Art direction and design, from Toronto.

My work sits where brand strategy meets craft. Most projects fall into one of three areas, and the best ones touch all three.

Brand identity and visual systems. This is graphic design in its most structural form: logos, typography, colour and the rules that hold them together — built so a small team can apply them consistently without a designer in the room for every decision. An identity is only as good as the system that survives contact with real use.

Campaigns and art direction. Concepting, key visuals, shoot direction and the through-line that keeps a campaign coherent from a billboard to a six-second cutdown. This is the core of my agency background and where most of my awarded work comes from.

Digital, social and content. Social creative, digital ad formats, landing pages and the steady stream of content a brand needs between campaigns — designed to hold the same standard as the hero work.

Agencies and studios. I step into senior art director roles and project work. Twelve years inside agencies means I know how a creative department runs, how to read a brief, and how to work to a creative director rather than around one.

Startups and founders. Early-stage teams that need a brand to look credible before they have a design function. The priority here is getting something distinctive and usable into the world quickly, not polishing a system nobody has tested yet.

Brands and in-house teams. Marketing teams who need senior creative thinking on a specific problem. My background is global brand work — Heinz, YahSat and Abed Tahan among them — across the Middle East and beyond.

Business owners. Independent businesses where the owner is the decision-maker. You get the same thinking that goes into a multinational campaign, scaled to what the business actually needs, and you deal with me directly rather than an account layer.

My approach is rooted in evoking emotion. A piece of design can be correct, on-brief and completely forgettable — the work worth making is the work that lands somewhere. I push the envelope and I look for the briefs that need witty thinking rather than a safe execution.

In practice that means starting with the idea, not the aesthetic. The Heinz Saudi National Day campaign worked because we took the brand name off the bottle, which is a strategic decision before it is a visual one. Hum Hum worked because it solved a real problem gamers have. The craft comes after the thought, and it matters enormously — but it comes after.

I care about restraint, about finishing things properly, and about the collaborators in the room. I’ve partnered with founders, in-house teams and global agencies, and the projects that go well are the ones where feedback is direct and early.

I trained across graphic design, brand and art direction, and spent the last decade in advertising agencies working up to senior art director. Most recently that was FP7 McCann, before that Interesting Times, and Da Morph before that. Since 2024 I’ve been working independently alongside agency engagements.

The work has been recognised with a Dubai Lynx Gold for Abed Tahan’s Christmas campaign, an ANDY Awards shortlist for the Heinz Hum Hum activation, and three Effie Awards MENA shortlists for Heinz Saudi National Day. The Hum Hum work picked up coverage in Campaign Middle East, Arab News, Khaleej Times and ONE Esports, among others.

I’m now based in Toronto, working with clients and teams across Canada, the US and the Middle East. Selected case studies are on the work page.

I’m open to full-time senior art director roles and to project work — brand identities, campaigns, and ongoing creative for teams that need a senior pair of hands.

The quickest way to start is an email describing what you’re working on, roughly when you need it, and what you’re hoping it achieves. I’ll come back to you either way.