Creagen Hayes: a case study by LAIN

Creagen Hayes

Creative director

Design, journalism, marketing

Personal brand, website

Three disciplines.
One curious brain.

Most portfolios ask you to pick a lane. Creagen's work doesn't: a campaign starts as a story, a story ends up as a layout, and a layout needs the right words to land.

So the brief was a personal brand loose enough to hold all three, and sharp enough to remember after one visit.

Pixels that won't
stay in line.

The idea came from the brief itself: a mind that jumps between disciplines, drawn as neon squares breaking across a black and white photograph. Every square sits on the page's grid, so the chaos is always on purpose.

1. Black and white, the person first.
2. Neon squares, locked to a 42-column grid.
3. Lowercase, in two steps, over the picture.

Loud, lowercase
and on the grid.

The name is set lowercase: stepped across two lines over the photograph, then run out on one line, edge to edge, at the foot of every page. Around it sit one neon green, true black, paper and a quiet grey, a typewriter voice for the cards and labels, and hand-drawn marks that circle what matters.

The wordmark, stepped

The sign-off, with its stickers

Sans and typewriter

The band, 42 columns

Pinned up like
index cards.

On the home page the three disciplines are pinned up like index cards, punched down one side, typed on a typewriter. Journalism gets paper white, design and marketing get the green.

01 Design, 02 Journalism, 03 Marketing

The statement

Three ways in,
four moves through.

The services page keeps the cards and lets them loosen up: three ways of working, then the four moves every project runs through, taped down and strung together like pages pulled out of a notebook.

Three ways I work

Listen, frame, make, stay

Off the screen,
same voice.

We took the system off the website to see if it held: cards for the first meeting, a poster for each discipline and a spread that treats the work like an editorial feature.

Cards

One poster per discipline

The spread

A portfolio that
reads like a feature.

Three pages, one rhythm: black and paper sections take turns, the band breaks across every first screen and the name signs off at the foot. The project page shows how a single case reads, with the work's own colour let in.

The scatter, how I work, a few things I do, selected work, contact

One case study, read like a feature

Three ways I work, the four moves, the principles

Three pages,
three shots.

How we put the website out: each page laid over its own first screen, the band running out of the frame.

Home

Project

Services

Out of the ordinary, in neon.

The website as we posted it, in three shots.