The Pattern Ranch creates illustration, and surface pattern design for a broad range of products, including textiles, home furnishings, fashion, UX/UI, giftware, and stationery. The cowgirls love to collaborate, and we welcome all commissions, and custom freelance projects. Our cowgirl specialty is working collaboratively with your ranch to wrangle full design technical repeats, color-ways, coordinates, line extensions, or custom illustrations.

In my corporate career as a creative director and marketing brand strategist, I have specialized for over 30+ years in integrated communications, user experience, brand strategy, product and social media marketing, and art/creative direction. My super-power is translating business and marketing objectives, organizational values, and key differentiators into tangible mission driven deliverables, and designing creative, for organizations wanting to build awareness, brand equity, and a strong marketing presence. I am currently seeking remote freelance projects and part-time job opportunities.www.candicelaxton.com

While employed with Mercy Corps as a Fellow, I was tasked with working with the ICKM team to help stakeholders prioritize creative communications and projects, implement internal brand strategy and online learning, maximize project management success, and drive best practices and standards to achieve department and organizational goals. Social ImpactSince 2009, thousands of Encore Fellows have provided over 2 million hours of service, at a fraction of their market value, contributing the equivalent of more than $200 million to not-for-profit organizations in over 50 metropolitan areas.Encore Fellowships began with a pilot program of ten Fellows in 2009 in California’s Silicon Valley. Its purpose – to deliver a new source of talent to help social sector organizations build capacity, grow strategically and ultimately have a bigger impact on critical social problems.Since then, thousands of Fellows have been matched with assignments in close to 50 metropolitan areas. Companies including IBM, Qualcomm, Cisco, Hewlett Packard and Intel have sponsored Encore Fellows.

As part of the product marketing and sales team, I was responsible for the overall marketing, creative, social media and advertising efforts of Icon Time Systems, a Paychex Company. I provided strategic leadership, guidance and council on all marketing activities within the organization and with outside professional services firms. I worked internally with senior management to drive a broad range of marketing plans and initiatives including: eCommerce platform initiatives, social media, lead generation, advertising, brand experience, public relations, product development, user experience, web/graphic/interactive design, and the design and production of print collateral.

Managing partner and co-founder of Abacus Design Communications, a strategic brand and visual communications firm. Responsibilities include the management of day-to-day business operations, creative direction, brand strategy development, project management and client services. Responsible for creative and sales presentations to clients, strategic planning and proposal generation. As managing principal, I built and mentored cross-function teams, wrote competitive analysis/strategies, provided creative leadership and oversaw implementation. Skilled in contract negotiations, client acquisition, art direction, project management and design process administration.

TacticalPoint Media was an integrated cross-media marketing firm that created personalized, variable data marketing campaigns that helped companies boost lead generation and cost effectively brand, market, and sell products and services to their customers. Responsibilities included the management of day-to-day business operations, creative direction, brand strategy development, competitive analysis/strategy, copywriting, project management and client services. Responsible for creative and sales presentations to clients, new business development, strategic planning and proposal generation.

Responsible for the strategic development of online branding and advertising, retail user experience, and e-commerce web site development. Senior level project management and delivery responsibilities; including team building, estimating and proposal generation. Management of projects with cross-functional teams including business strategists, creatives and new media engineers. Accountable for managing creative staff on accounts and fostering professional development. Responsible for client development and presentations to clients to clearly articulate strategy behind creative concepts. As a project and delivery principal, I communicated concept and strategic direction to art directors, copywriters, designers, and photographers. Consistently created work that was exceptional, effective and strategic, as well as on time, and on budget.

Content Team Manager and Creative Director for the Adobe Content Team. Responsible for the creative/art direction of software content development and acquisition for Adobe consumer software products. Accountable as lead project/creative manager directing cross-functional teams of artists, designers, production managers, copywriters, developers, outside vendors, product engineers and QA managers. Wrote and developed team process and technical specs for template and content development. Responsibilities included cost center control, project estimating, milestone setting and team building. Art directed and developed collection/template assets, managed in-house content developers, and outside vendor relationships. Content acquisition and development experience in the following media: illustration, clip art, stock photography, template design (web, presentation graphics and print media), animated gifs, music and sound clips and fonts. Developed out-bound contracts with the Adobe legal team securing rights, tracking origin and derivative works and acquiring rights to existing collections of original artwork. Experienced in standardization key wording, developing meta-data, file naming and indexing conventions. Content archiving and database management experience, as well product localization. Products shipped include PageMaker Plus and PhotoDeluxe.

Content acquisition and creative development. Responsible for content acquisition and development, project management and supervision of creative staff. Built successful vendor and client relationships. Developed creative strategy and art directed the selection and visual review of 35,000 media assets for the Microsoft content collection. Worked with team leads in supporting key wording and meta-data, file naming and indexing conventions. Wrote and developed team process and technical specs for template and content development. Responsible for content archiving and database management, as well product localization. Responsible for the art/creative direction of vector, web and photo collections found in Microsoft Publisher, Greetings Workshop, Office 2000, Home Essentials and Clip Gallery Live.