Packaging Design
Packaging is my favorite design medium — and I mean that without hesitation. There is something uniquely challenging and rewarding about designing something that has to work perfectly before it can be beautiful. I approach every packaging project the same way: starting at the very end, with the person holding it, and working backwards. What do they need to feel? What do they need to understand? What has to happen in what order, and how does the physical form either help or hinder that? Only once those questions are answered does the visual design begin. The result is packaging that does not just look good on a shelf — it performs exactly the way it was designed to, every single time.
GaiaGift
GaiaGift is a birth tissue donation organization empowering families to contribute to life-saving medical research by donating placenta, umbilical cord, and cord blood to accelerate the development of cell and gene therapies. The centerpiece of this project was a custom structural dieline for a medical-grade specimen collection kit — designed to meet an extraordinary set of constraints: precisely sized specimen compartments, a form factor compact enough for a hospital bag, and a collection workflow efficient enough for clinical staff to complete within a strict post-delivery time window. Most critically, the packaging had to serve two completely different audiences simultaneously — expectant parents and hospital nurses — each requiring their own instructions designed to be immediately visible and impossible to overlook, because a missed step could render the donated material unusable.
Working backwards from every possible point of failure, the solution balanced medical-grade precision with genuine human warmth — because the families opening this box were in one of the most emotional moments of their lives, and the design had to honor that. What began as a packaging challenge grew into a complete brand identity, donor gift packaging, brand guide, brochure, and website for GaiaGift — and eventually expanded into branding and web work for two additional sister businesses.
To this day, a miniature version of the final collection kit sits on my desk — a reminder that good design can carry an extraordinary amount of purpose. One small box, carefully considered, helping make research possible that will benefit patients and families for generations to come. It doesn't get more meaningful than that.
Goefer
Goefer is on a mission to remove wasted electricity — not as a process or a product feature, but as a cultural mission. Their flagship product, an advanced smart power strip that monitors, manages, and reduces energy consumption for homes and offices, needed packaging that matched that energy: bold, confident, a little bit irreverent, and impossible to ignore on a shelf. The brief was a designer's dream — creative freedom, a strong brand voice, and a product genuinely worth getting excited about.
The result was a packaging system built around contrast and clarity: a bright, product-forward front face that leads with personality and stops the scroll, paired with a dark, icon-driven instructional back that makes setup feel effortless and even a little fun. Custom iconography and playful warning label illustrations were designed throughout to reward the curious reader and give the unboxing experience a sense of humor — because a brand that believes sustainability should be a cultural mission deserves packaging that feels like an invitation, not an instruction manual. It's crazy smart packaging for a crazy smart product.
