Marketing and design shouldn't be intimidating, one-size-fits-all, or costly — especially not for small brands. Anne Marie works with large and small brands to elevate their presence through impactful, diy-friendly communications.
✔︎ make a bigger impact ✔︎ save time and money ✔︎ do it yourself
Anne Marie specializes in creating adaptable assets and strategies that can be reused indefinitely. This creates an impact that stretches far beyond the initial partnership, enabling brands to thrive on their own terms.
design
With maintainability in mind, Anne Marie will design and build out your new, custom brand assets.
She'll meld design with functionality to create content and materials that make it easier for you to run your business, while making it a breeze for your audiences to find what they need and get to know your brand.
She develops a strong understanding, not only of your brand right now, but also where you want it to be down the road.
With your goals in mind, she’ll craft a cohesive and clear brand strategy to help you stand out from the crowd and connect with your target audiences — all while keeping everything doable for you and your team.
Great design and strategy are crucial but it’s equally important to know how to put it all to use.
Anne Marie creates templates, assets, and resources that are designed to help you maintain and grow your brand independently. Everything is diy-friendly too (no prior design experience is required!).
It's very possible to build and manage a brand yourself.
It’s also valid to not know where to start, to question which investments in marketing/design are worth it, and to wonder which platforms are best for communicating with your audience. So pick up your cans. We have a lot to talk about.
Hi, I'm Anne Marie (she/her). I grew up in Newport News, VA, and then planted one foot in college radio and another in video production at Florida State. After spending a few years in the NYC media scene where I produced video content at Slate, Eater, and Dow Jones Media Group, I went through a broad-strokes grad program at Pratt to expand beyond the world of video and move toward strategy and creative direction.
Things started to click after that. I moved to Philly and began working with local and global organizations on every aspect of their communications. The wider lens quickly revealed how limitations in budget and capacity can hamper growth — especially for smaller brands who don't have the resources to enlist the help of a design agency or to hire a dedicated marketing team. I’ve since devoted my time to figuring out how to make it easier for people to manage the marketing themselves.
Outside of work, I enjoy experimenting in other areas of design (especially landscaping and interiors as I zhuzh up an old house in Germantown). I also watch a lot of women's sports (go bats) and enjoy playing on adult sports teams (go toe-sters).
why work with her
Anne Marie is focused on making things easier and more affordable for the folks who are rolling up their sleeves and "doing the marketing" themselves.
Her nimble approach is ideal for those who think that their brand could benefit from working with a marketer/designer, but don’t have the capacity to independently manage a complex project or the budget to hire a full-time marketing employee.
let's work together
Anne Marie is based in Philly but will work with brands anywhere
Don't know where to start and just want some advice? Chat with her for 30 minutes and she'll help you brainstorm.
get a design quote
$125
This is a great option for brands who already know exactly what they need. You'll meet with Anne Marie for 45 minutes to get her up to speed and then she'll send along a project quote for your consideration.
book a strategy session
$375
Meet with her for 60 minutes to discuss your brand's goals and needs. She'll put together a list of strategic recommendations after the session, which you can then implement yourself or hire her to tackle.
brand identity guidelines: why they’re so important and how to do it yourself
A brand’s identity is how it shows up in the world: how it looks/feels/sounds, what it says, what it stands for, and how it interacts with others. If you were to hire...
Content creation, branding, and web design for Philadelphia's most affordable Quaker school.
From 2016 to 2018, Frankford Friends School embarked on a series of campus and program improvements to differentiate the school from other local competitors. Anne Marie came on board in 2018 to build a website with a tailored visual identity and messaging to better communicate the vision of the school and expand its audiences.
Identity, Content Strategy
Anne Marie first conducted user and stakeholder research, leading workshops with the school’s administration and educators to identity key understandings, actions, and values. She then distilled and united the school’s mission and vision into one arching narrative: Frankford Friends School is building a better future for humankind. Coupled with the new messaging strategy, Anne Marie developed an approachable, bright, city-centric visual identity to reflect the school’s identity as a young, tight-knit community of critical thinkers and problem solvers who care deeply for the City of Philadelphia.
Web Design
Paramount to the success of the school’s new initiatives was the establishment of a school website. The website’s design needed to serve and attract the school’s key constituent groups: current families, alumni, prospective families, and donors.
Photo & Video
Coupled with new copy and cohesive messaging, Anne Marie captured and curated photos and videos to bring the Frankford Friends School atmosphere and curriculum to life through imagery.
