Portfolio

Plan

To determine a strong price to performance means of raising awareness, and encouraging engagement of their services.

Studied the population data. Interviewed their consolers, social workers, and therapists. Found that the youth were facing new challenges through technology, social media, and world events that were foreign to the previous generation. We decided to build a campaign targeting the youth. Delivering a series of various sized posters, with singular messages aimed to resonate with the youth audience. Distributed through schools, libraries, and community centers.

They had me create a new impactful visual style, message, and copy writing. A handful of concepts of each were presented.

Project

Dish Network was finalizing development on a new proprietary hardware ecosystem called SMARTBOX. Effectively a more efficient, modular, compact server solution.

The demands of the SMARTBOX department were high, as the head of the department was accustomed to working with ad agency level of attention to detail. While their instructional design department was composed of a team with strengths in writing and narration.

My role was to fill in the visual design gaps, and help lead and train an expanded team for an aggressive timeline and demanding quality.

Leadership

The instructional design departments project manager and I co-lead the project. They focused on script approval, and I on visual approval, with some crossover. We developed the first few courses together, reaching a solution the SMARTBOX department was pleased with. We on boarded and trained an expanded team of a dozen new course designers to handle the aggressive timeline and high course volume of about 60 ten minute courses in a few months.

I was instrumental easing tension between the two departments clashing work styles and expectations, such that the two departments were praising each other by the end.

Reward

I quickly got a reputation of being quite demanding of quality expectations. It was a large guide, and not fully followed, which was partially on me for overwhelming them with instructions. I did some things to ease this, and learned other things to do going forward.

By the end of the project, behind our backs, our trainees put together put together a thank you presentation using the very course tools we'd taught them. This demonstrated technical, writing, and visual skills they'd learn along the way, and showcased some new things they'd learned that we didn't even know about. It was the most heart warming and rewarding gift of our careers.

Leadership

Some of the divisions welcomed the change, to ease the burden on themselves. Other divisions felt quite adversarial in having work they wanted to create their way be threatened. I came into a culture of corporate not wanting to address the issue, answering it largely through ignoring the divisions after the initial announcement. The initial announcement only informed them of what was happening, not why, or how they could still be involved. It was readily apparent that the problem wasn't with the consolidation, but with taking away creative contribution.

As well as removing their confidence in reasonable turnaround time, by nature of having no timely quality response to their questions. I had previously developed an online course for helping employees through the demerger transition of Hewlett Packard into HP and HPE. And used that course to help inform how to talk them through the changes. Although I was hired by Corporate, this was not one of the things I was hired for. I took the initiative to add the goal of helping the divisions through the transition, as it fed directly into the other goals of the transition.

I received high praise from the divisions for walking them through why it was important to have more unified brand consistency, how elements of the new branding standards they didn't understand contributed positively to the brand, but most importantly, explaining how they could still contribute. What we were looking for, and not only what to avoid, but why we were avoiding certain stylistic choices. This empowered the divisions to create initial work we could more easily approve, and improved corporate output quantity and turnaround time.