No one loves stock photograpy, especially when your brand is meant to be warm, real and bold. It can be a crutch to young designers that don’t have reps thinking quickly and utilizing snapshots of real life to tell a story. Here’s a look at my thought process for removing dependency of stock photography from our website (and especially our 1,000’s of articles). It’s one thing to just stop a process or habit cold, but also to make sure there is a scalable solution in place (and a clear way to communicate it to a large creative team with hundreds of designers and writers).

Problem:

Stock photography had gotten out of hand within our articles on the blog. We also found many competitors using same imagery and had also become a crutch to our designers creating compelling imagery. The solution had to scale across all teams, use original imagery we created in-house, and work for multiple business units; without increasing design time.

Solution:

• Created the new global style, guardrails, examples & lead illustration training with iPad Pros

• Utilized snapshots farmed from internal team members instead of stock photography

• Created process for team members to sign release forms online when adding to database

• Rolled out new process & trainings company-wide over 6 week timeframe

As the creative director at Emma, I often worked alongside the product team to create a cohesive brand experience. From ads and the website, to the actual product and apps, all the pieces have to flow together. It was equally important to show consistency in the way we partner with other compaines, to customer email communications. Everything we did at Emma was true product marketing. In the early days, I did product design as well, creating the iconography for the drag and drop editor as well as designing many template collections used within the product. After 7 years of helping push Emma’s product, I have more imagery for product design, marketing and partnerships than anyone would ever want to see in a single sitting (but please give it a scroll, because it’s good stuff).

Team:

Lee Floyd, Greg Frank, Rob Beckham, David Wright, Jeff McKeand, Kevin Burr, Matt Thackston

I love taking notes. What I love less is going back through really basic, bland notes. I starting turning up the volume with my notes a few years ago and it’s really helped me not only understand concepts in the moment, but process even faster as I take them down. I started doing them for the company during our monthly EntreLeadership University courses, the annual Summit event, and conferences like Clarity.

When Emma, Inc, Delivra & Campaign Monitor were acquired in October 2017 we began quick work to overhaul each brand and make them feel like they were connected. Though each had their own specific market and feature set, they were all ESP’s that wanted to help people create meaningful connections. By simply adjusting to a global framework, we were able to have 3 separate companies that felt like a family of brands. This light rebrand involved language updates, reskinning of homepages and logo tweaks for all brands.

Team:

Lee Floyd, Mike Twigg, Greg Frank, Rob Beckham, McKenzie Gregory, Katy Campen, John Peregoy, Cody Newman, Nikola Keavy, Kate Reyes, Ash Durham

This brand was created to be used for demo purposes within the Emma marketing platform. To show the capabilities of the product, it is much easier to sell on the possibilities by showing "real" examples of smart ways a company uses it to gain prospects, drive sales, segment customers, personalize content and engage with their audience. WANDR has been implemented by the Emma sales team as the unified way to speak about the art of what is possible within the platform and is used seamlessly between their sales demo and tours within the account, as well as on their homepage for showing how new features will work. 

Team:

Lee Floyd, Greg Frank, Lauren Johnston

Emma was no stranger to events. Whether it was getting our name out there at Digital Summit or Content Marketing World, or a specific conference for one of our verticals, we spent a ton of time and effort on a great brand experience to take on the road. From content pieces to t-shirts, we made sure anyone we met out in the world got to know Emma.

Team:

Lee Floyd, Christina Brady, Greg Frank, Rob Beckham, Jeff Slutz, McKenzie Gregory

When Emma, Inc, Delivra & Campaign Monitor were acquired in October 2017 we began quick work to overhaul each brand and make them feel like they were connected. Campaign Monitor was selected as the parent brand, and we wanted to do some quick work to include all the locations from the newly acquired compaines and build excitement that we were all one company, together. This involved everything from lobby overhauls, new swag items and brand guidelines.

Team:

Mike Twigg, Greg Frank, Rob Beckham, Nikola Keavy, Kate Reyes.

In order to drive home the level of service and attention to detail Emma gives its customers, we created a "Blue Envelope Box" to have printed pieces on-hand to send to special customers; or welcome new accounts to Emma. This project had many pieces including 2 shirt designs, notebooks, coasters, tissue paper, box and even pencils that said "Phil Collins was here". He wasn't, btw.

Team:

Lee Floyd (Direction & Design), Elizabeth Williams (Direction & Design), Chris Korbey (Direction), Christopher Lester (Direction), Emily Konouchi (Copy), Suzanne Norman (Copy & Direction)

Awards:

HOW In-House Design Award 2014

American Graphic Design In-House Award 2015

People in marketing love guides, downloads & statistics. So much that our team has spent a good chunk of our time creating shareable content for Emma & Campaign Monitor. These gated pieces, collectively, yielded over 3,000,000 email addresses that were put through different nurturing series on their way to becoming sales-ready leads. We also made as many as possible into printed pieces that we'd hand out to prospects at conferences and other events.

