“Motherhood is difficult at best. But it’s also so very worth it. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s “brutiful.” “

- Jackie Ferrer, Mother and Founder of Mama2Mama Gifts

In September of 2017 founder of Mama2Mama found herself in a dire situation with her 2-year old daughter. Hurricane Irma ravaged through the Caribbean destroying just about everything it found in it’s path. Within that path was the U.S. Virgin Island, St. Thomas, the island Jackie had called home for the past 7 years. Without knowing a second hurricane was on route, with just 2 bags Jackie had no choice but to evacuate with her daughter back her hometown of Chicago.

Aside from dealing with the traumatic situation of going through a devasting hurricane and being evacuated one day to the next. She also had a past of struggling with debilitating depression and anxiety, after her daughter was born. Finding a sense of gratitude and clarity after surviving such a trying moment, and having family and loved ones ready to support her and her daughter gave her a moment of reflection.

What initially began as a blog and a form of therapy of sharing her story and her struggles with the general public, an unexpected response occurred. Women within her circle, and even outside her circle, started to share and relate to her stories of trauma, motherhood, depression and anxiety. These stories often were shared privately, telling of personal storms: abortion, miscarriage, abuse, sexual assault, mental illness. Those letters were so personal and these brave women were willing to open up and share with her in hopes of creating digital solidarity to support one another.

After some time off, Jackie came up with the idea of sharing anonymous letters with other women to show them they weren’t alone in their struggles. The idea then evolved into not only sharing letters, but gifting these wonderful women care packages. The requests from the public to make a shop to buy and gift these packages grew and that is when Mama2Mama grew into a true movement.

As a personal friend who has know Jackie for many years seeing first hand, not only what she went through, but how she turned her trauma into something beautiful and bigger than her. I was honored to be asked to create the branding and logo for Mama2Mama’s next phase. I am and always will be so grateful to be a part of this amazing movement. This is an ever-growing and changing project with much to offer.

Featured here are few pages of the brand guidebook, working website layout, and some print items for the M2M care packages. Everything from the logo to the visuals have been inspired by the many stories being shared and by Jackie’s vision to have women support women through anything.

There is much to learn from these women and these stories. Stay tuned to see where Mama2Mama evolves to next!

Discover is an ever growing entity and has expanded their products beyond the Discover credit card. In this gallery there is a sampling of layouts created for Discover’s Personal and Student Loan and proposed designs for their newest branch, Discover Deposits.

With financial institutes, especially well developed ones like Discover, branding is key. However, knowing the insights of how each media outlet audience responds we were able to test and push certain elements.

Our team consisted of veterans designing for financial companies. We understand that there is a balance of clear concise information that must be relayed to the viewer. In addition we uphold brand standards but tweaked to our tested best practices. Something to always take consideration as well is the various media outlets these layouts will be viewed on. Even when renditioning previous layouts or campaigns there is need to remain current with technology and processes.

Seen here is a range of Facebook ads, landing pages, and emails. With direct mailers it’s best practice to stray from to many visualizes when attempting to present a more formal or official package. However, when conveying content via email or social media more flexibility with visuals is necessary. Animation or video is also a strong tool to use in the digital world. In the barrage of emails and posts a viewer receives, grabbing their attention with gifs or videos is proven tactic.

*Additional Art Direction Credit: Sil Camacho, Kim Karch
*Copy Direction Credit: Jess Distler, Nancy O’Connell, Jen Wood

Social Financial is an ever-growing financial institution. A lending company who likes not to be seen as just another lending company. SoFi based out of San Francisco has become one of the largest student loan refinancing companies and continues to expand their lending options from Personal Loan Refinancing to Parent Plus Loan Refinancing and new and up and coming products.

Working on SoFi for longer term, I learned they wanted us to think outside the typical financial institution box. Working closely with our strategy team, we resulted in generating countless direct mail pieces to test and retest against each other. We often had staggered drop dates to test each new layout against our proven control piece per each product. We tracked results and learned from each test we released.

