Northern United Brewing Company, owner of the two most successful brew pubs in Michigan, North Peak and Grizzly Peak, was making its beer available in stores for the first time. North Peak in six packs of 12 oz stubby bottles. Grizzly Peak in 22 oz high gravity singles -- macro micros. The brew pubs themselves have sort of an old timey log cabin vibe so we tried to make something that wouldn't look out of place among the beers from back in the day.
Agency: Neatly Trimmed Beard
Writer: Josh Leutz
The North Peak Brewing Co. Manifesto: With a rarely seen dedication to old-fashioned craftsmanship, Grizzly Peak Beers are made in honor of those that came before. The pioneers! The trappers! The woodcutters! who once roamed the timberlands of the great North. These were men who ate meat from the tips of giant buck knives, who used wolverines as handkerchiefs, who wouldn’t hesitate to strip to the waist and wrestle even the mightiest grizzly to its hairy knees. We believe that these fine handmade beers would have sated the mighty thirsts of even those great men. So drink, friends. Raise your glasses and Drink!
Death’s Door makes a popular gin and is known for their cool customer-centric events. Working with agency Victors & Spoils in Boulder, we created a series of badges to reward faithful event participants. The designs all incorporated recognizable Death’s Door design elements based on their packaging.
Agnecy: Victors & Spoils
To help Jamba Juice dominate the cutthroat smoothie market, we designed a new website that is fully responsive - not only can it adapt to different devices, but it’s also able to serve different content to different users.
Our tile-based design could reshuffle itself to fit on any size screen. But it could do much more than that. The tiles meant that every page, product or blog post on the whole site would have its own mini-advertisement. We designed a brain for jambajuice.com that could serve specific tiles to individual users based on their location, the time of day, the weather and their previous site visits.
In addition to that nerd stuff, we helped define a new social media-friendly photo style for all of Jamba’s products, we gave the site a look and feel that matched their new brand style guide, and we designed a cute kids section.
Jambajuice.com won a 2013 Sitecore Site of the Year award.
Agency: Modern Climate
Lead Designer: Natalia Maher
Writer: Patrick Clifford
Modist is a new brewery launching soon in Minneapolis. The name Modist comes from the owners' brewing philosophy: they like to take classic beer styles and modify them. They’re kinda like a group of hot rodders who can take your Chevy Vega and turn it into a ridiculous dragstrip demon. Except they aren’t taking your Chevy Vega, they are taking your Belgian wheat.
To help Thermo King launch their first new technology in twenty years, we built a campaign that completely redefined what was formerly viewed as an aging brand. The campaign incorporated print, web, mobile and video executions that told the behind-the-scenes story of Thermo King’s cutting-edge engineering feat, and we also equipped their sales force with an app that allowed them to calculate ROI with each of their customers in real time, face to face. How’s that for cold transport logistics?
Agency: Modern Climate
Designer: Carl Schultze
Designer: Natalia Maher
Writer: Mike Rook
Northern Brewer sells brewing supplies to home brewers across the midwest. To help announce the opening of a new store location in Minneapolis, we created a look and feel that was one part northwoods, one part hops and one part D.I.Y., all laddering up to the rally cry “MAKE BEER.” Needless to say, beer has been made.
Agency: Modern Climate
Writer: Mike Rook
Writer: Patrick Clifford
I recently helped explore options for a refresh of VitaminWater’s packaging. The goal was to find something that felt new, but was still instantly recognizable as VitaminWater. The design at the top of this page is being rolled out in limited markets.
Agency: Victors & Spoils
Before there was Don Draper there was Kimberly Mann. For AdFed Minnesota's annual award show, we created the most hellish judge we could think of - an ultra prissy, uptight, narcissistic ad man from the 60's.
Agency: Hunt Adkins
Writer: Doug Adkins
“Epic” is not a word that I trot out very often, but when it comes to UnitedHealthcare, it may be the only appropriate descriptor. Clocking in at number 14 on the Fortune 500, UHC serves 70 Million individuals and are one of the few clients who can get away with saying their target audience is “everyone”. Every project done for UHC needs to be a showcase of clarity and simplicity while also building brand affinity.
