Design, digital and strategy for the greater good. Let's do something great together.

Energy Education Series

Print & Visual Design, Strategy

A set of materials to be given to participants of our energy education program.

Through an early assessment of design and other needs for our Behavior Change Program, we identified that the in-person energy education workshops we held were lacking a coherent and cohesive set of handouts and reference materials to encourage participants to take part in energy saving behaviors on their own outside of the workshop.

This project was created with our Behavior Change Program Manager, and as a team we crafted an overall strategy to meet the needs of both our residential and commercial participants while taking into account best practices on effecting behavioral change. It also included equipment specific materials to help users understand smart thermostats and evaporative coolers that were installed in their homes. The project is ongoing, and was a yearlong effort to create the first set of materials. Some challenges we’ve faced included translation and accessible content for all audiences and having to create a project management workflow to accommodate the long-term timing associated with the program.

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Affordable Housing Guide for Local Officials

Project Management, Print Design

A guide to policy, land-use, and other strategies for affordable housing.

In the history of the Division of Housing was a guidebook that had become severely outdated, the Affordable Housing Guide for Local Officials. It was an incredibly useful tool, so useful that despite it being last updated in 2007 local government leadership were still using it in 2017. On a trip around the state of Colorado, our housing director observed several communities referring to the information and when she returned we knew it was a priority to update.

I lead the project with a writer and editor and we completed it in an iterative, agile-like way before finishing on the 7th iteration with a new sequencing of information, complete rewrites of the majority of content, and a layout that felt user-friendly. The guide was printed and distributed, as well as becoming a searchable webpage using Gitbook. Our biggest challenge was updating the content from 2007 to 2017 without having a draft from between those years. The policies and land-use guidelines had gone through many changes in that decade and led to us having to completely redo entire sections of the guide. The project took 2 months to complete and is still is use today.

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Brand Launch

Project Management, Strategy

A rebranding exercise to reflect our earned position in the industry.

One of the most exciting parts about joining the organization when I did was that we were going through a brand overhaul that I took over and managed. It was our 29th year in business and we wanted to make sure our brand aligned with our history but most of all reflected our current station in the industry and the kind of organization we had grown into.

Through the branding process we reaffirmed our core values as an organization, identified our key audiences, solidified a visual brand that was vibrant and professional, and developed a new tagline as well as key messages that reaffirmed our commitment to service. The project took 9 months in total with a host of challenges such as a timeline unconnected to our website relaunch, gathering input and buy-in from all levels of the organization, and a costly price tag.

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Website Relaunch

Content/Writing, Project Management, Strategy

Website content, technology, and branding overhaul to better serve our users.

When I was hired, the organization was just starting their rebranding effort. But the website relaunch was already underway. We had identified that our website was not serving users well through a lot of anecdotal evidence, and since this project was already underway we kept those assumptions. Our pages were verbose without clear calls to action for accessing our services, the content was written at an average grade 13 reading level, and our poor mobile navigation rendered the site almost unusable on cell phones.

Working with a great outside vendor, we were able to realign the timeline so our website didn’t relaunch prior to the branding, and make some minor tweaks in the technology the previous team decided on. Mostly, the work of the website relaunch fell on me – we had to write all new content and draft a better architecture of the website. The result was a site that had 39% faster loadtimes, mobile responsive navigation, a 28% reduction in pages overall, a 40% reduction in content on the pages that remained, and a grade 7 reading level across the site. The project took 6 months and had many challenges, including an initial chaos due to not being connected to the brand launch, a timeline that had to be put on hiatus halfway through, and a uncooperative former development company for the old website.

www.energyoutreach.org

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Public Data Visualizations

Print & Visual Design, Front-end Development

Showcasing data to tell the story better.

Throughout my career I’ve been making use of public data to create a story and showcase it visually. It’s always been in response to feedback from our users that our current data solutions were too complicated, or to reframe a story so that it was easier to understand the whole picture.

Some highlights (above):

• A tool that showed exactly what programs at the Department of Local Affairs gave grants to specific Colorado counties - something that helped our executive director know our financial impact as he traveled the State meeting with leaders in each county
• An interactive data visualization for rent and vacancy data across Colorado - which helped tell the story of Colorado's housing crisis for reporters and the division of housing
• A map that compared the funding levels for energy assistance programs in Colorado counties - which was used by a lobbying group on behalf of low-income families to try and secure severance tax funding for energy assistance programs across the state

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Low Tech, High Impact Solutions

Strategy, Process Design

Projects that use readily available technology to solve a pressing problem.

Manufactured Housing Testing – Google Forms, Sheets, Maps API
One of my favorite projects was an incredibly successful implementation of a new online testing process for the State of Colorado. We used Google Forms to create an online version of a test that manufactured housing professionals in the State were required to take for licensing. The old process meant they would drive from across Colorado to Denver so they could take an in-person, hour long test and they wouldn’t be told the results until they were home. If they failed, they would have to make the journey again.

