Creative Strategy

Throughout my career, I've been most interested in the intersection of business objectives, audience insight and creative execution. While my background began in design, my work has consistently evolved toward strategy—understanding what an organization is trying to achieve, identifying the barriers to success and then aligning creative teams around solutions that drive meaningful outcomes.

Whether I'm building an enterprise brand system at HCA Healthcare, reimagining a publication for a national membership organization or developing consumer products for major retailers, my approach is the same: start with the objective, understand the audience, create a compelling idea and then guide the team toward execution.

HCA Patient Safety Campaign

HCA needed a way to communicate patient safety

principles to physicians and hospital staff. The challenge wasn't creating posters. The challenge was getting busy healthcare professionals to actually notice and engage with important safety messages.

My insight was that traditional safety communications were easy to ignore because they all looked the same. Rather than creating a standard poster series, I developed a campaign where each piece was inspired by a different influential twentieth-century art movement.

The strategy was to use visual surprise to increase engagement and create anticipation for each month's message.

The result was that the series became highly anticipated across facilities, generated strong internal engagement and was ultimately compiled into a calendar. The work also received a Certificate of Design Excellence from Print Magazine.

HCA Enterprise Brand Transformation

One of the most significant initiatives I worked on was helping guide HCA Healthcare's transition from hundreds of individual facility identities to a unified consumer-facing brand.

This wasn't simply a logo project. It was an enterprise transformation effort involving research, stakeholder alignment, legal considerations, operational implications and long-term brand strategy.

My role was helping stakeholders understand the value of a unified identity and translating that vision into practical systems that could be implemented across markets.

In Denver alone, the transition eliminated the need to manage more than 100 individual facility logos, creating greater consistency while simplifying operations.

Marine Corps League

The Marine Corps League faced a challenge many organizations encounter: how do you remain relevant while honoring a deeply respected legacy?

The existing publication felt dated and no longer reflected the experiences of modern Marines.

Rather than approaching the project as a redesign, I approached it as a brand repositioning effort. We started by examining audience expectations and identifying what aspects of the organization's heritage should be preserved versus evolved.

That led to a new name, Semper Fi, a redesigned content architecture and a visual system that balanced history, service and contemporary relevance.

The success of the project wasn't measured by design awards. It was measured by acceptance from the Marine community itself, a highly discerning audience with strong emotional ties to the brand.

NFIB

NFIB serves small business owners, a highly practical audience that values actionable information over marketing language.

The challenge was creating a publication that delivered expertise in a format that encouraged engagement.

Our strategy was to position business owners themselves as the experts and use strong editorial storytelling and visual presentation to make complex business topics approachable.

The publication became one of the organization's strongest member engagement tools and was recognized with an Ozzie Award for Best Feature Design.

Bright Idea

While attending Toy Fair, I observed a new crayon technology capable of drawing on black paper.

Rather than seeing a product feature, I saw an unmet market opportunity.

We developed the first black-paper coloring book line, creating a fundamentally different user experience from traditional coloring books.

The concept was launched nationally and became a strong retail performer at both Target and Walmart.

For me, this project illustrates the importance of curiosity and recognizing opportunities others may overlook.