Awards

Holly Taylor

A multidisciplinary graphic designer, Holly is responsible for the concept and design of exhibit graphics, signage and marketing materials. From concept to completion, Holly offers an eclectic skill set with an eye for visual solutions. She is fully equipped to develop innovative design and high-quality renderings while meeting client specifications.

Gavin

As co-founder at Drift, Gavin is actively involved with day to day management, art direction and leads the digital projects at Drift. His drive to produce great work for even greater clients fuels his passion to try new things, collaborate, and grow as a designer and business owner. Gavin’s love of the outdoors, adventure-seeking mantra and ever-growing love for board games, is shared almost equally by his beautiful wife, Kristy. Together they have a 4 month old daughter that smiles for days. Gavin also teaches a class on typography at Texas A&M and loves the opportunity to share and learn from students. Drift inspires his class and his class inspires Drift.

Martin

Martin Hooper is a founding partner and the creative director at Drift. His semi-retro esthetic was shaped by growing up surrounded by the vintage hand painted signage that still exists in East Texas. Martin got his start in design by working for a print shop in high school. He quickly fell in love with the look of a screen printed poster, and hasn’t looked back since. Over the span of his career he’s designed hundreds of logos and thousands of t-shirts, and still loves the challenge of crafting something unique everyday. Before founding Drift Martin worked several agency and in house jobs, including a brief stint at a cattle magazine. He likes winter, good whiskey, and cheap beer. His mother tells him he’s a blast to hang out with. Martin’s philosophy is that design is an organic, team-driven process, and believes that great design should feel timeless.

Spencer

Born and Raised in a small suburb in the heart of DFW, Texas. My love for photography and video started at a young age and was cultivated later in life through trial and error. With over 10 years of professional experience now, my style and drive for stylistic images and engaging video continue to be perfected. My philosophy in both design and Photo/video is a simple one, “make it look badass”. This is the drive behind some of our most unique images and videos we have created at Drift. When I’m not busy creating something awesome at Drift you can find me out on the golf course, smoking some BBQ, or trying to find some new hobby to throw money at. The other side of my outside of work life is my amazingly wonderful wife Anna and my 2 cats who never cease to provide minutes of entertainment.

Ben Taber

Ben Taber, after graduating with his BFA Industrial Design from Purdue University, started working with global design and engineering firms in hopes of reducing time to market with new ground-breaking innovations in not only products but the manufacturing methods to create new products. With this education and skillset he became an entrepreneurial consultant to help start-up companies develop ground breaking products with the same horsepower and resources as large global players. As this new generation of product design and development has evolved, Ben has been at the forefront since establishing Fire Farm Studios when he moved to Denver in 2013. He has found a home giving back to the community and students of the future at Metro State University.

Bryan Patrick Todd

Bryan Patrick Todd is a designer living and working in Louisville Kentucky. With a strong focus on lettering and illustration, he has created world renowned work ranging from local murals to work for brands like Subaru, KFC, Esquire and many more.

Jessina Collins

Jessina Collins is an Industrial Designer with over 9 years of experience creating successful consumer products.  She graduated from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN with a BA in Industrial Design.  From 2005 to early 2015, she worked for Masco Corp and its various business units (Delta Faucet, KraftMaid Cabinetry, Behr Paint) designing home building and remodeling product – everything from faucets to hand tools, and the occasional retail experience concept.  In early 2015 she left the corporate world to join a design consultancy – FREEFORM – in San Francisco, where she designs products, brands, and experiences for a wide range of clients across the US.

Brian Buirge

Brian has no fear of public speaking or public restrooms. He holds an advanced degree in design and an instructor rank in martial arts—ultimately making him a danger to both himself and others when wielding an x-acto blade. His friendly demeanor, strong love for being right, and desire to tell people what to do makes him an endearing and lovable educator. Chronically, he keeps about 90 browser tabs open, which he readily admits is about 5 too many. When not distracted by work Brian copes with an insatiable addiction for authentic Chinese cuisine.

Jason Bacher

Jason is a vehicle for hard work. He goes 100 miles an hour and runs on his own special blend of high octane motivation. His destination: Get-shit-done Avenue. When he was ten years old he was carrying buckets of paint around his family’s business, at sixteen he rodded out a 1984 Pontiac Fiero, at twenty-five he co-founded GFDA in his basement while in grad school. Whether it’s grilled cheese sandwiches or mid-century industrial ephemera, he has a penchant for the spartan. His personal tastes and professional work lay in intelligent, highly functional design. Jason Bacher is a man possessed by a rare tenacity, and there’s nothing he enjoys more than savoring the fruits of his labor. (Whatever you do, though, never get between him and a jar of hot giardiniera.)

