Crooked 1.0
The Crooked brand grew quickly from a few podcasts into a media company with nationwide live events, merchandising and film production. I worked with the founders to define Crooked Media’s visual brand and helped clarify its tone. As the company continued to grow, I built and managed its in-house design team.
built by hand
Crooked aspired to a high degree of creative excellence and created a best in class, often imitated visual brand. The design team built a sandbox of design tools that allowed it make lots of high quality material quickly and consistently. What began as a 1990's MTV-style brand playground matured into a design system that allowed the Crooked brand to move quickly in election news cycles.
Guidelines and templates helped Crooked fulfill the varied assets needs of a media company consistently with a high level of quality.
Brand standards
I worked with senior leadership at Crooked to help define the tone of the brand and implemented new guidelines across departments. These sample exercises represent portions of a brand tone defining process.
brand tone
Live events
Live events
Crooked Media hit the ground running with 50+ live shows in it’s first two years. I produced the visual material for these shows and guided their stage presentation. From Pod Save America Live at 3,000 seat theaters, to Lovett or Leave It’s weekly comedy club residencies, Crooked’s live events created a unique touchpoint for the brand.
Merchandise provided Crooked Media with an additional revenue stream as well as another route of influence. A few viral moments, along with coordinated promotion via a dynamic Shopify email workflow and in-house ad reads helped drive Crooked’s audience to its store. I worked with the eComm team to make designs responsive to audience preferences and helped turn the Crooked store into a destination for its audience.
