Sam Arnold

Contribution: Production Design Lead
Company: Rakuten Kobo

In April 2024, Rakuten Kobo announced the launch of its first ever colour eReaders, supported by a larger-than-life Above the Line creative campaign. This campaign, conceptualized by external agency The Garden, brought colour to the forefront with eye-catching, colour-inspired book covers splashing off of the eReader page.

As this campaign had to scale globally across multiple languages, myself and teammates designed a number of variations of creative in-house, following the established concept.

Most notably, I supported this project as Production Lead for hundreds of both print and digital deliverables. This process included: Building organized master InDesign templates with a modular link system, circulating those templates to internal designers and external partners & vendors with accompanying documentation, ensuring quality of creative and file structure once received and exporting all finals for delivery to correct specs on time.

Additionally, I supported the efforts of our team of in-house designers by testing and approving accessible colour combinations, creating and publishing colour styles to optimize workflow, ensure accessibility compliance, and support consistency. Finally, I created modular, campaign-specific components to provide the design team with resources that allowed them to localize a reading screen or switch creative versions in their production with just one drop-down menu!

Contribution: Art Direction, Design, Production Lead

This Second Cup Coffee Co. Summer LTO Campaign harnessed the aesthetic of summertime music festivals to flood the inside and outside of each Second Cup Coffee Co. café with gorgeous visuals of extreme summer. Large-scale, colourful photographic elements highlighted the summer’s fresh and innovative offerings whilst simultaneously driving appetite appeal & excitement.

Contribution: Design, Production & Motion Design
Company: Rakuten Kobo

A collection of static and motion digital marketing assets to advertise the launch of Apple Pencil compatibility with the free Kobo App—enabling readers to highlight and annotate within the margins of their favourite reads.

Contribution: Art Direction, Retouching, Food Styling (first two images only)

Client: Second Cup Coffee Co.

A collection of images from various photoshoots which I did the pre-production planning for, art directed and retouched in post. In the first two images, I also acted as a stand-in food stylist.

Contribution: Design & Illustration

Tannk co. is a compassionate children’s apparel company founded by notable author, philantropist and mother Anita Okoye.

Tannk. co designs and distributes affordable children’s clothing which is stylish, playful and practical. Founder Anita eagerly invests a portion of its profits into improving childhood education in Nigeria, where she lives and works.

Contribution: Design, Art Direction, Custom Iconography, Production Lead

When Second Cup Coffee Co. launched its lineup of Clean Label menu options in 2018, the task was clear—highlight the real, quality ingredients found in these beverages and strip the rest away. From this initial concept, we landed on a bright, airy, crisp photography style and a simple icon set to help tell the story of what you were getting in your Clean Label Beverage (and more importantly, what you weren’t.)

Contribution: Brand Development, Design

The creation of a cohesive, personal brand for Truly Medium. Truly provides authentic, honest medium services, meditation and emotional/spiritual healing workshops from a place of love and integrity for adults who have experienced death and grief. Her goal is to help bridge the often sorrowful gap between living people and their loved ones who have died, who they are grieving or may feel disconnected from.

To help bring Truly’s brand pillars of Educational, Magical & Deeply Authentic, the logo was designed to incorporate various symbolism: a spellbook, opened wide, as well as the sun & the moon combined (as a nod to the astrological/The Beyond). The secondary/alternate version of her logo logo is a more simplified version of this concept—using a single star to represent The Beyond. Between the single star and the wordmark is the line element that Truly loved from her previous logo, representing the thin veil that separates the living world and The Beyond, which Truly is able to peek behind.

Contribution: Concept Ideation, Design of print & social media collateral.

Collaboration: Concept Ideation, Logo System & Illustration by Lindsay Hill; lindsaydesigns.ca

The Brand for The Park Co-working is a 2020 collaboration between myself and designer & illustrator Lindsay Hill. The Park is a Co-working space in Bowmanville’s sought after 182 Wellington Street historical building. The loft setting is slated to include a co-working space, meeting rooms, photography studio & prop rentals, as well as a podcasting studio. The brand for The Park plays off of the space’s positioning line: “where work comes to play,” and utilizes a dynamic logo system which includes a set of hand-illustrated alternate logos, each representing one of the brand’s key pillars.

The brand is meant to be playful while sophisticated & contemporary enough to attract entrepreneurs within and outside of its target audience: young, trendy, tech-savvy professionals seeking a collaborative space to cure the loneliness of being a solo entrepreneur.

The “where work comes to play,” brand positioning line is carried through the collateral by introducing a playful sugar packet design for the space’s mini café, hopscotch floor decals and even an interactive & useful deck of cards in lieu of a traditional welcome package.

Two Boxes is a children’s book which seeks to explain the complex framework of gender construction, a largely academic notion, to children in a way that’s understandable.

Two Boxes was named a winner of HOW Magazine’s 2013 International Design Awards as well as a finalist in the 2014 INSPIRE Toronto International Book Fair Self-Publishing awards. The project was also named a semi-finalist in the 2013 Adobe Design Achievement Awards.