Matt Dobson

Matt Dobson is an artist and designer from Louisville, Kentucky. Currently, he is an Art Director at Power Creative. Matt received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ball State University where his interests in design and fine art intersected in the study of printmaking with a focus on letterpress and screen printing. In the years after college Matt continued his artistic pursuits exhibiting work locally as well as nationally, appearing in shows at the New Image Art Gallery and Melt Gallery in Los Angeles, the Purple Skunk in San Francisco, and the Anno Domini Gallery in San Jose, California. Matt’s design work has received many awards and accolades. Since 2007 he has won more than 20 awards in the annual Louisville Graphic Design Association’s (LGDA) 100 Show. He has also received awards from a wide range of groups including the Society for Professional Journalism and the Traverse Awards from the Kentucky Travel Industry Association. Most recently, Matt was honored to receive a Judge’s Choice Award in the 2014 Louisville Advertising Federation’s Louie Awards. Matt has been featured in several publications and websites including Computer Arts Projects Magazine, FiveOTwo.com, LEO Weekly, Velocity, and the Courier-Journal. In addition to his creative work Matt is a dedicated supporter of Louisville’s visual arts community. He has coordinated and promoted several art exhibitions and briefly owned and operated an art gallery. He continued to curate and commission work during his time at Actors Theatre as a producer of The Late Seating, a series of late night events that featured an eclectic mix of local artists, performers, and musicians. Matt is a leader in Louisville’s design community through being a long-time member of the board of the LGDA. Matt served as President in 2012 and has helped the LGDA through the transition of becoming a chapter of the AIGA. Matt founded and operated The Louisville Paper from 2011-2013. The Paper was dedicated to celebrating all the good happening in Louisville, with a strong focus on arts, culture, and social activism. He has a beautiful wife, Lindsey. They have an amazing daughter and are expecting another in late August.

Kevin Mercer

Kevin Mercer is a designer-illustrator working in the Philadelphia area. His work embraces the vivid, tactile feel of the screen printing process, layering shape and drawing-based elements with hand drawn type, collage and digital elements. His early background in modern painting and printmaking fuels his design and illustration with a well considered sense of form, color and texture. Kevin’s experience includes freelance illustration and design with a variety of clients, agencies and organizations; ten-plus years of concert poster design; in-house design and art direction; and, recently, a teaching position in the Illustration Program at The University of the Arts. Kevin’s work has been featured in a stack of books on contemporary design, including Paper and Ink Workshop (Rockport, 2013), 1000 Indie Posters (Rockport, 2011), Juxtapoz: Poster Art (Gingko Press, 2009) and The Art of Modern Rock (Chronicle Books, 2004). He lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and son, where adventures never cease.

Carlos Zamora

Graduated from the Instituto Superior de Diseño (ISDi) in 2000, Zamora emigrated to Quito, Ecuador in 2004 after four years of working for cultural organizations in Havana, Cuba. Institutions like Oficina del Historiador de La Habana in Old Havana Downtown Master Plan Headquarters, La Gaceta de Cuba magazine from the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers, Alicia Alonso’s Cuban National Ballet Company, and Habanos S.A. the national cigar enterprise nurtured his early freelance days in the island. Two years in South America gave him a daughter, a family, and a suitcase full of posters. He arrived to St. Louis in 2006, worked at Fleishman Hillard for a short period of time and Kiku Obata & Company for seven years. Currently works as a Creative Director at Express Scripts and serves as a Brand Chair at several boards in St. Louis. He cherishes a fondness for poster design, russian cartoons, propaganda art and cigars -Cubans or not. He might be at Brennan’s daydreaming with his next poster show and maybe plotting some sort of revolution. Carlos Zamora is the President of AIGA St. Louis, the local chapter of the professional association for design in the region.

Faraz Shah

Faraz is an Industrial Designer living in Iowa City, Iowa. Since 2008, he has been developing and designing for the second-largest office furniture manufacturer in the world, The HON Company. During his time at HON, several of his contributions have been showcased at the NeoCon design expositions and are successful multi-million dollar lines available today. He has recently been recruited by HON’s parent company, HNI Corporation, to join a multi-organization Advanced Development Group. Faraz was born and raised in the Evansville area and is a 2007 graduate of Purdue University with a BFA in Industrial Design. He has close ties to Purdue’s Industrial Design program through project sponsorship. Faraz is also an active member of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA).

