Dark Roast Watercolors™ · darkroastwatercolors.com

2008 to Present · Fine Artist, painting as MīKEL

• Realist and abstract expressionist painter working in brewed coffee as the primary medium since 2008, one of a very small number of artists worldwide painting exclusively in it. Researched the science behind the medium so the paintings' stability and preservation match those of oils.
• Third place and the Patrons Award at a juried festival in 2009, followed by an invitation to the 2009 Disney Festival of the Masters. Work held in fine art galleries and in private and corporate collections, and featured on television, in domestic and international magazines and in online publications.
• Three bodies of work, more than eighty paintings: Dark Roast Watercolors™ realism (six to nine cups of coffee per piece), Dark Roast Abstractions™ (up to 170 cups), and the Coffee Lifescape™ and Coffee Break™ series. Subjects center on the overlooked moments of everyday life: weathered surfaces, light through palms, harbors, cafés and city evenings.
• Designed, built and branded the portfolio and sales site, its painting pages, and the social presence behind it.

Comp Edge Solutions, Dayton OH

2001 to Present · Owner, Chief Envisioneer

Design studio and software company. I am the sole designer on everything the company ships, from the first logo sketch through the finished interface.

Logo and brand identity (2023 to present)

• Logo and wordmark development, color palette and type system for each product brand: PCO Widget, PageAnvil, LayerLytix, PrayerMap, Ekkora, PrayerLane, AllMyStuff, LinksVault and CESai.
• Identity work for the ministry and community brands: EveryMartian, American Inklings, Stone Soup, Hesed Discipleship Network, the Everyone Will Know conference, Healthy Prophetic Community Kansas City and Lead With Prayer.
• Favicon, app icon and social image sets, email signature and template design, and brand copy (taglines, product naming, launch pages) for the same brands.

Layout and UX design

• Marketing site layout and page design for every product and ministry brand above, each with its own typography, color and imagery rather than a shared template.
• Application UX and interface design: dashboard layouts (LayerLytix), card-based prayer flows (PrayerMap), six embeddable calendar layouts built to sit inside any church website (PCO Widget), large-type accessible screens for seniors to WCAG 2.1 AA (Ekkora), sign-up, onboarding and billing flows across the SaaS products, and the generated page templates PageAnvil produces.
• Editorial layout for long-form reading: articles, essays and song pages at EveryMartian, member gallery and application pages at American Inklings, and a trauma-aware reading experience for Hesed.
• Responsive, mobile-first layouts throughout, with SVG iconography and illustration drawn in-house.

Illustration and storytelling

• Stone Soup: concept, character design and page layout for an interactive illustrated storybook series in which forgotten English words become characters in a reimagined folktale.
• Photography, imagery direction and image editing for the product and ministry sites.

Client brand and web design

• Brand identity and site for J Legacy Renovations, a Dayton-area remodeling contractor: logo, photography-led gallery pages and before-and-after galleries.
• Site design and collateral for Goddard's Painting, Poison Ivy Removal, Cape May Traditions and Generation Church Miami, several moved off template platforms onto designs of their own.

Earlier design and production work (2001 to 2022)

• Produced hundreds of wine label design concepts along with finished press-ready art for Napa Valley private wine bottling customers.
• Designed logos, branding and web sites and laid out high-resolution artwork for printed marketing materials: direct mail postcards, brochures, business cards, email signatures, email blasts, banners, listing presentations, car vinyl and magnets.
• Responsible for the video production of hundreds of MLS-compliant 'Virtual Open House' video tours: videography, photography, storyline composition and script, voice-over recording and cleanup, and video editing in iMovie, Premiere or Blender across multiple output formats.
• Designed the UI/UX of a proprietary shop-floor Andon system in SVG and C#, and of subscription mobile web applications integrating PayPal and Google Wallet.

ProAlert · Bridge Software Technologies, Mason OH

2023 to Present · Director of Marketing (concurrent with Comp Edge Solutions)

• Own the brand voice, messaging and positioning for ProAlert, an on-premise manufacturing quality and production platform, including the trademark-aligned copy standard that followed the USPTO repositioning.
• Designed and wrote getproalert.com, moving it off a template platform onto a design of its own: feature pages, product screenshots, user guides and sales presentations.
• Designed the supporting customer-facing surfaces: the feedback and support portal and the demo booking experience.

Nielsen, Inc. · Scarborough Division (Arbitron), Coral Springs, FL

2017 to 2019 · Senior Analyst

• Re-coded existing Visual Basic, FoxPro, Access and MS SQL Server programs to improve UI/UX, processing speed and efficiency, reducing required time by ~480 man-hours a year. Wrote 500+ pages of documentation.
• Built a data-driven 'problem character fix' module and consolidated duplicated programs into reusable, table-driven releases.

IDLogistics (IDL), Dayton OH

1999 to 2001 · Senior Software Engineer

• Team lead on a globally integrated 'dynamic product' ordering and manufacturing system (Windows application to Oracle) spanning domestic and foreign facilities, complex user permissions, and multiple order-receiving methods, with linked customer catalog tables for barcode, price and variable data.

Information Engineering Corp (IEC), Dayton & Cincinnati OH

1998 to 1999 · Software Developer

• Developed ASP on IIS and Visual Basic 6.0 COM objects interfacing with Oracle, generating dynamic SQL and returning data via object properties/methods.
• Built a dynamic web site (Visual InterDev, FrontPage, IIS, MS SQL Server) that assembled HTML based on client profile, product subscriptions and data-driven structures.

Monarch Marking (Avery Dennison), Dayton OH

1994 to 1997 · Service Bureau Division · Programmer / Developer

• Built a Delphi 2.0 (Object Pascal) Windows application on Win95/NT to retrieve, process, transmit and track daily orders for domestic and overseas production facilities.
• Solely built a complete variable print imaging application in Clipper 5.2 that merged variable text and graphics with data-driven templates, calculated step-and-repeat offset-plate layout for least waste, and output direct to plate via Autologic (ICL RIP) or Postscript.
• Designed a utility for Postscript font downloading, image management and imagesetter calibration, plus a TIFF compression-format converter.