Graphic Designer & Technical Writer
Evocative writing and creative graphic design
The original Desert Life Design has decades of creative design experiences!
Desert Life Design is a creative graphic design agency serving the southwestern United States. Our design capabilities include graphic design, photography, creative writing, as well as video production.
All of our creative designs focus on the graphic arts profession. But, talk is cheap. Please take a moment to browse our portfolio of recent assignments.
For our photography assignments, we depend on Canon and Nikon cameras. To prepare photos for publication, we use Photoshop. When it's time to publish those photos online, we upload our edits with FileZilla.
WordPress is our preferred tool to create and publish hundreds of pages of concise, focused content for specific audiences. In addition, we publish content that covers many topics on our own Desert Life Design site.
Our Desert Life Design logo
Our Desert Life Design logo uses a stylized version of the red yucca desert plant. In addition to being a heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant plant, this symbolic plant alludes to our agency's adaptive creativity, which translates well into our graphic design assignments.
Just like the red yucca, our words and images impart beauty as well as sustenance. At Desert Life Design, we are flexible problem-solvers, we are open to new ideas, and we have a child-like sense of wonder.
Copywriting, editing, and blogging experiences
Our most recent assignments include creative, documentary-style writing along with photography and graphic design. Our work reaches a specific audience with focused copywriting and SEO techniques.
In every copywriting assignment, our goal is to communicate on a personal level and generate a positive response.
Room for rejuvenation
Here's our break room. But since we're 'creative-types', we call our break room the 'new-ideas' department. It's where we take a rejuvenating break, with the goal of generating creative new ideas!
Reading, playing challenging games, learning a new language, or maybe even writing a new poem will stimulate our brain cell activity with new growth. We do all those activities in our break room! As a result, we've found that a strong, flexible, growing mind is also a creative mind.
When we're yearning for more fun, we also like to apply our design sensibilities to interior design. For instance, we designed our break room with a nostalgic, mid-century modern motif, along with other styles thrown in to reflect our design firm's unique personality.
Traditional graphic design for print
In addition to graphic design for online marketing, we also design for print campaigns. We understand the unique formatting requirements for accurate reproduction using CMYK and spot colors.
Please consider Desert Life Design for your printed graphic design and technical writing projects.
Examples of our print design
To attract a customer's attention, the designers at Desert Life Design accentuate a product's visually enticing features. Our goal is to package an irresistible call-to-action.
At Desert Life Design, we use the cool colors and textures from a swimming pool to make a compelling sales message.
New for 2024: Desert Life Design's xeriscape experiences!
At Desert Life Design, we love working in our landscape. Here in the southwestern United States, landscaping means to xeriscape using drought-tolerant and heat-tolerant plants.
In our new xeriscape landing page, you can read our experiences with this delightful hobby. A well-designed xeriscape will not only help you save water, but also enhance your property values while creating a welcoming landscape for wildlife!
We've learned lots of lessons
After what feels like a lifetime-and-a-half of work, it seemed time to document some of the lessons we've learned at Desert Life Design. In addition to lessons about entrepreneurship, we share experiences about old-fashioned printing, creative writing, as well as many aspects of design, especially graphic design.
We've compiled the lessons we've learned on a landing page for handy reference. As the weeks fly by, we'll add more of our experiences in this wonderful world of design and written communications.
Recent lessons we've learned
Every day at Desert Life Design is a new learning experience. For instance, I've recently remembered how often I've used vignettes in graphic design.
Based on our experiences, the brush tool is an easy-to-use tool for producing custom vignettes. Other times when we need consistent vignettes, we use the Refine Edge dialog box in Photoshop.
We find creative inspiration from the desert!
At Desert Life Design, we find creative inspiration from desert life. That's why we've used that unique beauty to describe our business!
By the way, the flower in our photo below was a Penstemon variety. We had it in our drought-tolerant landscape when we were based in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
A beautiful, drought-tolerant desert flower at dusk. Notice how the plant is surrounded by a golden aura, and is reminiscent of our Desert Life Design logo.
Innovative, creative
writing and graphic
design
Software tools we use to create the design
We have our favorite design tools. They include:
- WordPress is our Content Management System (CMS)
- InDesign
- Photoshop
- Dreamweaver
- Illustrator
- Adobe Acrobat
- Camtasia (video production)
- Microsoft Office Suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access
- Apache Open Office
- Adobe Technical Communication Suite
Next, browse my portfolio.
Desert Life Design is based in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area. Here, we strive for perfection in graphic design and concise written communications in the technical writing discipline.