Holden Hardcastle

Holden Hardcastle

Creating beautiful, exciting, and positive experiences by working with inspired and driven people.

Over the last twenty years, I have produced award-winning strategic marketing campaigns. I am an experienced art and creative director who has led high-performing teams at companies across various industries. Working with inspired and driven individuals, I aspire to create beautiful, exciting, and positive experiences. Whether it is bringing people together through an application or developing a dynamic brand to change the world, I believe that inspired teams yield inspirational results.

Lively

Livelyme Website

Lively—Website Redesign

(2023-2024) The collaboration with teams at Lively and Last Rev, the website redesign for Livelyme.com yielded significant improvements across key metrics. The concerted effort resulted in a 5.3% decrease in bounce rate, indicating enhanced user retention and engagement. The redesign led to a 16.5% increase in engagement time, suggesting that visitors are spending more time exploring the website's content. The average pages per session surged by 8.3%, demonstrating enhanced navigation and content discoverability. Individual conversion rates saw a substantial boost of 7.1%, indicating a more effective user journey and a higher likelihood of achieving desired outcomes. This collaborative effort not only revitalized the Lively website but also delivered tangible results — enhancing the user experience and driving conversions.

San Francisco Surfrider Foundation

San Francisco Surfrider Foundation

Surfrider Foundation—Creative Strategist

(2109-2024) Coordinated the redesign and migration of the San Francisco Surfrider Foundations' website and marketing emails to Hubspot. The platform consolidation allowed for greater insight into the chapter's membership.

Ready State

Amazon FireTV

Ready State—Senior Designer

(2021-2022) Conceptulized and generated a variety of media from concept to final execution with teams from Amazon, Instacart, Markforged, Snowflake, and Torani. Edited video and created strategic content for blogs, social media, and marketing materials.

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Tone Oliver Productions / Four 11 Productions

Real California Milk — Editor

(2021) Partnered with Tone Oliver Productions to create the video series promoting Real California Milk and local chefs. Responsible for editing and assembling recorded raw material into a suitable, finished product ready for broadcasting. The material included camera footage, interviews, sound effects, graphics and special effects.

Union Bank

Union Bank

Tag @ Union Bank—Art Director

(2016-2020) Served as brand steward and directed designers, production artists, copywriters, and specialists to ensure consistency for 360 marketing campaigns. Delivered collateral and assets across channels and mediums on schedule according to specifications.

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Bleu Marketing Solutions Inc.

Bleu Marketing Solutions

Bleu Marketing Inc.—Art Director

(2016) Collaborated with clients and project leads to determine opportunities, goals, style, and tone for media campaigns. Communicated a vision and strategy to designers, illustrators, copywriters, and other artists. Approved artwork and delivered client presentations to review and finalize products.

Dell EMC and the Hybrid Cloud provides the foundation to help companies modernize, automate, and transform data centers by innovating across devices, ecosystems and services to design solutions for the way people work.

Identified audience, messaging, stories, and statistics, to develop a cohesive launch campaign that adhered to brand guidelines. Digital content and collateral was designed to highlight metrics that influence CFO decision making.

Advanced Energy Economy

Advanced Energy Economy Responsive Website

Advanced Energy Economy—Creative Director

(2013-2016) Defined, built, and maintained the company’s visual identity to ensure brand consistency across channels, mediums, and campaigns. Responsible for conceptualizing and creating assets for print collateral, websites, and email campaigns.

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Old Navy — Gap

Old Navy Online Email Campaigns

Gap Inc.—Sr. Level Graphic Designer

(2013) Collaborated with copywriters, designers, and marketing teams to create and support online and email campaigns.

Old Navy is in constant communication with their customers. The marketing and creative teams foster relationships through email and online campaigns. The campaigns are centered around new products, promotions, and sales.

Weekly marketing and design meetings allow for open collaboration and exploration. Production artists, designers, copy editors, art directors, and team leads are encouraged to discuss new ideas and fine tune project briefs and update style guides for targeted online email campaigns.

Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com Search Results Redesign

Dictionary.com—Search Results Case Study

Dictionary.com is committed to accelerating the discovery and mastery of English in all its forms. As the world's leading digital resource for language success, they were looking for solutions to increase the awareness of their expanding product line and increase earnings without compromising their primary vision.

Focusing on the goal of increasing revenue, advertising and promotion became a more prominent part of the search results. The site was redesigned to give more emphasis to exclusive advertising.

The responsive and grid based mock-ups work within the established style and brand guidelines to call out the promotions and ads. Using typographic and visual hierarchy, the search results remain the primary focus.

Chronicle Books

The History Of Surfing

Chronicle Books—Dynamic Digital Production Coordinator

(2013-2016) Collaborated with teams at Sony, HBO, Lucasfilm, Apple, and Amazon to create digital books and applications.

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TRX Training

Website and application experience for TRX

TRX Training—Creative Manager

(2007-2010) Responsible for hiring and managing a six-person video production team and developing best practices for content creation and distribution.

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