Every business needs a graphics department.

The Treasures Series, published by Morgan & Chase Publishing, was a series of coffee-table style travel books. They highlighted local businesses within the area with full color photos and a story. As the supervisor of the graphics department, I wore the hats of art director, senior designer, assistant production manager, organizer, and inter-department communications head. When I started, we were putting out a book every 3-4 months. By the time I left, we had a book out every 2-3 weeks.

Treasures of Alberta was one of the favorite covers I designed during my time there. This and several other books are on display in my office for you to look through if you stop by.

While working at Morgan & Chase, I was asked to create a certificate. The concept was to make it fun and whimsical. Management wanted a way to encourage employees to give them their ideas and suggestions to improve morale, efficiency, and practices in the company.
While I could have made this look more like a traditional certificate, it would have added formality and ended up being counter to the concept of the certificate itself. By using a cartoon image and adding humor to the text, it carried a more personal feeling. It didn’t hurt that the name on the signature line was fake (an inside joke within the company).

When I began work on this project, I had to start almost from scratch. It was a 128pg directory, with blue, white, and yellow pages (community, basic directory, business listings/ads). The previous format had no cohesiveness, each element competing with others on the page. I picked out a font family to use throughout the book, added the colors to differentiate the sections, re-designed or re-created the vast majority of the blue pages, typeset the white pages, designed some ads, and organized the yellow page ads and listings.

Then I designed the directory again the following year, but from a much better starting point.