Michelle J. Konar is a designer and art director living in Portland, Oregon. She loves avocados and owns too many grey t-shirts.
She is currently a member of the Studio team at Wieden+Kennedy.
W+K partnered with The 3% Conference to host a day of inspirational talks featuring women leaders from various creative industries. The theme of the conference was “Getting Here, Going There” and speakers were asked to discuss their career trajectory and to share what they learned along the way. I worked with an intimate team to create branding for the conference, worked with the Event Planner to curate the rental furniture and design the interior spaces, and designed welcome kits for attendees, signage for within the event space and marketing materials to promote the event.
In the summer of 2015, I needed two roommates for a rental house in NE Portland. Instead of putting up the standard Craigslist post and in anticipation of my first W+K all-agency email, I created a detailed presentation and Tumblr to showcase the amazing aspects of the house. The result: a house filled with like-minded individuals with a sense of humor over how we found each other.
When Account Director Eric Gabrielson announced his departure from Wieden+Kennedy, I was asked to create a going away gift based on an internal presentation that he gave several years prior. I transformed his “8 Habits of a Highly Successful Account Person” into “Expect The Best: 88 Habits of a Highly Successful CEO” so that he could take his own wisdom with him to his new role. His gift included a one-of-a-kind book while the agency was covered in inspirational posters on his last day.
Photograph of Eric Gabrielson from Chris Hornbecker's People We Couldn't Sleep With.
Condé Nast Media wanted to create a mobile experience based on a spread from Vogue featuring Olay that detailed the daily affairs of the founders of Dannijo, a luxury jewelry brand. This interactive unit puts the beautiful imagery that Vogue readers love front and center yet allows the user to access the story by expanding the content. I thought-through the user experience, created the UI components and provided direction during development of the unit in HTML5.
The young start-up needed a cohesive look and a new website to showcase its multi-screen HTML5 ads. As the company’s lead designer, I spearheaded this project and led the design team through exploratory, research and creation of a new logo and development of brand guidelines. For the digital showcase, I worked with the front- and back-end development teams to work through user journeys, create wireframes for all screens, and oversaw development.
Portland-based Industrial Barre wanted to soften the structured look and feel of their brand for their next line of apparel. I worked with the owner to introduce some trendy details, like scripts and inline typefaces, to create fun tees and tanks, full of barre puns.
