One of my early interests in design came from the surf/skate culture. I used to spend hours looking at magazines, which were filled with amazing photography and stories that provided a platform for me to daydream. The magazines were also filled with advertisements of brands that shaped who I was as a teenager, from the way I dressed to the boards I rode.

In 2012, I moved from Dallas to Los Angeles for a change of lifestyle and one of the first things I did was teach myself how to surf. I also started skating again after a long hiatus and my wife taught me how to snowboard. These activities provided an escape from the day-to-day grind and gave me the opportunity to challenge myself physically and mentally.

I became interested in the surf/skate culture again and began revisiting the brands that I once admired as a kid. It wasn't long before the idea of creating my own surf/skate brand started to enter my mind and before I knew it I was doing naming exercises, sketching logos, designing t-shirts, shooting photography, wireframing a website and strategizing marketing materials.

What you will see here is the result of all of that work, which is a brand identity system for my surf/skate/snow brand EXIT. This project has rewarded me on many different levels as a designer and a person. In a effort to return the favor, I donate 100% of my profits to local surf/skate/snow nonprofits.

born into chaos /
expected to follow /
choose to EXIT.

Churro Borough is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based pastry chef Sylvia Yoo. In 2011, Sylvia invented the churro ice cream sandwich and started to make a name for herself through pop ups, catering gigs and food festivals.

I met Sylvia in 2013 and she asked me if I was interested in helping her rebrand Churro Borough, because she was not happy with her logo and wanted to shape a new look. 

The two of us started at ground zero and began building a new brand identity system for Churro Borough. Once this exercise was complete, Sylvia asked me to join the team as the Creative Director to continue to develop and manage Churro Borough's brand identity.

In 2015, Sylvia took Churro Borough to the next level by opening a store in Los Feliz and I worked with her on applying the brand identity as an experience throughout the store.

Discover the churro ice cream sandwich.

This was an internal brand identity exercise that explored a handful of concepts that could transition the HKS brand identity from a static identity to a dynamic identity. 

I can still remember the day that I walked into the model shop at work and saw the new laser they got for making models. It was one of those moments that you realize that there is a new world for you to explore with your designs.

One of my first explorations was this greeting card that I designed to send out to friends, family and potential clients. The words came from all the different ways people have said hello to me throughout the years. Each of the words were laser etched onto pieces of old chipboard that had initially been used by my printer to protect one of my jobs during shipping.

This project received a lot of attention in the sustainability community and was featured on FPO. Photography by Daryl Shields.

This was a design for a competition held by Greenpeace, in response to BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The design brief called for a redesign of the BP logo to reflect the effects of the oil spill. The concept that I came up with did not make sense for a logo, but had great potential to be executed as a poster.

I used chocolate syrup to mimic the spilled oil and incorporated the BP logo into the design as the eye of the seagull. The phrase "I want my life back" came from the media quoting the CEO of BP. His life and company had been turned upside down by the spill and all he wanted was for his life to go back to normal.

I interpreted his quote as him caring more about how he was being portrayed in the media than how the spill was effecting the environment. I took his quote and applied it to look as if it were coming from the animals that were effected by the spill.

This poster ended up winning an honorable mention award and was featured on FPO.

This is one of the two student projects that I show in my portfolio. The assignment was to design a visual interpretation of the Tom Waits' song "Georgia Lee", in an octavo format.

I chose to use cheap butcher paper as my medium because of its imperfections and how it softens up the images that are printed on it. I kept my palette to two colors so that I could hand fed the paper into an Epson 10,000 and print it in two passes.

By doing this method of printing, there was no way to register the prints, so any mistakes became part of the design and no two prints were the same.

I met Steve back in 2000 while I was working at Wherehouse Music and he came in looking for some ambient music. We immediately hit it off and shortly after began recording our own music in my home studio.

Our friendship continued to grow through long discussions of music, art and our philosophies on life. We would spend hours digging for new music at Soundwaves in Houston and once music went digital, we would swap hard drives to build an impressive library of music.

Steve continued down the path of musician and I discovered my love of design, which took me away from making music. There was an unspoken understanding that when he put out an album that I would be responsible for the design.

When the time came for his first release, I worked with him on developing a brand identity system that also included a cover for his 7" vinyl. The concept behind the album cover is a reflection of the conversations that we had over the years about life, art and music.

Listen to Steven Thomas' Music for the People.

During a recent internal branding exploration at HKS, I came up with a concept that would allow each employee to have their own custom shape based off of their personality.

This custom shape would be created from provided words they selected that best described their personality. The shape could be used for things like business cards, team charts, bios, infographics, etc.

The initial idea for the shape came from one of my concepts from the brand exploration, which highlights the synergy that exists amongst each architectural project.

EXIT is a first-person exploration of LA’s surf and skate scene, visually documented through photography and design.

100% of the profits from EXIT are donated to local surf/skate nonprofits. The profits from the first issue will go to Stoked, a nonprofit organization that empowers underserved youth to reach their fullest potential through mentorship and action sports culture.