Team:

Lee Floyd, Greg Frank, Jeff Slutz, McKenzie Gregory, Rob Beckham

Marketing United is an annual conference put on by Emma, Inc. I've had the opportunity to not only brand this event, but also lead the creative and implementation from 2016 - 2018. It hosts over 1000+ attendees and over 70+ speakers from around the world. I also worked with Hatch Show Print to create a poster for the event each year and enjoyed transforming the Country Music Hall of Fame into a marketing hub each year.

Check out current details at: marketingunited.com

Team: 

Lee Floyd, Greg Frank, Cody Newman, Rob Beckham, Jeff Slutz, Katy Campen, Miles Price

Rebranding Emma in 2012 was a team effort and a truly fun experience. We started with the personal feel of the company and used brighter, more fun colors to represent the vibrant staff and service that Emma provides. Secondly, we had to update the glasses to more modern frames, as well as make the face itself a more vector-friendly mark.

The wordmark was a bit trickier as it was originally New York, a very unapproachable serif that had no personality at all. Instead of doing the arbitrary thing where you just go opposite (lowercase to capital letters, etc) with no rhyme or reason, I began to do some thinking into what the typography wordmark of an email marketing company needed to say about itself. What I came up with were 2 things: 1) Emma is a platform primarily used to create email, which uses "web-safe" fonts as the users only choice. 2) Email is different than the web in general, there is no typekit or plugin for email type, it's the standard few. I wanted to make sure we based th ewordmark off one of those choices, so we started with Georgia Bold Italic, since our CEO was from Georgia and it lended itself to a nice, personal script look and feel. The end result is an iteration that was hand drawn, approachable and personal, but based on the old trusty web-safe, Georgia Bold Italic. 

Approaching the launch of the new Emma website, we knew there was a ton that had changed from the old version of the website. We had cleaned up the existing site by about 125 pages and had reworked the entire interface to be more efficient. To prepare for the inevitable "404" scenario that could occur with users trying to access dated or re-oraganized content from old URL's, I decided we needed to have a fun 404 page in place for launch while we sorted out any redirect issues. It has since become a right of passage at Emma to be added to the 404 page and often anyone that leaves the company usually asks to be added on their last day.

You can check it out live here at myemma.com/404 

The challenge here was to re-imagine a sales demo process for the Emma marketing platform. To date, they had been using the standard "Demo" process which is a short overview of the product, from left to right, in order to show prospects how Emma works. For this new demo, I worked with VP of Sales Christopher Lester on delivering instead, "The art of what is possible" with the Emma product. For this I first started with a fake brand called WANDR (see more of that brand work here) and we told the story of how that brand used Emma to do their best email marketing ever. It was important to show the product from the customer receiving the email's perspective to really sell what it could do. In shortening the actual deck to about 10 slides and making much of the product shown through video, I was able to keep this demo simple, on point and show enough product while still keeping the focus on the possible without getting lost in the "how to" weeds. In the end you have a standardized demo that can be taught and perfected across a large and growing sales team. They will also use the populated WANDR account within Emma to dive deeper into anything that is touched on within the deck, for example, the dynamic content example used in the video is ready to be built in a "how to" fashion by simply logging in and dragging a few easy pieces. All of this makes for a great new system that can grow with their team & product.

Team:

Lee Floyd, Christopher Lester, Greg Frank, Cody Newman

The 2015 version of this website was the 4th installment launch I was a part of while working at Emma. For this project I was responsible for wireframing, concepting and pitching the idea for this site to various VP and department heads, as well as directing the development, copy, photo shoots, videos and illustration for the final product.

Current version of the site can be viewed at myemma.com

Team:

Lee Floyd (Direction & Design), Kevin Burr (Design), Kenton Glass (Development), Emily Konouchi (Copy & Direction)

The first video here is the literally the first I did with Cody Newman for Emma. We were both new hires and both wanted to bring video to the Emma brand. This company has such great, authentic people so we knew we had to get them in front of a camera. We borrowed a camera and used the video we made to justify a budget for Emma's own video gear. We now have a whole studio and make a video at least every week. 

Team:

Lee Floyd, Cody Newman, Jeff Slutz, Emily Konouchi, Jamie Bradley

One of Emma's largest verticals are a collection of schools, colleges & universities. With over 600 universities using the Emma platform, the need for a specific landing page that spoke directly to the buyers was needed to help bring in leads and increase site conversions. This page is interesting because it speaks to all the different buyers you find within a university organization: Athletic departments, Alumni & Development and Admissions. This site increased conversion by 37% ( ahuge lift) by speaking to the pan points of each sub-vertical within universities.

The current version of this site can be viewed at myemma.com/universities

Team:

Lee Floyd, Greg Frank

For these wedding invitations, I went in with a goal of creating a wedding invite that people would want to keep. I scoured the bargain bins for one hundred 45 rpm records I could modify- each one is actually a song you’ve heard. The process overall was much more costly and time consuming than I thought, but the end product was a very unique invitation that most people did actually keep! Each song was cataloged by number [001-100] before covering the original label. The surprise of what song you received was a really cool detail that people ended up coming up to me and telling me all night.

