What do you do at Paradise and how long have you been with the agency?
I’m a Senior Art Director and I’ve been at Paradise for 11 years.
Tell us more about your role at Paradise
I work with our creative team to design all sorts of things for our clients. I’ve created print ads, digital animated banners, logos and branding, posters, brochures, packaging, eblasts, websites, billboards, and much more for our clients.
My biggest contributions to our team are my expertise in email marketing, animation, digital development, and a lot of event / exhibit promotion (Mote Aquarium, ZooTampa, Busch Gardens, Tourism Star Awards, ¡ARTE VIVA! Festival, Winter Ramble, etc).
How long have you been in Marketing & Communications?
I have been here for 11 years. I started at Paradise shortly after I graduated from college on August 10th, 2015. Previously I had a full-time paying internship on the in-house marketing team at Star2Star communications in Sarasota and an internship during my senior year at PP+K in Tampa.
What drew you to a career in our field?
I have made art my entire life, and I first started telling people I wanted to be a designer when I was seven years old. Originally I was interested in Architecture and wanted to design the new twin towers after 9/11. Then I became obsessed with Pixar films, so I taught myself animation and won first place in a local film competition when I was 13. By then I had also begun learning video game development and photography, and took graphic arts and drawing classes every year of middle and high school.
Alma mater/degree.
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design with a Minor in Art History (Magna Cum Laude), University of South Florida.
How do you spend your time when not connecting people to brands?
I jump between different creative interests in my free time.
I’ve been playing guitar and piano for 18 years and during the pandemic in 2020, I learned how to record and produce my first album Moving On – which is available on all music streaming services. That same year I also recorded an EP and scored the intro music for a podcast called “Best Fictional Friends.”
I’ve recently started learning to sing and as payment for my lessons, I recorded and produced two singles for my vocal coach: Wildfire and Closer.
(I also designed the cover artwork).
I also perform occasionally at open mics, or backing up singers.
I’ve been nominated twice for best instrumentalist in Creative Loafing’s Best of the Bay.
Last year I developed an app to assist a self-improvement journaling practice with curated journaling prompts, called Guided Gratitude. Now I’m developing a skateboarding video game.
Check out the Paradise Blog Article: https://paradiseadv.com/guided-gratitude-app/
Last tv series/show that you’ve binged or been hooked on?
I don’t watch much TV, but my closest thing to “binging” has been Conan’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. If I binge anything, it’s always comedy.
Favorite movie of all time?
“Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”
What’s getting heavy rotation in your music playlist these days?
John Scofield’s album A Go Go
Julian Llage’s album Squint.
What’s one thing about you that people would be surprised to learn?
I don’t handle caffeine well, yet I absolutely love coffee and learning about all the different ways to brew it. Currently my setup is a Fellow Opus grinder and Fellow Stagg kettle with a Hario V60 pour over brewer. The best decaf I’ve found so far is Lil’ Red by Big Bad Decaf.
Favorite Paradise memory or experience?
One would be the time when we asked the AAF Tampa Bay (American Advertising Federation of Tampa Bay) if it’s worth us buying tickets to the Addy Awards because we don’t want to go if we didn’t win anything and they gave us a response like “Yeah, you should probably be here…”. Then when we went, they had our whole team seated in the front row. We sat through the whole presentation and at the end they announced all of the Best of the Bay and Best of Show awards, and we won pretty much all of them for the Vacationauts campaign for Space Florida.
Another when our Chief Creative Officer, Tom Merrick, asked if I would be willing to dress up as an elf named “Naughty-List Franklin” and play bluesy versions of Christmas songs for our company Christmas card. I agreed and also designed all the pieces for this campaign and it ended up winning an Addy award.
What else should we know about you?
I’m obsessed with the “classics” of any type of thing. So I collect vinyl records, classic novels, and retro video games. I love to expose myself to culture of the past and learn why a highly revered piece of art was so influential.
What does being a “Partner for Good” mean to you?
To me this means thinking about the ethical implications of marketing — how our work affects real people and our environment. That can range from supporting a client’s animal conservation efforts, to using best practices to protect private user data, to being reasonable and empathetic with all the people we work with. It means approaching this business as an empathetic human being and putting extra thought into the implications of everything we do.
