Photo by Beth Gwinn
Kevin has been helping brands communicate through strategic design-driven projects since the late 90s. Working with clients, via Collide: A Creative Studio, across branding, advertising, corporate communication, and interactive media, he has worked within entertainment, corporate, nonprofit, publishing, and consumer products industries while also mentoring and helping shape community events and to equip up-and-coming creative professionals. His work has been recognized by Print, AIGA, and AAF, and 14 of his album designs have contributed to RIAA Gold and Platinum status and millions of album sales for artists like Willie Nelson, Amy Grant, Larry the Cable Guy, and Carrie Underwood.
When speaking, Kevin brings a wealth of experience, and the lessons he’s learned along the way, while talking about the value design holds for solving communication problems, and the processes involved. He passes along the curated wisdom of others, and the hard-fought lessons he’s learned, and recounts them alongside quirky stories and work examples.
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I recently sat down with Bridget Deenihan for the Surprisingly podcast, for a lengthy conversation about communication, creativity, comedy, and finding unexpected common ground. The core concept of her show is that the host starts out knowing nothing about her guest and the conversation unfolds into a journey of discovery. For context, other recent guests on the show have included Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton and Grand Ole Opry member Mandy Barnett (and she hadn’t met them before their conversations either.) With no prep or framing to hide behind, our conversation admittedly did become awkward at times, but as we began to find common ground, it quickly became a (surprisingly) honest conversation that slowly unfolded into a multitude of topics.
I love albums. These are the “top” 500 albums released roughly in the first 50 years of my lifetime. A lot of people would reasonably argue that some of the best albums of all time were released in the ten years before I was born. Well, I’m not a music critic – I just love music, and I listen to a lot of it, and I like to share – and I somewhat arbitrarily decided to follow what I like to call Quantum Leap rules – only traveling within my own lifetime (rounding to whole years). Besides, that, my only criteria is unscientifically weighing how much I love *and* respect each album. In the end, there are plenty of albums
I have a problem—and if I’m not mistaken, you do too. It’s fear. Not just any fear, though: the fear of asking stupid questions. I’ve learned over the years how getting over this fear has helped me to reach creative solutions and find meaningful answers. But I took the scenic route on the way, and I’m going to tell you how I eventually discovered that, among all the different kinds of questions, five in particular have been especially helpful, and the one thing they all have in common that makes them most effective. Looking back, I realize that feeling like a perpetual outsider was a big part of my childhood. First of all, I was generally just wired a little
Recently, I had the chance to visit my first school, over 40 years since the last time I stepped foot in the building, and it was a pretty bizarre experience, but I walked away with a memory that taught me a crucial lesson. Built over 100 years ago, the building had been condemned as a fire hazard (asbestos was likely a factor too) and forced the students to move to a variety of newer schools in the area, and only a handful of the kids went to the same one I did. We moved away from the town a few years later, and as the years have gone by, visits to the town became more seldom, especially after my grandparents