Communication Design
Design that carries a message across every surface it lands on — a wordmark, a page, a package, a moving feed, a forty-metre wall. One practice, eight skills, and a classroom record that goes back to 2008.
Every block on this page carries a label: client work, studio practice, or self-initiated project. Nothing here is presented as something it isn’t.
25 yrs
Communication design across agencies, studios and classrooms
8 skills
Identity, type, editorial, print, illustration, motion, packaging, environments
12
Short films, every frame an original painting or drawing
Since 2008
Teaching the discipline at college level
Brand identity systems
Marks, dynamic identities, guidelines a producer can run without a designer in the room
Typography
Type as infrastructure — display, text and code carried by one disciplined skeleton
Editorial & publication
Grids and type systems that hold ninety-six pages, issue after issue
Print production
Repeat tests, soft proofs, press specs — files that survive the roll and the press
Illustration & image-making
Painting, character work and narrative image as cultural argument
Motion & dynamic imagery
The artwork is the footage — short-form film built from original art
Packaging & structural
The form of the container designed before the label that wraps it
Environmental graphics
Wayfinding, installations and spaces that read in section, not just in plan
Identity, type, editorial, print
The core of the discipline: systems that hold. An identity a whole network can tune from one rule, a typeface disciplined enough to carry display and code, a grid that survives ninety-six pages, and production files that come off the roll the way they left the screen.
Illustration & image-making
Communication design with a hand in it. Painting, character work and narrative image made to argue a point — and made by me, on paper and canvas, before any of it reaches a screen.
Motion & dynamic imagery
Short-form motion is where an audience actually is, and it is the format most designers never make — because shooting is expensive and produces something that doesn't look like their work. So I stopped treating video as something you shoot and started treating it as something you move. The artwork is the footage.
The first frame is the poster
No build-up, no lead-in. In a feed the film competes with a thumb, so frame one has to be a finished picture — the still is designed before it is animated.
It has to work with the sound off
Most viewers never hear it. Image and typography carry the argument; sound is a reward, never a requirement. This is a design constraint, not a technical one.
It has to loop
A film that ends where it began gets watched twice. Cutting the last frame to hand back to the first is a compositional problem, and communication design solves it.
- Concept & storyboardBeat boards, animatics, the still before the move
- After EffectsCompositing, keying, tracking, expressions, time remapping
- AnimationCel and digital, transform and shape animation, kinetic type
- Edit & finishColour, sound design, aspect-ratio cutdowns, delivery specs
- Frame-by-frameGraphite and oil captured on paper and canvas, then conformed
- GenerativeAI-assisted sequence exploration, then hand finishing to standard
The full library below — filter by category, hover to preview, click to play. Every film is built from artwork I made by hand.
The Kiss — paintings on the wall
The whole catalogue, hung. One wall, one light, and the paintings changing inside the frame — so a buyer sees the room before they see the file.
Video production →Outrage — the masked madonna
A statement piece set in motion: the veiled figure, the two pistols, the calm face behind the mask. The painting holds still while the meaning moves.
Video production →Cacti Bloom — desert paintings
The cactus series set in motion — the bloom opening, the saturated desert light, moonrise over the saguaros. The paintings, given time to breathe.
Video production →Women Displaced
A short film on displacement, cut from a body of collage paintings — women at windows, birds leaving, the fire escape as a border.
Video production →Wall Art — social ads
The painting, framed, then hung above a sofa, in a bedroom, along a hallway. Sell the wall, not the file.
Video production →Apparel — Afrolatin Rockstar
The artwork on a body. A short promo for the apparel line — it ends on the brand and the shop, never on the painting.
Video production →Quixotes — framed prints
Framed editions hung as a gallery wall. The same move as the wall-art ad: hang it, light it, let the buyer stop imagining.
Video production →Viva Nativa — El Gallo
A promo for Puerto Rico's number-one rock band, built around the rooster: the bird that announces the morning whether or not you asked it to.
Video production →Afrolatin Tarot — the sketch underneath
Run in reverse: the finished plate, then the paint, then the pencil line it came from. The sketch is the proof a human made it.
Video production →Bangkok Market — graphite on paper
A market drawn line by line until the paper is full. No time-lapse tricks beyond speed — the mark is the mark.
Video production →Cherry Ants — graphite on paper
Graphite again, with a single red intrusion — the only colour allowed in the frame.
Video production →Slaveship Regret — oil on canvas
It starts as an oil on canvas painting, and it ends on a wall, framed. The whole arc in twenty seconds.
Video production →The Artwork Is the Footage
The case study behind the reels: ten short films built entirely from my own paintings — a cause film on displacement, product campaigns for wall art and apparel, a promo for Puerto Rico's number-one rock band, and four process reels that put the camera straight on the paper. No footage, no stock, no camera anywhere in it.
Packaging, environments & dimension
Communication design in volume rather than on a flat page — an installation choreographed in time, a station that reads in section instead of in plan, a package whose structure precedes its label, and flat repeats resolved onto garments. Form, light, camera position, and the decision about where a person stands.
Teaching the discipline
College-level teaching since 2008, across undergraduate and associate programmes, in digital media, digital imaging, design foundations and studio art. Communication design is also something I hand on.
- St. Paul's School of NursingDigital MediaAdjunct Professor2026–present
- Briarcliffe CollegeDigital Imaging & Computer GraphicsProfessor2008–2010
- Education AffiliatesGraphic Design & Digital MediaUndergraduate—
- Inter American UniversityDesign Foundations & Studio ArtUndergraduate—
Intercultural competence isn’t a line on my CV — it is the subject of the work
My studio practice is Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin: Animalia Caribe, Afrolatinidad Es, the Afrolatin Tarot, Unraveled Identities, Telar. I have taught in Puerto Rico and worked between New York and Barcelona. Audiences who do not see themselves in the canon they are handed recognise very quickly whether the person doing the communicating has actually thought about it.
In practice this shows up as reference sets that are not all from one place, briefs that let the audience’s own culture into the work, and a critique culture where being specific is the courtesy and being vague is the discourtesy.
Need a message carried across every surface?
Full case studies, process footage, and course material are available on request.