Brand director with fifteen years leading positioning, identity, and art direction for venture-backed companies and global brands — strategy through production. Founder of Workhorse, an award-winning type foundry recognized by Communication Arts and the Type Directors Club in five of the last six years, with typefaces licensed by Nike, Louis Vuitton, Universal, Harvard, and Princeton. A director who sets the brand strategy and can draw the typeface it runs on.
2018 → Present
Independent brand and digital practice serving venture-backed and mid-market clients. Own strategy, identity, art direction, product, web, and implementation from brief through launch, working directly with founders and in-house teams and bringing in specialist collaborators when needed.
LMNL Spaces (aerospace and defense sector): directed a full brand sprint from positioning research through delivery — market positioning strategy, complete identity system, and enterprise presentation template.
International cancer foundation: led a full rebrand alongside a suite of patient-facing web products and a comprehensive interface design system. Following launch, company leadership reported approximately 30% user growth, improved retention, and a 120% increase in funding within one year.
Medical staffing platform: owned branding, design, and development end to end in 2.5 months, delivering a week ahead of schedule. The product contributed to a highly profitable acquisition for the client.
Next Frontier Capital: venture brand identity and investor-facing materials.
Design and development of andfoundry.com (leadership and brand consultancy serving Kate Spade and Oscar de la Renta) and scripts.directory, an open reference resource for the design community.
2021 → Present
Built a retail type foundry to seven families and 365+ orders through direct distribution only — no MyFonts, no Adobe Fonts, no platform intermediaries. Positioning, customer acquisition, licensing, and fulfillment built and owned in-house. Many orders are multi-seat enterprise licenses.
Typefaces licensed globally by Nike, Universal, Louis Vuitton, Progressive, Cole Haan, Princeton, the Utah Jazz, and Harvard.
Nine custom commissions for studios and brands, including logotypes and proprietary typefaces for Freedom Reads, Kinn, Satellite Office, Modern Haven, and Kovadrin Chronicles — delivered through Cantrell Studio, Letter A Studio, and direct client engagements.
Designed Cantrell Grotesk, Staten, and Staten Sans for Cantrell Type, and designed and built the foundry’s site at cantrelltype.com.
Full production capability: variable fonts, OpenType feature development, Latin Extended character sets.
2022 → 2024
One of three design leads on a ten-person team, owning assigned client relationships end to end and directing one or two junior designers per engagement. Contributed to 80+ projects delivered on time and under budget for Atlassian, Bain, McKinsey, Sunrun, Qualtrics, and John Hancock.
On a Bain engagement for Qualtrics, directed day-to-day design across three teams and stakeholders at two companies, developing a new product in five months; the business case projected $250–300M in first-year revenue.
Built and maintained a component-based Figma system for Sunrun’s internal training program, reducing support requests by 80%, doubling production throughput, and cutting project turnaround times by 50%.
Mentored junior designers through full project lifecycles as both a hands-on contributor and a lead.
2017 → 2018
Led the company’s custom design branch, working directly with clients and overseeing fabrication and installation of physical environments. Later assumed product development responsibility, managing the launch of new product lines.
2016 → 2017
Refined the core UI/UX framework and marketing site while designing a new logo, brand system, presentation materials, and advertising assets.
2010 → 2016
In-house designer responsible for brand identity, web design, and product design while completing a BFA.