While we began our work with SoFi solely with direct mail, over time our results allowed us to expand our agency best practices to SoFi’s social media and digital assets. With our digital work we were able to show a more playful colorful side of the brand. However, the digital world presented a different set of challenges. But keeping true to our strategy tactics and best practices, we were able to release various strong performing Facebook ads and digital banner ads. We knew the importance of strong messaging and clean or colorful displays that were engaging and stuck out from other posts (some featured here). For example with Facebook, within a continuous flow of photos we knew implementing solid colors and graphics in our ads broke the viewers flow and resulted in them stopping to glance at the ad.

This client was an ever-lasting learning experience. And as the brand grew and evolved we did so alongside them.

*Additional Creative & Copy Credit: Amanda Russo, Andrea Colasanto

Gift of Hope is the largest non-for-profit organ and tissue donation organization for Illinois and Northwest Indiana.

When getting your first license or renewing it you are asked if you would like to be an organ and tissue donor. Many don’t think much of the question or aren’t informed enough to know how the process works. Thus, enrollment of donors is often a struggle. Through the process of becoming a donor I became informed what it meant to actually be a donor and the impact one person could have. I learned that with one person who becomes a donor could actually save up to 25 other people. However, speaking of death and the idea of having to make such a decision in such a moment of grief is often too much for people to discuss especially amongst family members.

We were tasked with a full rebrand of Gift of Hope. To show a new more friendly light to such a dark subject. The tagline that was created, and that sprouted all the various facets of this rebranding campaign, “Where there is HOPE, there is life.” Hope is strong idea that gets people through really difficult moments and decisions. Thus it was our anchoring word to inspire hope but also literally tie back into the organizations name Gift of Hope.

We created a full internal branding relaunch summer event at the premises. Over months we establishing their new creative guidelines, company manifesto, and a large quantity of internal and external giveaways, signage and more. The event and internal branded was launched and motived and inspired their employees to feel proud of the work they were doing. They now had a new platform to and various attributes to work with to spread the word and encourage the general public of making one decision could have a world of impact.

Featured here are only handful of pieces that resulted from the rebrand such as OOH posters, social media pages and ads, internal office branded supplies, and some of the event pieces presented at the launch. It was huge undertaking and as team we learned so much and created some viable creative that could make a difference.

*Additional Art Direction Credit: (GOH Summer Rebranding Event) Yuleni Espinosa, Marie Walz, Salar Ziaie, Liam Fox

United Airlines a Chicago-based airline, has continued to seek how to expand their ever-growing travel destinations and brand along with it. The creative featured here was a part of multi-team effort to present United with a target specific but unique RFP presentation.

We focused on United’s newest flight trajectory, San Fran to Manila non-stop as our base. We did extensive research to learn about our target audiences on both the Manila side and the San Francisco side. We formed a series of personas that we would market this creative to. We had a range from Filipinos in Manila who travel often to San Fran. To young travelers in San Fran who were frequent flyers looking for a new adventure. To frequent flyers who like seek high-end luxury flights and accommodations.

With the target audiences in the Manila, we took the opportunity of incorporating words or common phrases in Tagalog (main language of the Philippines), to connect and “speak” to the audience more directly. While also highlighting common factors our strategist concluded as to why this audience would travel to San Francisco, such as technology and sports entertainment.

For other audiences it was more about the opportunity to explore and a sense of adventure. All while reminding the flight is non-stop thus leaving more time for things that would be of more interest to them.

Featured here are a few of the mircosites, Facebook ads and digital banner ads. This is only some of the creative presented but highlights some of the points mentioned above. Each target audience had their own strategy board on who to reach and engage with them. Also acknowledging the need to release various creative to them in multiple waves over a shorter time frame.

This RFP resulted in postive feedback from the client and won us a large portion of their work.

Sony is most recognized for their tech products such as TV’s and of course Sony PlayStation. They also have a well established film studio that releases multi-million dollar films throughout the year. With their well anchored array of products and films Sony has managed to be at the core of the entertainment and technology world.

With well established clients such as Sony there is some flexibility in knowing you can keep branding to a minimum. Their logo and “X” graphic speak strongly to the viewer as a trusted recognized brand. However, incentive programs and new video game or film releases are always in need of promoting. The Sony Rewards program (featured here), is in constant product rotation with enrolled members. Also promoting their joint credit card opportunities with Capital One and VISA is another opportunity to gain new members and global recognition.

