On May 4th, 2022, New Jersey implemented it’s ban on plastic one-use bags and paper bags in stores. Months leading up to it, I began sketching and designing my own ideas for reusable grocery bags.
I wanted each bag have a purpose, one for produce, another for meat & seafood, for dairy & frozen, and so on. My thought was twofold: it would make putting groceries away easy once home and it would help prevent food contamination.
Below are final looks and sketches of produce bags I drew and designed.
Each piece of produce was drawn digitally in Procreate then exported into Indesign where I laid everything out. Once set to my liking, I printed mock bags through Snapfish.
This bag design would act as a general grocery bag, rather than for specific items.
I enjoy trying to make puns out of the things I create. It’s one of the joys of life. This DAIRY GOOD bag though didn’t quite hit the mark for me, so a simple DAIRY will suffice in this situation.
I plan to make this a DAIRY & FROZEN bag in the future.
Illustrations for this bag were easy and straight forward. The most complicated one was the cheese, mainly in getting the right colors and getting that immediate recognition that, yes, that is in fact cheese.
It’s very important to get colors right when creating food. This was one of the challenges I faced when creating these illustrations. I found using the eye dropper on real images of meat allowed me to use accurate colors. I also gathered inspiration from other illustrations of meat and seafood to feel out how much detail and shading I should include.
These were some flyers and digital assets that I created to bring awareness to events and products of the Spotswood Youth Baseball Softball League (SYBSL) .
The SYBSL already had a sign for their annual picnic, but I was tasked with redesigning it to make it more clear, colorful and eye catching. The first image is of my redesign and the second image was its previous design.
At times, the SYBSL will sell and promote products they are selling at baseball games, or an event that patrons can participate in to raise funds for their group.
Images three, four and five were designed to promote the Spotswood Chargers blanket as a print flyer, and for social media on Instagram and Facebook.
Images six and seven were for a Thanksgiving Day football pool, designed for Instagram and Facebook.
In the summer of 2018, I was recommended for a graphic design job for Rutgers Graduate School of Education, Center for Literacy Development. I was tasked to create a booklet for their Annual Conference on Reading and Writing.
Utilizing my graphic design skills, references from previous years and feedback from my client, I was able to create a beautiful, minimalistic booklet for the conference from blank page to print.
I was brought back the following year and produced their 2019 booklet.
Below are links to the completed booklets:
This poster was created for a contest for the Philosophy Symposium at Middlesex County College. out of several entries it was chosen as the winner of the contest.
Below the final poster is a college of sketches and ideas that I came up with.
An advertising campaign based on the idea of selling fictional spy glasses that looked conventional, but in reality could utilize different x-ray modes, scan persons for highly confidential information and locate persons via tracking device. Our design team was charged with creating an app to coincide with the glasses, print posters that would be placed on billboards, and a website that gave information about the glasses. My part in the project was to create the app.
As an extra, I also created an interactive poster which could be placed in a mall or shopping center.
From sketch, to digital image, to product creation, to product usage, this project filled me with great satisfaction. To see an idea turn into something tangible that you can hold in your hand must be a great joy for multitudinous creators.