Colorado is a large state, so the time spent driving was a completely undue burden on our residents that weren’t close to Denver. Recognizing this, we developed multiple versions of the test that professionals could take online from their own home.

By using the addresses of the test-takers, data they were already providing in the process, we were able to connect our test answer tracking spreadsheet to the Google Maps API and see the direct impact we were having – how much time we saved people, how many emissions we saved Colorado, and the cost of travel we alleviated. We also sent a survey to see how we could improve the experience over time. Our very first online test-taker saved an estimated 18 hours on the road, accommodation costs, and knew immediately that they had passed their test.

Case Study

Skills & Tools

Employment

Energy Outreach Colorado – Senior Design Strategist

February 2018 – Current | www.energyoutreach.org

• Analyzed process and service delivery in programs to create efficiencies and increase customer value
• Designed all in-house collateral, applications for services, advertising, and service maps
• Key member of a 9-month strategic planning committee for the 5-year organization direction
• Product owner for brand identity & website redesign launch creating information architecture, analyzing usability data, and copywriting all content in June 2018
• Implemented cost avoidance measures that saved over $75k in first 12 months

Code For Denver – Co-Organizer, Design Lead

May 2019 – Current | www.codefordenver.org

• Organized and facilitated a group of 20 to 30 civic tech volunteers - ran weekly meetings, orientations, onboardings, workshops, and special events
• Served as the design lead for the organization, contributing critique, mentoring, and guidance for designers and other volunteers learning design
• Secured 28.6% more funding from our main financial sponsor in 2019

State of Colorado, Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) – Digital Strategist & Designer

September 2015 – February 2018 | www.colorado.gov/dola

• Practiced agile and human-centered design processes in everyday work, teaching skills and fundamentals like continuous improvements and testing through collaboration on projects
• Ran pilots and created low-tech prototypes of digital products alongside internal employees and stakeholders to address inefficiencies and user needs
• Provided interpretations of analytics and other data to contribute to data-informed decision making
• Implemented LEAN strategies for service design, process design, and waterfall workflow efficiency
• Created both static and dynamic (API driven) data visualizations to showcase public data in a transparent, easy to understand way
• Contributed strategic decisions and guidance that led to cost avoidance of more than $100,000

Colorado Interactive – Content Management Specialist

March 2015 – September 2015 | www.colorado.gov

• Strategized and facilitated non-technical government stakeholder team meetings on best practices, content, audience, and how to best meet user needs with their digital properties
• Created wireframes, digital prototypes, and navigation redesigns for agencies including the Governor’s Office, Department of Regulatory Affairs, and the Colorado Energy Office
• Conducted pre-launch usability testing on the newly redesigned www.colorado.gov

Occasional Guides – Owner, Creative Director

August 2014 – March 2015 | www.occasionalguides.com

• Created two city guides to Denver including research, writing, layout, design, and printing
• Designed and built website in HTML, CSS, and JS from scratch

gyro – Engagement Associate & Business Development

December 2013 – August 2014 | www.gyro.com

• Researched, designed, wrote and managed our RFA/RFP responses in collaboration with our digital product, search, and strategy teams
• Ideation, project management, and event planning for the strategic thinking event series gyro:scope
• Copy edited and proofread for TD Ameritrade, DCP Midstream and Johns Manville

FitPro North America – Editor & Technical Strategist, Production Editor

August 2012 – December 2013 | www.fitpro.com

• Defined overall brand strategy including digital content, social media, and analytics reporting
• Launched a redesign of the website with user centered design principles and usability testing
• Lead research and contributed to procurement of a new learning content management system, oversaw its implementation, content design, and launch

Freelance Writing, Strategy, Design

October 2010 – August 2012 | www.anotherpatrickcollins.com

• Created print and digital content for clients such as Beck’s Beer, The State of Victoria, The City of Melbourne and Barefoot Radler Beer
• Developed strategy and design for Black Eye Coffee, The Clever Turnip, and Privateer Rum

Volunteer Experience

Code For Denver – Designer

• UX/UI and visual design for many projects including COMRAD Community Radio, Generation Schools Network Database Dashboard, Flo’s Whistle: Pandemic, Energy Assistance Penetration Dashboard, You Are Not Alone Mom2Mom App, Denver Public Library’s IdeaLAB 3D Printing Queue, and Dear Neighbors.

United States Digital Response (USDR) – Project Lead for Local Government

• Scoped project for a local government that led to creating a roadmap of new service delivery ideas to serve residents while figuring out how to reopen a physical service space that was closed due to COVID-19

Education

University of Colorado at Boulder – Bachelor of Arts, Linguistics

August 2003 – May 2008 | www.colorado.edu