With unexpected downtime between projects in June, Joey asked me to “maybe help out” with Steven’s idea for a new Sylvain Labs thought-leadership experiment (if you read nothing further, it’s now live). The plan was to help come up with a series of white-papers that don’t just regurgitate business platitudes, but actually conjure up ideas and tools to start changing things up at work. Cheekily, they called these “Off-White Papers”.

Days turned into weeks and me “maybe helping out” turned into me assisting with first paper drafts, dreaming up some of those tools, shifting from writer-mode to producer-mode, outlining all the content we’d need for a website and a newsletter, and then building out that website wireframe on Shopify (woof), and designing every campaign template, form, and page we’d need in MailChimp for a companion newsletter (S/O to my SO for several a coding assist).

From strategy, to writing, to design, to production: I can proudly say I more than “maybe helped out” with a little bit of everything. It all became this deeply magical moonlit mess of Joey, Steven, Trevor, Katie, myself, David, Les, and a few more folks all in a collaboration of love. And as always, thankful I’ve been able to trick Joey into consistently inviting me along for the ride on all his crazy ideas. (Shhh. Don’t tell him, though.)

Check out:

• The website

• The inaugural Off-White Paper, and

• The newsletter

I usually post about things made 100% by me but re: collaboration-of-love, credit here is 1000% shared. Still, see here a little sneak peek of what I helped build.

Scripts and topics and slides and special-guest hunting and suggestion hat signage and crib sheet cards and secret envelopes stuffed with glow sticks and hot take workshops and wax-sealed special thank you gifts and invitations (see cloudful collab below w/ NoraM) and RSVP sheets and ukulele practice and so much more that was the madness of preparing for the Critical Nonsense live show was totally worth it. Feeling gratitude for Sylvain Labs and all the people who pitched in to turn our silly weekly diversion into an event last night. See the video here.

As Let’s Save the Date approaches its second birthday, I FINALLY figured out the proper code to lock the typewriter effect on the landing page!! James would be proud. Of course, only a week later, they retired the domain.

Still, I realized I never shared this work. Background: I and fellow Sylvain Labs intern, Eliza, devoted our summers to researching the engagement process, out of which I built a micro-site (http://letssavethedate.com), hand-drew the illustrations, and hand-wrote the workbook. It’s a satire of the overabundant “wedding planning survival checklist:” instead, an emotional survival guide—something Brides, Martha, and other ‘Big Wedding’ oracles don’t provide (despite painfully obvious need). Since participating in a few weddings and witnessing the stressors firsthand, I’m proud to say the guide still holds up. Kicking myself about the missed opportunity to refer to the stressors as “uninvited wedding guests.” Good thing I’m truly the only one who would care about this anyway.

Much has changed since those early proofs! And suddenly, it's #100!!

I am one proud seester and so joined in the celebration. Hence, special edition art!

And t-shirts! IRL!

And internal branding exercises! And a cleaned-up site! And a survey! [Sorry, that one's for readers only :) ]

TL;DR  Namin is so cool! Moves are being made! Exclamatory sentences!

My first guest edition of The Link! I succeeded in including the actual wordmark I designed in the header, but failed at coding edge to edge color in the preheader. Can't believe Ben's almost at 100 weeks! These are my original design proofs from back in 2015 (nearly two years ago).

Poster series for Filmic.

We’re in the thick of recruitment. I’ve been coordinating and simultaneously acting as temporary graphic design lead. Definitely not a sustainable long-term system.