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Graphic Design

Christmas Rose Concert Poster

Client:

Sterling Singers

Tool(s):

Photoshop

Role:

Designer, Freelance

The Brief
Sterling Singers, a recurring client, needed a concert poster for their 2025 Christmas season performance. The concert title was Christmas Rose. My first question was an honest one: what exactly is a Christmas rose? The client’s answer was simple and immediately visual: a red rose with snow.

The Challenge
A strong concept lives or dies on the hero image. My first instinct was a custom photoshoot, but a quick check of the local forecast ruled that out. No snow on the ground, none coming within the project window. That meant finding a stock photo specific enough to serve a very particular mood, not just any rose, and not just any snow.

The Approach
I narrowed the image search to two compositions: a rose rising up through snow or a rose resting on it. Once I found the right shot, a vibrant red rose lightly frosted, lying on snow with warm light behind it, the direction became clear. The image had a majestic, almost fairytale quality to it. That association pointed me straight toward the typography.

My usual go-to fonts didn’t fit. Futura was too geometric, Proxima Nova too modern. The rose lying in snow felt closer to something from Beauty and the Beast than a standard holiday event. That instinct led me to an elegant, fantasy-adjacent display font that matched the mood. For body copy I came back to Proxima Nova, using its weight range to handle hierarchy and keep white text legible against the photo.

Texture was added to the title treatment to reinforce the icy feel, and a QR code was included so concert-goers could find more information easily.

The Result
The final poster leaned into the romance of the image rather than the typical holiday red-and-green formula. The color story, multiple shades of red against the cool whites of the snow, gave it a warmth that stood out. Sterling Singers had a poster that felt as considered as the concert name itself.

AdvancedMD Corporate Website

The Challenge

When I joined AdvancedMD, the company was about to hit it’s growth spurt within the healthcare SaaS space. The marketing team had just launch the 2014 rendition of the website using Expression Engine. The website was called, by us later, as the “bowling ally” site because of the decision to use wood paneling…still to this day I don’t know why they went this direction.

All the fonts when over the wood paneling had an offset outline to make it look like it was indented in the wood, there was different wood grains based on what page we were on, and the biggest issue is that it didn’t feel like a software SaaS website. Lead generation tanked down to near nothing.

About a year after this launch, and after a complete rebranding of the company, I was given the responsibility to art direct, rebuild, and relaunch the entire website…and I need to do it in three months.

My Approach

I brought myself and the two other web designers in marketing into a “war room” to separate ourselves from the distractions of the day-to-day. We worked on selecting a CMS that can grow with us, figured out how the lead gen was to work, and the overall “feels” of what AdvancedMD could be in the future.

Selection of the CMS
The first thing we needed to do before moving onto design was picking a content management system, or CMS. We needed to do this because Expression Engine wasn’t working for what we needed. It was bloated, slow, easily broke (sometimes multiple times in a day), hard to find developers, and doing any custom work was out of the question (hence the breaking). We looked into Sitecore, Drupal, Joomla, and other various options, but in the end we decided to go with the ever popular WordPress. WordPress gave us everything we needed to bring the website into what we wanted to do with the website, which was customization and control.

Lead generation
The next step we needed to do focus on was the lead generation issue. We were using Adobe Marketo Engage for our email campaigns already, so we decided to tap into that asset. We actually tested this on the bowling ally site for a bit so see how we can utilize it the best. It offered embedding or adding a script to utilize the built on page forms. After much testing, embedding the forms from Marketo directly onto the website was the direction to go.

Jumping forward a bit, for this iteration of the website (the 2016 version) we put the form on every page…we did not test this approach as this was a request from the higher ups. We year or so later we tested this and found that having a form on every page actually decreased lead generation, so we replaced it with a button. Every lead went through the pricing page, resource (learning) center, or live demo pages.

The design
Design was a different matter. Gone was the wood paneling, dated icons, the dated technology and devices, and in its place was a clean, minimalistic white. White became the theme. Why white? Because it offered the ability to “splash” color into the mix. The AdvancedMD logo at this point was a multiple color hummingbird with about four different colors and various tints and shades of those colors. So, to emphasis this branding, I decided to make these colors the accents.

In the end, we brought in high def screenshots of AdvancedMD, had a custom photoshoot for the “everyday doctor” feel, introduced an actual SEO strategy bringing the main pages to number one spots with Google, and moved the corporate website into a stable environment where we had the freedom to do what we needed to do.

Since the 2016 launch, the website has remained relevant in messaging and stable even with the introduction of Ai. A few things have happened along the way. It has survived two brand refreshes due to AdvancedMD being aquired by different parent companies. Recently it went through a complete backend rebuild from WP bakery to Bricks Builder (which was completed in one month) while keeping

The Result

Today, as of this writing, the website is a strong powerhouse full of information for every aspect of AdvancedMD. It is also a main source of lead generation for the AdvancedMD sales team, and not just any leads…ones that convert to clients.