I started creating movie and television posters to find a creative outlet as well as to decorate my walls. I have been lucky enough to turn these side projects into paying gigs thanks to sharing these designs online with various fan communities.

Some of my most recent work and skill development for my position as an in-house designer for UPS are in video production. In order to accommodate strict project deadlines, shrinking department budgets, and a need for a creative and versatile video production method, I, along with UPS video producer Michelle Polk, crafted a new type of video kit for our department. This production kit relies on High Definition DSLR Video that is made available through the use of cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark II and GoPro action camera.

We have been able to literally travel the world with a two or three person crew. Michelle and myself, along with the occasional help from our UPS colleague Wes McDermott, captured some really nice video on tight deadlines and at a fraction of the cost of an external vendor or production crew.

I also started working with motion graphics, which allows me to take traditionally two-dimensional documents and information call-outs and turn them into moving and dynamic video graphics. Under the tutelage of our resident full time video and sound editor, Eric Deuser, I have tackled on-set audio capture and sound editing. Over the last two years, I developed the skills to storyboard a script, operate as director of photography, edit, color grade, and finish customer-facing videos.

Maintaining a good working relationship with clients can open up many new avenues. The one-sheet I created for Moonrise Kingdom’s theatrical release was a commission for Shortlist.com. It was used in an online gallery featuring several artists’ interpretations of the film’s movie poster. Thanks to a good relationship with the editors at Shortlist.com, they passed my information on to a product manager with NBCUniversal UK. The product manager was coordinating the promotion of the film’s release on DVD/Blu-Ray in the UK in October of 2012. My poster was used as a give-away item at promo events and I conducted an online interview with CreativeBloq.com about the poster.

The “For Your Consideration” ad for Moonrise Kingdom was part of an unrelated contest to create a promotional piece for the film going into Oscar nomination season. My design was a Grand Prize winner, which included a cash prize and the opportunity to have my ad used in the Oscar promotion of the film.

I have managed to turn my love for movies and the art of the movie one-sheet “posters” (for those not familiar with industry speak) into a steady stream of work from Shortlist.com and occasionally the print version, Shortlist Magazine. Shortlist is an entertainment website and magazine based out of the UK, which often helps promote film releases by asking artists to create their own version of the film’s release poster.

As a result of my early work with fan art concert posters for the Phish and Widespread Panic fan communities, I have started receiving requests directly from musical artists for official show posters.

Thanks to the recommendation of a friend, I was able to make contact with several fan communities that support artists who design alternative concert posters. The rules of the community are simple: you cannot use the band’s name or likeness due to copyright issues. This requires you to be very creative in your design and implementation. I have had quite a bit of success selling limited print runs to these communities. I even sold out several editions after just a few weeks and in one case, a few days.

A recent proposal design required fresh airline photography to be used as section title pages. Brian Fellows, our senior designer, came up with the concept to create abstract and tightly cropped images of aircraft. My challenge was to execute the concept in such a way that the images evoked the feeling of an aircraft without being too direct. I tried to capture parts of the aircraft that people may have never noticed before, requiring you to look twice to figure out what part of the aircraft the image represents.

Simply, my idea was to combine design and custom, fan centric artwork with a calendar that highlighted every major football fan's passion, Game Day. So, it would function not just as a piece of artwork, but also a way to track your favorite team through their season.

The calendar would only consist of the months within the regular football season. In the case of college football that meant September, October, and November. The top portion of the calendar would be dedicated to a custom illustration and the bottom would be a traditional calendar, but with a slight twist. I centered the layout of the days on the calendar around Game Day which I placed smack-dab in the center. For Notre Dame's schedule, that meant that Saturday of each month through November became the center of the week.

Also in this space I gave specific information about where the team was playing (home or away), when, and against which team. I also wanted it to be a little interactive and fun by designing a space to place a sticker indicating whether they had (W)on or (L)ost as well as an area to record the games final score. At the end of the season you could either cut out the calendar dates and keep the illustration as a piece of artwork or keep the whole calendar as a memento of the entire season. I left enough room on the rest of the days of the week so that you could still write in events or appointments. To really hit home the idea of a quality designed product and to complete the overall experience of receiving the calendar, I created a cover to round out the design.