From a production stand point, since their targeted enrolled members are grouped by tiers, creative has to be versioned out per group. There is a constant flow of work with product/tier versioning. Plus, seasonal promos and new products in market required new creative to be generated. Also social media is a major outlet to promote enrollment and new products and sales. Working with Sony is a constant upkeep of various marketing and advertising facets, which was challenging at times. However, it was a great opportunity to establish ourselves with Sony and their partners.

Whether it was emails, social media ads, Sony app functionalities, program enrollment or product promotion, Sony always found ways to keep our team busy. But also allowed us explore new tactics and projects and also further establish our true and tried creative best practices.

*Additional Art Direction Credit: Allie Gecht, Dustin Klare

RFP Pitch Creative

Delta Dental is a growing dental insurance company that offers insurance nationwide. Seen here is a sampling of some of the RFP creative presented and also used as case study by our agency.

One major part of any brand is knowing your target audience. Establishing personas per each audience was the basis of our pitch. Understanding the needs of each audience and the general demographics allowed us to build a storyline for each persona and for the brand itself.

Nestle Water is a multi-brand entity, a couple of their more recognized brands are San Pellegrino and Perrier. Getting to work with San Pellegrino/San Pellegrino Fruit Beverages and Perrier was always enjoyable and had lots of opportunity for exploration. Each brand has a range of style from more a classic approach to sparkling water to a more colorful flavorful experience.

Both brands are very well established but constantly seek a fresh and engaging take on their products. Brand loyalty is a big part of the sparkling water experience with both San Pellegrino and Perrier. However, each brand branches out with different incentive tactics and programs to keep consumers engaged.

*Additional Art Direction Credit: Blais Hunter, Jana Ocampo, Jeff Previdi

Metlife is an insurance company that has been around for some time and is well recognized. However they over recent years stepped away from past branding of Snoop and the Peanuts gang. MetLife felt it was time to establish a more mature look that could be trusted. Also being able to reach a broader audience had been a challenge.

During the start of our time with Metlife the original Peanuts branding was still in play and did display a sense of a friendliness and familiarity. Despite the characters being cartoons keeping clean simple layouts was key to keep a sense of seriousness. As we transitioned away from Peanuts to their new lifestyle based branding a combination of iconography and imagery was considered. Eventually the style of iconography did become more linear or simplified and Peanuts characters were fully transitioned out.

MetLife did also change their logo and added new secondary and tertiary accent colors to still keep a fresh but clean look. Incorporating the right life style imagery was also highly considered to assure nothing was too commercial or un-relatable. MetLife continues to be well recognized in the insurance world with an ever-growing amount of customers worldwide.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield is one of the most recognized and trusted health insurance companies in the U.S. In an ever changing world of health care and medical advances its important to the general public to have a recognized brand that is up-to-date on the medical world.

Reaching out the Latino population in the U.S. is always a different undertaking. Especially for the target audiences in the lower income populations. Often these lower income groups find insurance an extra finance that is a luxury not a necessity. Also a fear of confusion with documents and decisions not in their native tongue is also a viable factor.

Using BCBS’s tagline “Siempre Contigo” / “Through it All” sits well with the Latino population. Culturally Latinos are community driven and trust those they connect with. Through all of life challenges knowing there is someone that you can trust creates life long connections. Thus using that “Siempre Contigo” tone and tapping into those familiar family-like images and messaging often gave strong response. Direct mail still remains the main way to reach the older generations however with ever growing technology and devices even the older generations could be targeted via social media and display ads just as the all other younger target audiences.

Aside from providing a sense of trust with this target audience messaging also had low cost options as a secondary selling point. Being able to best understand not only what you target audience responds well to but understanding their concerns and fears was just as important.

Cigna is a well acknowledge insurance company with multiple insurance products. Here our focus was their dental insurance, and the objective was to increase awareness and result in enrollments.

Two major challenges were to target specific audiences who find dental insurance either an unnecessary luxury, or converting audiences whom already have established insurance elsewhere.

