Journalist turned designer.

How to name your design business? Ideas ranged from what I saw around me to the obvious, my name. Abdella Design began in 2000 with a lay-off from the best job I ever had. Inc. magazine was sold and moved to New York. While I looked for another full-time job, word spread and I found myself working on projects, big and small. 

My client list covers industries in education, technology, publishing, insurance, financial, construction, real estate, and retail. I've worked independently and with teams in corporate environments.

I can jump right in to your project or team with skills to start producing quickly and efficiently, working through all phases of the design process while staying within budget and deadlines.

For just about three years, I worked full-time for a health plan that served active-duty uniformed services families. I updated existing brand standards for the plan's marketing initiatives which included print, web, outdoor, social media, a quarterly print (and pdf) magazine, and email newsletters 6x/year. Created templates to support new and existing design projects. Photographed members and food/recipe shoots. Supported sales team and member services with direct mail initiatives and ads. Used best practices for production of all design. Worked with website developers and learned BigTree CMS. Project managed migrating pages, applying styles and links, and editing photography for new website.

 www.usfamilyhealth.org            

Teaching and engaging undergraduates is fun and challenging. I was offered the opportunity to teach a semester course on Applications of Print Publishing. The class covered design concepts, layout, printing techniques, and instruction in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Guest speakers were invited from design firms and print shops to speak about best practices and current innovations in their fields.

 www.emerson.edu

Looking at the college brochures in high school, I was taken with pictures of schools in New England. Pictures of snowy commons, ivy-covered stone buildings, sunsets beyond the hills — none of those things found in Miami. But Gainesville definitely had ivy-covered buildings and a beautiful campus set in north central Florida. It was there I practiced my chops writing, editing, photo editing, and page layout. It wasn't until I worked with art directors in DC that I realized people look at what they're reading before they read it — and my career in graphic design began.

 www.ufl.edu