Many designers work behind the scenes and are rarely brought to the forefront. Graphic designers are part of a larger picture alongside a marketing team, web designers and production artists. The names of these individuals do not appear on the finished products that they spend hours, weeks, months and years tooling over every detail until client perfection is achieved. These individuals will likely never even appear on their company’s website. Behind the scenes creatives get satisfaction from being part of successful teams that rely on one another to evolve as a collective group in lieu of standing out for personal fame. (Although personal recognition wouldn’t hurt once in a while.)
Why Todd? Well, Todd Amos is a tireless designer and innovator who has devoted over twenty years as an in-house designer while creating his own vinyl design and printing brand, The Vinyl FOXX. His vinyl designs are sold on his Etsy store and make perfect gifts as well as branded corporate products. Todd manages to balance being the world’s coolest dad by bringing his kid’s imaginations to life with interactive snow sculptures while wooing his wife with handmade and up-cycled personal vinyl art for special occasions. Oh yeah, Todd has also been a youth soccer coach and trainer for 10 years and plays soccer in a few men’s leagues. Phew, Todd is on his way to earning superhero status.
Curious to know how Todd’s over twenty year design career has been? Well, Todd has spent the past 16 years with his previous company where he attributes a lot of his personal and professional growth starting as a mid level designer and advancing to Production Manager, then Sr Designer. As Todd rose within the company, their customer readership increased by 10%, and their sales increased by over 40%. Over the last six plus years, he was overseeing the in-house print and digital marketing department. Todd’s daily jobs consisted of managing multi-catalog production and scheduling, creating page layouts, cover concepts ranging from presentations to final photo shoots, designed product packaging, social media marketing, and product branding. Todd said that his attention for detail and high standards for organization helped him rise up in the department. Todd’s advice to designers in the making is to apply all of their effort into each position they hold regardless of the title or industry since it will create the foundation for many opportunities in the future. When asked is he ever stops moving, Todd’s reply is, “no, and I don't plan on it.”
Here is more about some of Todd’s work in his own words.
“A few of my favorite covers (in the slideshow below) were catalogs printed 20 times a year, each seasonal and different, printed up to 800K and were mailed all over the world. The cover of the customer catalog was the face of the company and something I took great pride in. I was involved with all of the studio production for the last twelve years and directing for seven of those years. I always went above and beyond to make sure I produced the best quality of work. From concept to completion, I created and directed each cover. As I was managing the design team and two photographers, I created shot lists, gathered and made props, scouted locations, screened and hired models, for in studio or on location followed by all of the digital editing.
The Holiday Front and Back cover was interesting as this shoot took me two days to set it up with one day to shoot. The Holiday Kids cover is special to me because I was able to have my sister’s kids as the models. I had to stage all of the gifts and even had to put together laminate wood flooring from Home Depot in the studio to have a Jeep rolled onto it. The real trick was finding a big enough Pine tree that we were able to cut down in October.
Then, there is the Barn Find cover which was cool because it's every “Jeeper's” dream to find an old jeep in a barn. This was shot on location and on one of the scouting days my team and I had to take shelter in that barn because of a random freak tornado warning. We came back the next day to shoot and even used the owner/farmer of the barn, seen in the background. The "father and son" are models.”