With the young start-up families it was about focusing on cost and available options to assure them dental insurance doesn’t have to be considered a luxury but a necessity. For the older audience groups, the challenge was showing them the ease of switching and showing CIGNA is just as trustworthy as other dental insurance companies.

Featured here is a range of digital ads, Facebook ads, and landing pages.

Cricket Wireless over years has become a viable contender in the wireless world for the consumer looking for great deals, new devices and connectivity all on a budget. Cricket Wireless continues to grow their network and knowing connection with our neighboring friends just south of the border is essential.

Here is a sampling of layouts for Cricket’s latest promo “Pa’lla y Pa’ca” (From There to Here). This promo highlights a ‘no roaming fees’ plan to their customers both on the U.S. (Interior) and those on the U.S./Mexico Border (Exterior).

A range of display ads, direct mailers, and emails were created and distributed in 3 various waves to targeted consumers. Each wave was to be released within close staggered dates and tracked to see which layout resulted with the highest response. The winners of both direct mailer and email layouts were then the new control piece to version off for continued versioning.

One major struggle that the team encountered was this creative was to be tested in English and Spanish. We had to base creative of the out-of-home and social media the lead agency for Cricket has created. We used their creative to capture the general tone and feel of the campaign and the target audiences. However, all creative was started off in Spanish then back translated to English. Unfortunately there was no Spanish speaking team members working initially on this account pre-creative. Luckily when the creative team was selected I happened to be amongst the selection. I am not only fluent but have experience working with bi-lingual and full Spanish creative. We were on a tight timeline for our first wave, thus not allowing substantial rounds of translations between the translation agency and ourselves. So I was able to step in for proofing and general back translations, and also was able to assure the colloquial tone and verbiage initially used by the lead agency kept true and throughout the process. Also in general was able to provide direct translations to the team and assist the copywriter.

Being able to support my team in a different manner aside from my usual design/directing skill set was a great opportunity to showcase another skill I hone. It also felt great to be able to further assist my team.

ComEd is the most recognized and largest energy provider in Chicago and Northern Illinois. Although they are the most recognized energy provider in the region they unfortunately had terrible customer service reputation. ComEd sought to change the perspective of the general public by creating online and mobile app services, new energy efficiency incentive programs and overall approach and messaging to customer service.

These various programs and approaches presented our agency with the opportunity to visually convey the “new Comed”. Simplifying messaging and introducing their mobile app. In addition promoting their energy efficiency programs such as

*Additional Art Direction Credit: Marie Walz

Old refrigerator recycling program

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Comcast is one of the major cable providers used throughout the U.S. Xfinity is a branch of service providing expanded cable and internet packages.

With Xfinity the priority was to promote various package deals being offered to our bi-lingual or Spanish speaking target audiences. Aside from direct mail engagement pieces, Xfinity also attended various events throughout the Chicagoland area. At these events, promotion stands were placed and print promo pieces were passed out by Xfinity brand ambassadors. In addition to printed pieces an enrollment game app was created. This app was placed on stand (featured here) and used basic entertainment based trivia for the audience to interact with. Information capture was the apps objective, while the audience member received a branded prize for playing.

The GAP, Banana Republic and Old Navy all run one corporation but under individual branding umbrellas. Featured here are is a self-mailer and a couple email communications sent to GAP Visa credit card users.

Branding was always at the core of the layouts but messaging always was focused on the benefits cash back or spend and save incentives.

RFP Day of the Dead creative for Crown Import Brands: Corona, Victoria and Modelo.

*Additional Art Direction Credit: Yuleni Espinosa

Amway XS energy drink line packaging for drinks and products.

There’s so many ways to explain what a graphic designer can do and create. Sometimes our work is very technical or literal. At times designing can be completely out of the box and engaging and very abstract. The beauty of being a designer is you can go down so many different roads. However at the end of the day is all about communicating visually to your viewer. Whether it’s information or just something visually pleasing a graphic designer has the ability to create all of it.

Aside from my more technical client based work I do get the chance to play with some creative designs from time to time. Featured here are a sampling of some personal projects I’ve taken on such as invitations, business cards and more.