Anborn
Carter

The brand already had equity under THC. Moving it into CBD meant a different category, a different buyer, and a different set of rules governing what the panel is allowed to say. I kept the roundel and the name doing the recognition work, then rebuilt everything around them to hold a compliance panel without reading like a warning label.

Labels print on holographic stock so the bottles catch light on a crowded shelf, where a matte white competitor disappears. The artwork is layered vector built in Illustrator with spot separations and CMYK builds for the label press, and the color bands carry SKU identity so a customer can tell full spectrum from no-THC across the room. Every bottle and jar in the line was labeled by hand, which is also where the tolerances got settled: a label that wraps a curved bottle without a seam gap has to be proofed on the bottle rather than on a flat.

The merchandise was a lever, not a giveaway. A spend threshold released a branded cinch bag and a mini tincture, which lifted order value and put the brand into circulation outside the house at the same time.

The mark had two jobs that usually pull against each other. It sits on a living plant a grower keeps for a season, and it sits on a garment someone wears in public. A roundel does both: leaf over sunrise arcs, furrowed rows beneath, heavy enough to survive a holographic sticker and quiet enough to live on a plant without shouting.

A clone ships in a red cup. Rather than design around that, I made the cup the brand device. Printed mini cups on lanyards replaced paper flyers, roundel on one face and a QR on the other. A paper flyer gets folded into a pocket and thrown out; a cup on a cord goes onto a keyring and stays on the counter, and it is still a working flyer the moment someone scans it.

The QR opens the site. The strain list is its own piece, reissued every week inside a cash register receipt: monospace, rule lines, barcode, torn edge. Availability and pricing move constantly in this category, so the format had to be one I could reset weekly without it reading as a new design each time.

Nothing on this brand went out to a vendor. On Str8CBD I prepped files for a vendor's press and applied every label myself, which is where I learned what that press was doing to my artwork. Real California is the same job brought in house: I print it, cut it, and apply it.

Every drop gets a vertical teaser that puts the cross in the same position each time. That notation is breeder shorthand, so the parentheses carry real information to a grower and read as a subtitle to everyone else. I art-direct and produce all of them, and the mix is deliberate: my own illustration carries the scene, Adobe Firefly fills in generated elements, product photography grounds it, Adobe Express handles the animation, and the pieces are scored with custom beats made in house. The teens introduction is the one exception: that one runs on a stock track.

Midriff's brand system was built in Figma and extended across Shopify: product line, storefront assets, merchandising, and an embedded 3D shopping experience. All Things Align got its own identity and print work on the same foundation.

The operation is the part worth looking at. At five or more new designs a week the catalog work scales faster than hours do, and the usual answer is to hire the hours. I rebuilt the layer instead. Claude Code connects directly into the store and standardizes products across titles, types, tags, meta content, and alt text, with rule-based collections that keep merchandising consistent as new drops go up.

The second store is the proof the first was not a one-off. I packaged the workflow built for Midriff and ran it on All Things Align: same connection into Shopify, same standardization pass, same collection rules, a different brand sitting on top. It began as a test of the package and shipped anyway, because a system is only proven when it reaches a live storefront with real products on it rather than stopping at a demo.

The split below is the deliberate part. Every decision that sets taste or spends money stays with me; the repetitive layer runs on its own and gets reviewed, not trusted.

The identity is built on the objects themselves: a blind box caught mid-open, a beige desktop running a paint program, an arcade cabinet coming apart. Each graphic is a memory drawn as a product, which means the brand never has to explain itself in a tagline.

The guidelines name two reusable assets, a diamond halftone and a sparkle watermark. Every drop inherits the same texture and the same light without anyone redrawing them, and that is what holds a graphic-led brand together when no two graphics are alike. The palette is presented as painted swatches rather than chips, in the same register the logo is drawn in.

The applications move. The mark spins, and the garments carry a walk cycle so a print reads on a moving body instead of sitting flat on a product page. Stills below.

Every volume takes one city. The car changes, the street signs change, the landmarks behind them change, and nothing else does. Charter Way in Stockton, Echo Park, the Mission, Chicano Park, Story and King in San Jose, McHenry in Modesto, Broadway and Franklin in Sacramento, Central Avenue on Route 66, Grand Avenue in Chicago, Lincoln Park.

The frame does the holding. Masthead locked in a white box across the top, a red, white and green border, and a rule that breaks out of the frame and runs the full width. Inside it, the hero car sits in full colour behind a heavy keyline, over a collage of local landmarks rendered down to pencil. The car is the subject and the city is the ground, every time, which is what lets a reader pick the series out of a rack and still know which volume they are holding.

The series came with a site as well. It is no longer hosted, which is the usual fate of a small brand's website once the renewal lapses, so the covers are what remains to show.

Two volumes break the border colour deliberately: brown and gold for San Jose, purple and grey for Sacramento.

The customer here cannot shop online. Orders are placed on paper, by hand, usually by a family member, and mailed to a facility. That single constraint set the whole design: every product in the catalogue carries a code, every code has a row on the order form, and every row ends in three empty boxes to write in.

The codes carry their category, so F is food, S is supplies, H is hygiene. Someone can find a shampoo in the picture spread, read H73 off it, and go straight to that line without scanning two hundred rows of text. The visual page and the order page are two views of the same index.

Field labels run in both languages throughout, down to the totals: quantity and cantidad, weight and peso, price and precio, sales tax and impuestos, freight and envío. The address block asks for housing number and facility alongside name and city, because that is what the envelope needs to clear.

Fifteen years, three to five accounts running at once, each one owned from brief through final production file. Storefront wraps, storefronts of the other kind, business cards, direct mail, and brand kits, mostly for businesses on Stockton streets. The plates before this are what the practice looks like at full scope; what follows is its range. The earliest pieces here predate the practice: they were made in house at the two auto companies where I worked, while my title on the door said accounting. Simmer is the oddest brief in the set: a restaurant through the day and a club at night, so the identity had to hold under two completely different lighting conditions.

The homepage is not a portfolio. It is a drawing pad. The copy says where I am rather than what I do, and the only thing to do on the page is leave a mark: scribble with a finger, a stylus or a mouse, sign it, send it, and it arrives on my desk. A visitor who came to look leaves having made something instead.

The District is the portfolio, built as a place rather than a page. Neon Alley is the first street. Storefronts are enterable, a guide named June moves a visitor between them, and what she says is a door policy rather than a menu: the door will not open for strangers. Still in development, shown here as it stands.