On occasion I will pick up a private commission poster if the subject matter inspires an idea or I have a technique I want to try out. These posters have no affiliation with the bands represented, but are meant to be one-off mementos of specific shows or favorite artists.

A little over a year ago, I started the process of standardizing the look of my online web presence. My three primary sites are my personal portfolio page, viewable at Benwhitesell.com, my personal blog through Benwhitesellblog.com, and my online store, Movingthemerch.com. I looked into a few select online services that allow customization, and also do the heavy lifting as far as hosting and running a checkout counter, which was going to be a necessity for my e-commerce store. Now, my portfolio is hosted by Behance’s Prosite, my blog is a product of Squarespace, and my store is run through Big Cartel.

Each of these services offers the best solution in their respective areas of focus. The challenge was to take these three different services and adapt the frameworks they provided to create a consistent brand experience. In this case, the brand is myself. I made updates to some of the branding elements I used over the last few years and injected bright colors and simple content identifiers in the web headers to help visitors know what type of experience each site offers.

Prosite, Squarespace, and Big Cartel all allow for custom HTML and CSS elements, so after completing some back end coding, I was able to standardize the headers and navigation elements. Movingthemerch.com is slightly different in that I want it to stand alone as a store to keep it flexible for future product offerings, but at the same time fit into the overall design scheme I developed across all three websites. Another big plus is that all three services provide mobile optimization. On my original portfolio site that I built from a template, I had to add code to route mobile users to my Behance profile because my site, which featured some fancy navigation elements, did not function correctly on a mobile device. This seemed to be a more elegant solution and is much easier to update.

The challenge from the UPS Supply Chain global sales team was to re-invent the customer experience for their primary tour location housed in Louisville, KY. The new experience would need to highlight UPS Supply Chain’s pursuit of cutting-edge technology, and move away from the traditional PowerPoint sales presentation. After vetting several external vendors, it was determined that a custom solution could be built in-house utilizing the variety of skills available within our small team consisting of Michelle Polk, the project manager, Wes McDermott, the multimedia developer, and myself the visual designer. What you see here is the initial Phase 1 rollout of the presentation with basic functionality.

This customer experience is designed to allow the presenter the ability to create a story on the fly. When traversing the trays there are buttons that can be selected to bring up specific content related to each customer’s individual needs. The content ranges from montages of images of strategic locations, to full HD video, and even interactive 3D models. Not only was the challenge for our small team of 3 people to develop the presentation, but we were responsible for the executable content as well.

When I started getting heavily into photography back in 2008, I was really into the art of the portrait. My interest in portrait photography and the study of lighting techniques led me to some interesting commissions for friends, and later ended up being a valuable resource at my day job, as budgets got crunched in the economic downturn. I even managed to win a Louisville Graphic Design Association Gold Award for my black and white photo for the United Way/UPS fundraiser.

You never know what type of photos you will be taking in our department. I recently had the opportunity to photograph a new air mask system for our aircraft. The images were then used in informative magazine spread and for instructional purposes. I also captured images of the system in use in an actual cockpit for the magazine cover. Fellow designer, Brian Fellows, did the Leading Edge publication design.

In early 2010 I got the itch to create my own unique wall calendar. This is a large format calendar designed specifically for my work cube. I wanted to go slightly retro in the overall feel, hence the rainbow colors and use of half circles, which were inspired by the phases of the moon. The final piece was custom printed at zazzle.com and later featured in the book, Save the Date: New Ideas and Approaches in Calendar Design published by Victionary Workshop Limited.

The 2007 UPS Global Small Business Forum was one of my first large scale projects for UPS as a full time employee. I was tasked with creating an overall design concept within brand guidelines, to run through the invitation, event program and schedule, booth banners, table tents, nametags, and PowerPoint templates used by the presenters. The design for the invitation went on to win a Silver Award for graphic design in the 2007 Louisville Graphic Design Association’s annual 100Show.