K&Company | Product and Catalog Design

I, along with two other designers, was given the opportunity to layout a 274-page catalog featuring a brand new scrapbooking line to be sold wholesale to retailers such as Hobby Lobby, Archivers and Michael's stores. We each contributed our own concept and design of the merchandise featured in these catalogs, and I was given the role of designing and executing the Life's Journey section and all its subsequent product brochures and marketing materials. My responsibilities included writing product descriptions, art directing photo shoots of the product line and creating layouts based on my own brand analysis. It was incredible to see my designs being sold in art and craft stores across the country.

K&Company — Product Catalog
Role: Graphic Artist · Art Direction · Print Production · Environmental Design

K&Company was a $125 million paper arts company founded by Kay Stanley, built from her basement into one of the Inc. 500's fastest-growing businesses, with national retail distribution through Michaels, Hobby Lobby, Archiver's, Walmart, and Target.

Kay recruited me directly from my senior exhibition at the University of Kansas. As a graphic artist on her design team, I owned the full development cycle for my assigned product lines — from initial concept and design through overseas manufacturing and final client approval. Product categories included embellishments, decorative tags, metal arts borders, accordion books, domed frames, and stitched tags.

A significant part of the work involved building every product in precise vector format to meet overseas factory specifications — die lines, cut paths, and construction details all had to be engineered to translate accurately from screen to physical production. I attended press checks for any local press production to maintain print fidelity across the line.

In addition to product design, Kay extended opportunities that broadened my scope considerably. She brought me onto my first professional photoshoot in an art direction capacity — a role that encompassed product styling, adjusting lighting and shadow for optimal photographic output, and developing the editorial visual language that defined the catalog. Working with brass borders, metal embellishments, archival papers, and dimensional adhesives, we built a tactile aesthetic that translated directly from the studio to the page.

She also tasked me with designing the booth graphics for K&Company's presence at the scrapbooking industry's major Chicago trade show — my first large-format environmental design project, and my first trade show.​​​​​​​



This role also marked my transition from QuarkXPress, which I had trained on at the University of Kansas, to Adobe InDesign — a switch I made on the job, under live production deadlines. It was an unusually rich first role, and Kay Stanley was an unusually generous mentor.

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