Groupon
Corporate Communications Design
Employee communications, press relations, corporate financial design, portrait photography—the visual language of how a global company talks to itself and the world around it.
Groupon
Employee communications, press relations, corporate financial design, portrait photography—the visual language of how a global company talks to itself and the world around it.
Strategic creative lead for executive transitions, M&A activity, organizational redesigns, DEI programs, crisis communications, and company-wide change initiatives—work that required designing around the gap between what happened and what needed to be said about it. Partnered directly with senior leadership on executive presentations, employee engagement campaigns, and internal culture-building across seven years of near-constant structural motion.
The initiative work included the Billionth Groupon Sold celebration, GrouponWeek, and the ten-year anniversary campaign featuring Tiffany Haddish. The intranet redesign introduced gamified engagement experiences tied to social responsibility programs across the company.
Art director and execution lead on all six—video production drawn from internal resources, no outside budget. The work came from whatever the brand had available and turned it into coverage.
A product sold on Groupon that looked suspiciously tumescent became the focus of the Groupon Facebook feed for a week—that became the Banana Bunker. Mother's Day became an occasion to introduce Johnny Cadillac, the world's most rentable fictional son—who actually sold, got refunded, and earned an appearance on the Chicago Morning News. April Fools delivered GroÜber, a cat-operated car service. The Discover Downtown series drove internal employee volunteer engagement from 27% to 52% in its first year.
Groupon is the textbook example of how not to run a public technology company. Losses, executive rotations, failed product launches, market exits—bad news was structural, not occasional. The earnings materials, investor presentations, and all-hands decks lived in that reality: how to present a quarterly loss without reading like a company in free fall, how to give leadership something credible to stand behind when the numbers aren't cooperating.
The design approach leaned on illustration, visual humor, and pop culture references—an aesthetic that had no business being in a quarterly earnings deck. The goal was simple: it's not good news, but you'll enjoy seeing it. Designed and produced earnings releases, investor decks, all-hands presentations, and executive communications across the company's most difficult years.
Presentation Design System
Custom illustrations built for investor decks, earnings materials, and executive presentations. Each icon was designed to carry specific business concepts. Complex concepts and communications required more detailed illustrations.
More than 500 Groupon employees photographed—all shot by me, across Chicago and the international offices. Not a headshot program for senior leadership. The whole company.
The project was my idea, built around engagement and culture: make everyone feel like they worked there, particularly new grads starting their first job who'd never had a professional photo of themselves before. One year the portraits became a printed yearbook, distributed to the full company as a gift.
Average sales team tenure moved from three months to five. Employee satisfaction scores rose 8% in a single quarter. Glassdoor reviews improved specifically around the onboarding experience. Retention numbers are measurable, but friendship is not.