At Modern Climate, I worked with our designers and UX folks to create an app that proves that good design really can save lives. Or help people look up their HSA accounts, at the minimum. (Agency: Modern Climate, Lead Designer: Carl Schultze)
More recently, I worked with Sapient Nitro to define a simpler, easier-to-digest homepage experience for new insurance shoppers. We pared the entire experience down to answering only the most basic questions a healthcare shopper might have, and answering them well. (Agency: Modern Climate, Illustrator: Drew Lintvedt)
We created the Civilized brand for a new microdistillery in northern Michigan. The concept is based on the woodland gentleman of yore; the sort of man who cut wood for a living and wrestled grizzlies for fun but still found time to wax his mustache and comb some pomade through his hair.
Agency: Neatly Trimmed Beard
Writer: Josh Leutz
When Andersen Windows came to us, they were promoting their big, beautiful, premium-quality windows though a tiny, cramped and less-premium website. I worked with my team at Modern Climate to develop an airy web experience that finally reflected Andersen’s high-end product line.
Agency: Modern Climate
Lead Designer: Jason Nelson
Rivet Vodka was a concept for an All-American, premium vodka. Rivet was developed by wine and spirits giant Brown-Forman with help from advertising agency Victors & Spoils. I helped V&S explore designs for this new ‘ruggedly chic’ brand, exploring ideas like reusable steel containers and labels with holes in them and other all-American stuff like that.
Agency: Victors & Spoils
They say that the cobbler's children have no shoes. Well, I'm no expert on cobbler's children, but I do know that sometimes the agency's new business folk have no ads. Whatever that's supposed to mean. The point is, I suppose, that I always enjoyed getting the chance to do work for the agency itself during my two stints at Hunt Adkins.
I’ve made a bunch of logos over the years. These are some of them.
In the world of online portfolios, some projects just don't get their own thumbnail image. Here is a collection of several such hard-to-categorize projects.
We designed the Modern Climate website to showcase our agency’s work and capabilities. The horizontally-scrolling format gives case studies a book-like feeling,and the culture section pulls in real-time feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the agency blog. (Designer: Evan Stremke
Writer: Patrick Clifford, FED: Jon Voth)
The Trylon Microcinema specializes in screening classic movies. For their showings of Planet of the Apes, we developed a modernized take on the 1968 film. (Art Direction: Rob Franks)
The John Roberts Printing company wanted to promote a crazy new cardstock-folding machine. Because this was being mailed to designers, and because designers nerd out on photography, I made a crazy folded cardstock pinhole camera. If you had the time and patience to punch out all the pieces and glue them together, you would be rewarded with your very own grainy, awful-looking photos.
In-store signage to promote a new highlighter product. For any dudes reading this: highlighter is a shiny, powdery coating you smear on your face in order to look radiant. You may find it easier to think of it as the exact opposite of camouflage. (Writer: Rob Franks)
According to research college students think they will always have a chance to quit smoking later, which allows them to rationalize their current smoking habits. These items were handed out on campuses, and part of a larger campaign that made fun of that rationalization process. (Agency: Hunt Adkins, Writer: Doug Adkins)
A personal project, Zombie Saw is an app that I designed and programmed myself. During an initial free/promotional distribution period the app had over 250,000 downloads worldwide, with an unusual amount of interest coming from Germany. Those nutty Germans. The app has since made me tens of dollars.
Put nerd glasses on your face! Another peach of a personal app project. Users can take a photo or pick one from your library, choose near/far-sightedness, and then add one of eight different & horrible frame styles. Then they can save, email or upload the image directly to Facebook.
Here is some work that I did with writer Rob Franks while we were at Hunt Adkins. The players were virtual unknowns, so we gave them exaggerated traits to turn them into modern tall-tales and give people a reason to care about the unproven squad. (Agency: Hunt Adkins, Writer: Rob Franks)
