Swank Studio

Swank Studio was where I cut my teeth on brand and visual design. As a Digital Designer, I created assets for entertainment and lifestyle brands—the most notable being Broccoli City, one of DC's largest music festivals and cultural events. This work was different from product design. Here, it was about capturing energy, emotion, and cultural relevance. Every social media graphic, every piece of event signage, every merchandise design needed to resonate with an audience that could smell inauthenticity from a mile away. For Broccoli City, I designed comprehensive visual campaigns spanning everything from Instagram posts to massive stage banners. The festival celebrates Black culture and community, so the design work needed to reflect that—bold, vibrant, unapologetic. I worked closely with the marketing team to understand each campaign's goals and then translated those into visual systems that could flex across dozens of touchpoints. I learned the importance of design systems in a different context here. When you're producing 100+ assets per campaign, you need templates and patterns that maintain consistency while allowing for creative variation. I built flexible systems that the team could use long after specific campaigns ended. The work reached over 50,000 festival attendees and drove significant social media engagement. But more than metrics, this role taught me how design can serve culture—how visual identity can make people feel seen and represented.