Dac Austin

For over a decade, Dac has been crafting designs for individuals, businesses, and events with simplicity as his guide. This approach has yielded recognition from Communication Arts, How, The One Show, Graphis, and the LogoLounge book series. Previously, Dac worked as a creative for Grant Design Collaborative, BrightHouse, BBDO Atlanta, and Stewart & Associates as well as taught advanced trademarks and branding at the Creative Circus. Currently, Dac resides in Louisville and is an Art Director for Brown-Forman as well as Adjunct Faculty at the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville. He also pursues creative projects through his design shop NOT A CANNED HAM, which he founded in 2006.

Adam Martin

Adam Martin is an 8th-generation Kentuckian born and raised just outside of Lexington, Kentucky. A 2005 graduate from Eastern Kentucky University with a BFA in Graphic Design, Adam went to work for the nation’s largest sports marketing firm, IMG College. He worked on design projects for athletics clients such as the University of Michigan, University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee, the Southeastern Conference and the NCAA.

Adam left IMG to begin A. Martin Design, an independent boutique design studio. Today Adam leads the design team at Able Engine and spearheads any branding and design strategy efforts for the company.

Amber Glisson

Amber Glisson is a designer from Louisville, KY. For the last 12 years she has collaborated with clients creating work that has garnered local and national awards. Her current clients include Sazerac, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Lebowski Fest and Chef Edward Lee. She is a previous president of the Louisville Graphic Design Association and active member of The Advertising Federation of Louisville.

Amber was born and raised in Evansville, IN, schooled in Chicago and Orlando where she got her start programming for graphical interfaces while receiving a conceptual education in traditional arts.

Mitch Eckert

After earning his BFA in photography and sculpture from the Herron School of Art, Mitch Eckert received an MFA from Ohio University where he focused on photography, printmaking and art history. For the past fifteen years he has focused on the multifaceted and complex interpretation of the genre of still life incorporating traditional and digital photographic techniques. His most recent work investigates the engineered landscape of the botanic garden and dioramas of natural history. He has exhibited in a number of regional exhibitions including invitational group exhibitions and solo shows. His work is in several corporate collections and institutions such as the Butler Institute of American Art. Mitch is currently an associate professor of art at the University of Louisville.

Eleanor Grosch

A Florida native, Eleanor Grosch knew from childhood that she wanted to be an animal illustrator. After earning her degree in Fine Art with a drawing focus from USF, she moved up to Philadelphia to pursue a freelance career. She’s living in South Philly, drawing animals for a living, and just launched a stationery line. Eleanor has been recognized in Print magazine and Grain Edit, she’s spoken at HOW Design conference and Dallas AIGA, and she’s been featured in US Airways magazine, Philadelphia Style, How About Orange, and Design*Sponge.

Carson Catlin

Carson’s award winning work landed him at his current position as Senior Motion Graphics Designer at VML in Kansas City, where he spends his time primarily on brands such as Gatorade and Colgate. In his spare time, Carson makes custom vinyl toys, his work has been shown coast to coast alongside the likes of KidRobot.

Melissa Martin

Melissa currently serves as Senior Interaction Designer at Method and lecturing faculty at California College of the Arts in the Graduate Design, Community Arts and Diversity Studies programs. When not in the studio, she enjoys making jam, nerding out on design and typography, memory visualization, drawing, cooking and collecting small rectangular objects called books.

Myron McMillin

Myron is a pro!cient user experience and interface designer with more than 10 years of digital and mobile experience. Myron’s focus has been serving clients from pharmaceutical, medical device, biotechnology, hospitals, and government sectors. Myron’s unique understanding of both multimedia design and the needs of the healthcare sector make him a valuable addition to Cymbal Interactive.

Jeremy Pruitt

Jeremy Pruitt is first to admit he has too many interests: design, art, photography, screen printing, music, art history and junk collecting. Originally from Kansas but now living in Denver, CO, Jeremy works full time as a designer at a Cultivator. However, he also has his own website to showcase art and design done in his spare time.

Jesse Southerland

Jesse moved to Philadelphia in 2007 !rst working as Art Director for Philadelphia Style, before coming on board at Philadelphia magazine where he has continually been nominated in CRMA’s Best Spread Design category as well as receiving merit awards from the Society of Publication Design. He has been published in the book Supersonic: Visuals for music, for album design and his photography has appeared on albums for the band Ween as well as the cover photo for comedian David Cross’s album, It’s not Funny.