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POSITIONING
POSITIONING
The sign goes up, lit at night, red and white on brick. A rebrand, landed. Same week, a job posting needs to hit social by end of day. A partner across the country needs a site built by December. A contract lands and two companies have days to become one brand, before the paperwork is signed. None of it waits for the others.
That holds together because of instinct that became a system. Michael "Ffish" Hemschoot, Feni Hagman, and I spent years at Worker Studio, a Colorado animation studio, figuring out how creative direction and production actually talk to each other on a deadline. At Tipping Point, that instinct found its project in 2021, building the Diamonds identity for an annual PMI symposium, and it took real shape: Ffish as Senior Creative Director, Feni as Art Director, Robyn Mattivi holding the project together, me producing it. A repeatable framework.
APPLICATION
APPLICATION
Tipping Point Media & Entertainment was more than the company's production unit. It was the internal marketing, design and branding engine. The framework that took shape at PMI became the standard for holding brand across everything we touched. In 2022 it took on the company's own rebrand, three divisions unified under one mark, running alongside multiple projects, each with its own client, budget, and rules.
The PULSE Accelerator ran for four years at NIST, thirty-eight companies over four rounds, each needing its own identity while still sounding like one program, surviving a full staff turnover on both the studio's side and the client's. Sault Tribe, a Michigan tribal government, needed several different builds at once, an economic development site, a federal contracting site, an e-commerce build for a member-owned furniture business, each run at a fraction of what an agency would typically charge, deciding what mattered most when the budget wouldn't stretch to everything. IMI, the studio's largest program, held creative and art direction inside hundreds of individual training deliverables for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, four hundred plus hours of content, each piece its own small brand decision nested inside a much larger system. None of that ran in sequence. It ran at the same time, inside the same team, under the same instinct.
GOVERNANCE
GOVERNANCE
The Tipping Point rebrand needed every department, not just the ones with a design eye. Accounting needed a new letterhead. The PMO needed deliverable templates redone. Leadership needed a deck fixed overnight. None of them knew what "on brand" meant, they just knew what they needed by end of day. And the design team fielding all of it was also mid-flight on a dozen other competing priorities.
Handled by whoever happened to be free, that breaks the brand fast, a mismatched letterhead here, an old logo surviving in a deck there. So we built an intake funnel specifically for the rebrand: one door for every request, routed to whichever designer had the bandwidth, using templates built so the request itself decided who could execute it correctly. Not who happened to know the brand best. Anyone proficient could pick it up and get it right.
A style guide holds the standard. A system makes sure the standard survives contact with everyone who isn't the person who wrote it.
Conectado started with a logo and a single teal color, a mandate to build an entire virtual world around them, a browser-accessible metaverse in Unreal Engine connecting students, mentors, and professionals in underserved Latino communities. As Project Manager, I held that identity across teams in the U.S., Europe, and Colombia, three time zones and two languages, while the Build Book from Phase 1 became the working style guide for everything after it, avatar design, environment art, a mural by artist Jessica Gonzales rebuilt as a landmark inside the world. Unreal and Unity development, event marketing for a public launch at L'Attitude, stakeholders on three continents, all carrying one identity that had barely existed when the project began.
Ten+ years, two employers, every outside brand that came through the door in between, and the one I built for myself, Axe & Petal. I held them with the same discipline, whether my name was on the building or just behind it.
Shoutouts. Logo design for the Tipping Point rebrand by Scott Haury. Feni Hagman led visual design throughout, under Ffish's creative direction, alongside a rotating team of artists and designers who kept the work on-brand across every deliverable this page doesn't have room to name.
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