EXIT is also in the process of creating an internship program where we will be providing opportunities for local surf/skate kids to work on the zine and learn about photography, design and printing through real world experiences.

In 2010, our team was presented with an opportunity to reinvent Innovate magazine. Innovate is an annual publication that HKS distributes to clients, consultants, students, professors and HKS employees with the latest and greatest work that the firm is doing. 

The challenge that we were presented with was to transform the magazine into something that communicated the firm's work in a smarter way and told the stories with less copy and more visuals. 

We achieved this by rebuilding the magazine from the ground up with a new font, masthead, paper selection, writing style, grid and by showing imagery of the architectural process.

The redesign was a collaborative effort with the other designers of the HKS Identity Group. My individual contribution was designing the masthead, cover, welcome page, table of contents, interview with Thomas Kelley of IDEO and interview with famous glass artist Dale Chihuly.

Read the complete issue. Photography by Daryl Shields.

Music has always played an important role throughout my life. I still remember how much time I spent obsessing over my dad's vinyl collection, studying every panel of the packaging of a CD, experiencing concert posters stapled to light poles and flipping through music magazines like Rolling Stone, Alternative Press and Ray Gun.

As a student, my dream job was to be a graphic designer for the musicians that I loved. However, since that is every design students' dream job, I settled with designing posters in my free time.

I also used designing posters as an opportunity for me to meet and hang out with some of my favorite musicians. I was fortunate enough to get a few of them signed and I always gave a copy of the poster to the musician that I made it for and gave them a business card for any future design work they might need.

A rubber band bound collection of printed cards displaying information about HKS and examples of their architectural projects. The packs of cards were passed out to students at university job fairs around the United States.

Photography by Daryl Shields

Here are two different website designs for HKS that I have worked on at two different time periods.  

The design of the first site was comprised of 11 mini-sites that provided each of the company's market sectors the opportunity to communicate a specific message tailored to their clients in their sector. Each site has its own look and feel, but similar branded design elements were incorporated into each mini-site, allowing for them to feel like they are from the same family of designs.

The site that would replace it four years later was a design that reflected the new brand philosophy of HKS, which was a one-firm mentality. Every sector's page looked the same, which was the opposite of what the first site's design philosophy was. 

I was the sole designer on the first site, but I was part of an internal website team at HKS that collaborated with a firm called Phire on the second site. Experience how HKS is creating places that enhance the human experience.

Infographics changed forever when the Noun Project website launched. For the first in the history of design, you could get some really nice icons to use for infographics, without paying a cent for them.

One of the first things I started doing when their site launched was take a few different icons and collage them together. I started a series called the Noun Remix Project.

I ended up with a bunch of these remixes, but had nothing to use them for. That is when the new laser in the model shop at work came into play. I had always been inspired by Invader's tile art and thought this could be a good medium to share these remixes.

I went over to the nearest Home Depot and bought a box of cheap white tiles for a few dollars. I sprayed painted all the tiles in the brightest colors I could find and then let the laser etch the remixes out of the paint so that the white from the tile would show through.

I ended up with a large stack of tiles and did what any person with a large stack of tiles does, I glued them to various things around Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Live Between was a hotel concept created by a team of architects at HKS for the Radical Innovation Award competition.

I was brought in on the project to help with creating the final presentation, but decided to take it a step further with the creation of a brand identity system, a visual and written story of someone's experience with the hotel and other marketing materials.

Although we did not end up winning the competition, the project ended up making its round on a handful of architecture blogs.

Read what ArchDaily had to say.

Going to design school in San Marcos, Texas provided a unique opportunity for exploring photography, because you could throw a rock in any direction and hit a small town that had seen better days.

These surrounding towns were full of dilapidated buildings, rusted metal signs and weathered hand painted signs from a different time period. I began to document everything I saw and build a photo library of images that I could incorporate into my work.

I began this project by deconstructing the imagery I shot and then reconstructing the images by collaging them with other found imagery. The end results were complied into a book that I laid out and used Blurb to produce.

A few years later I was experimenting with making ambient soundscapes and decided to apply the same technique to my sounds. I used a field recorder to capture different sounds and mixed them with found audio to make songs. I also used the same visual technique to design the album covers for each release.

 Look at the book. Listen to the songs.

Meal planning services have become a popular lifestyle trend in recent years, but back in 2010 one of my oldest friends and his wife came up with a meal planning concept called Menu Sprout.

Menu Sprout provided a customized weekly menu for people with a wide variety of dietary restrictions and created an online wellness community through social media.

My friend's wife came up with the name of the company and they brought me in to design Menu Sprout's brand identity.

Photography by Daryl Shields.

I have always been intrigued with the process of printing by hand, especially when it comes to letterpress printing and screen printing.

Letterpress printing has become a lost art, because modern typography is set by a computer, not by hand. Screen printing is very similar in that the end result of a design requires you to use your hands to pull a print.

This is a collection of some of my design experiments using my Dr. Miles Nervine galley proof press and my makeshift screen printing setup.