Special attention was given to explain how the school’s Project-Based Learning curriculum works, what it involves, why it’s distinct, and what it looks like for students. Anne Marie produced, shot, and edited a longform video that follows a handful of PBL projects in action.
Merchandise & Business Materials
Anne Marie expanded the new FFS visual identity to include apparel, accessories, and a new suite of business materials. She developed a new city-centric logo for use in casual environments that showcased the school’s commitment and pride in the City of Philadelphia.
Content
Following the launch of the Frankford Friends School brand identity and website, Anne Marie came on board as a marketing partner to design and implement a new communications program that would utilize social media, email newsletters, blog posts, a magazine, and ads to engage with the school community. In order to fuel a program of this frequency and size, Anne Marie worked with the school’s teachers to develop a system for sharing and archiving information and photos.Templatized classroom newsletters formed the basis of the self-propelled system by providing the content for external and community-wide communications. The collected content was then repurposed into social media posts, community newsletters, magazine articles, and blog articles. This system was strategically implemented to expand each family’s understanding of the school and it’s offerings so that they could become familiar with FFS beyond their own child’s experience. In addition to news content, Anne Marie developed a photo archive system to collect, edit, and organize photos taken all around the school for future use.
Newsletter
The Raft, a twice-monthly newsletter from FFS celebrates the work of students, teachers, and community members in a visual, easy-to-read format. Initially developed as a way to aggregate school news for current caregivers, it evolved into a comprehensive window into the goings-on of the school for all constituent groups to engage with and enjoy. Anne Marie planned, wrote, and designed the first 45 issues.
By adding multimodal content programming to the school’s touchpoints, the school could engage more frequently with each constituent group (donors, alumni, current families, alumni families, and friends of the school). In coordination with this work, Anne Marie repurposed certain social media content to run as advertisements in the Philadelphia area. Graphic interest and optimized messaging helped to make the ads appealing and applicable to prospective families and students. Over the course of three years, she optimized the program to reflect their expressed interests and needs through tailored messaging, content, and packaging.
Publications
Given its 190 year-old history, FFS has an extensive alumni base — many of whom continue to pursue connection with their beloved elementary school but who may be unaware of the recent programming additions.. Additionally, a large portion of alumni were lost to the school with no records on file of their life after FFS. Through focus groups with the school’s administrative team, a new name and visual design was created to help reinvigorate efforts to re-engage FFS alumni with the new mission and vision of the school. Called Engage, the bi-annual magazine aggregated 6 months of news and content about the school community. For each of the first 3 issues, Anne Marie created content outlines, wrote copy, prepared and shot photos, and designed and prepared the magazine for printing and distribution.
In coordination with the FFS Director of Development, Anne Marie designed the visual identity and materials for distinct FFS fundraising campaigns. Through social media posts, publications, micro websites, events, and snail mail materials, each campaign expanded upon the school’s central identity and values, and called constituents to action through targeted messaging to support their favorite institution.
High-quality deliverables for a global organization
As a designer with the Open Society Communications team, Anne Marie worked cross-functionally across multiple teams to produce high-quality deliverables for both internal and external use across multiple global offices serving over 120+ countries. Assets included publications, presentations, data visualizations, internal documents, and signage. Anne Marie also produced public-facing social media posts for Open Society’s Instagram and Twitter channels, ensuring the cohesive application of the brand identity across all content to help amplify Open Society’s mission around the world.
Camp Onas approached Anne Marie to develop a new visual identity and presentation template for their 2023 capital fundraising campaign as well as a document template for their 2023 annual report. Both projects required a new visual identity that expanded upon the existing Camp Onas brand while amplifying the revised mission, vision, and values. Anne Marie served as a strategic partner—optimizing the campaign content and storytelling through the incorporation of captivating photography, color, typography, page design, and iconography. She refined and prioritized Camp Onas’ core messaging within each deliverable to ensure organizational consistency and increase audience engagement. The final templates and resources were provided to staff members to use, edit, and replicate for years to come, building their team’s internal capacity to communicate with their audiences.
Visual identity and web design for an independent producer.
Billy Libby, an independent producer, composer, and instrumentalist, approached Anne Marie to design a portfolio website that would offer clients and collaborators an overview of his work. Anne Marie established a unique visual language to unify the site’s content and added a narrative flow to organize his diverse array of projects. The website was built using Squarespace, a user-friendly tool that makes updating the site in the future easy.
