreds of Alarm.com security partners, and those partner's employees have access to this training site. The goal of this revamp was to create easy-to-follow breadcrumbs for users, structure better navigation throughout, increase overall user experience, and prioritize aesthetic appeal. I relayed my Sketch designs to a developer and provided additional visual guidance along the way.
Photography and fine art mediums were my gateway to graphic design. This skills I learned and use for these mediums ultimately drive design decisions, even if on a subconscious level.