I came on board with Big Machine records in 2010 to help them rebrand their multiple labels (Big Machine Records, Republic Nashville & Valory Music Group) into one umbrella company called Big Machine Label Group. Under the direction of Scott Borchetta I worked ona  simple mark that still had elements of the original "hot rod" logo for BMR, but also could be versatile on all kinds of promotional materials, printed goods, albums, festivals, bus wraps etc. This work lead into a redesign and reorganization of their websites, which I managed for all the labels and artists while I was there rebranding. Creating the BMLG booth experience was a really fun team project. I worked with Gary Musick Productions in Nashville who did an amazing job building and setting up this experience.

Lee Floyd (Direction & Design), Scott Borchetta (Direction)

Hands down the most important project I worked on during my time in the music industry was being a part of the Speak Now team. Not only did we work on a great album alongside so many talented people in Nashville, we were also able to keep this record from leaking - which was almost impossible in 2010. From Target™ end caps to cover variations to vinyl pressings, this release had every single aspect of advertising you can possibly imagine – and a few you’d never believe. I was lucky enough to do all the in-store placement design, single artwork and more magazine ads than I can even recall. We worked with ST8MNT that was responsible for the cover, packaging and tour book. Our in-house team worked directly with Taylor on each marketing detail along the way. On its release, Speak Now sold over 1 million physical copies in the first week and I knew right then, this was very likely the last time any album would ever hit that goal again. Many thanks to Scott & Sandi, Taylor and team and Kelly and team for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this amazing record and work with such great creative from ST8MNT.

In-House Team:

Responsible for the marketing, release and production of Speak Now

Scott Borchetta, Sandi Borchetta, Taylor Swift, Kelly Rich, Lee Floyd, Lindsey Jackson, Ashley Heron, Justin Key

Design Agency:

Responsible for the Album, book & video design of Speak Now

ST8MNT

Following the rebrand I did with Big Machine Records, Republic Nashville and The Valory Music Group - The Big Machine Label Group site launch was a fast & furious piece that took many people to pull off. The goal was to merge everything into one site and launch as the BMLG. We worked with Hyfn, a digital agency that specialized in artist sites to make sure it plugged in to all the third party pieces we needed, and the rest was in-house. I did the branding and helped communicate the wireframe needs across our people, managers, artists and the company building the CMS. All in all it was one of th ebiggest websites I've had the pleasure of working on and was a huge success, as we moved from a static label site to a full on discovery site that housed 3 different labels worth of artists all in one main hub; the Big Machine Label Group.

Team:

Lee Floyd (Direction & Design), Ashley Heron (Direction), Lindsey Jackson (Design), Kelly Rich (Management), HYFN (Development)

I worked as a freelance package designer for EMI Music for several years and really enjoyed doing album design for a range of artists. The package for Abandon and Sanctus Real both won awards for package design in 2009 & 2010. The best thing about this relationship was when they came to me with a peoject, it was because it fit my style. That is what we call best-case-scenario for freelance work, right?

As an interactive designer & developer from 2006-2010 at Hi-Fi Fusion, I focused mainly on email marketing campaigns, videos, and interactive web pages- aka, e-cards. Though the term “e-card” doesn't exist today post the iPhone killing Flash, back then it was pretty lucrative business for the industry and it was really fun to get to work with almost every relevant country artist in the 2000’s.

This is the identity and design work for the band Baseball Bat. This band is a personal side project that started as a one night "Talent Show" gig to play Weezer covers and ended up just being a regular ole' rock band. We started writing original songs in the winter of 2012 and continue to write, record and play around the Nashville area. 

For many years I have been compiling mixtapes of alternative, dance & pop into what I call Apathy Dance. This began in 2007 when most of indie and alternative music began to adopt a "dance beat". Before long it was everywhere and the most recent mixes are simply basic pop, but I still make them because it's still fun to be inspired by a set of songs and put them together with a crazy theme to tell a story.

Follow me on Apple Music to listen

This was a personal project that I decided to do when finding out my wife was pregnant. It's simple in execution and editing but took a ton of dedication to shoot a 3 second clip daily for 9 months in order to tell this story. I'd seen this done before but wanted to do it myself and put more focus on the lives of the couple (us) leading up to the baby so that it would document not only the journey, but also a glimpse at what life was like for them during that time in their lives. Real life is scattered, out of focus at times and truly chaotic, but also beauiful. It's a nice step above an animation of someone's belly growing day by day; it's a true depiction of our real life that my son will enjoy watching one day.

These are several freelance identities I've created over the years. From tech start-ups to shirt printers to recycling trucks– these may not be still in business, but they should still be online somewhere because like all logo jobs they were slaved over and compromised to the fullest extent; like all good logos made by designers trying to make that dollar.

This is the work I bill as “J. Clutch design”, which was my personal moniker and design shop for many years. I started this straight out of college doing mostly screenprinted posters, album packaging and personal art for local businesses & artists. I still add fun misc. items to this category for fun.

Independent music design was pretty much all the work I had in college and a big reason why I went into design; and later to the music industry. This is a sample of the pleathora (yep, I said it) of covers, mock-ups & packages I’ve created over the years for little or literally no money; and in hindsight some of my favorite projects.