In my first year in college, back in 2002, I became involved in numerous projects that required me to learn web development, graphic design, and marketing. I began and managed the Student Senate site at the time and assisted in communicating successes addressing the student body’s concerns. By sophomore year, I oversaw and ran a small business, raising over $40,000 to publish “The Nevonian” a student guide to living at Franklin & Marshall College and in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Utilizing my skills and with the help of a small, hand selected team, I designed and laid out a 297 page book distributed to incoming freshmen and eventually purchased by the Parent Alumni Association to use as marketing materials for the college.

My role is defined by the project undertaken. Ultimately, it is our goal to understand the challenges to the problem we’re being asked to solve. I take on a variety of roles depending upon the type of project and the way it is being expressed.

I have background with informational design, aesthetics, graphical expression, web properties, photography, and videography, but my expertise tends to trend towards brand expression, strategy implementation, and message development.

While we call ourselves a design firm, we really do provide a wide variety of services to our clients. We’ve offered business advice to business startups in order to strengthen their concept. We’ve provided event planning advice and assistance. We’ve implemented design solutions, of course. And we’ve consulted on strategy in order to stimulate growth going forward. Ultimately, our services all utilize the same process allowing us to provide a full range of services.

I do a very different kind of work throughout much of the day. My representation of clients at the state level is built upon negotiation, coalition building, outreach, which in a way necessitates focus of message in order to succeed. When tackling issues that often times introduce political realities and effects public lives, it is important to maintain awareness of how my involvement can impact companies, families, and individuals. My role in daily life is often void of that empathy, focusing instead on power struggle, posturing, and influence.

Starting The Carmichael serves dual roles for me. First, it provides an outlet to offer my creative skills in a way that gets out of the way and helps individuals and businesses to do what they do best. Second, by offering messaging and strategy services via The Carmichael, I find that I am able to perform my daily tasks more effectively. Often times, government solutions are a hodgepodge of compromise and balancing that many believe leads to less than optimal results. However, engaging the public, clients, and officials with an understanding of constraints enables negotiation that can lead to better ultimate solutions where compromise is merely a limitation searching for an effective solution. The key is to only compromise ideas, not values.