About Chris Kavinsky
I currently serve as the Art Director and general creative lead at GREENCREST, a full service integrated marketing agency in the Columbus area, where I’m been since June, 2013. I head up the design and direction of our client work, whether print, brand development, or web and interactive media design. I am also the in-house web developer, working primarily with WordPress.
Previous Roles
Art Director at TCS Software (May 2007 – January 2013), where I managed the design and development for a number of clients in the association, government and non-profit fields. I managed the UX with the launch of their new custom database and website management software, helping make it more intuitive and user-friendly. I also led a number of brand and logo redesign initiatives with a number of clients.
Art Director at at Xenos Christian Fellowship, now Dwell Community Church (March 1999 – April 2006). As part of the newly-created Communications department, I provided design and art direction for the various ministries and events in the church, including promotional material such as brochures, annual reports, logos, invitations, catalogs, and packaging; and reorganized and redesigned the primary promotional and informational collateral for the church. I also restructured and redesigned the web site to be more user-friendly, simplify navigation, incorporate interactive multimedia, eliminated methods wasting bandwidth, and incorporated CSS/XHTML and templates to greatly reduce time required to add new content or update dated material. I also helped develop a project management system for design projects, and oversaw a handful of designers that assisted in either a part-time or volunteer capacity.
Senior Art Director at Columbus Employment News (December 1992 – April 1994, April 1995 – August 1998). I was responsible for the creative direction and design of a weekly newspaper, and managed the production team and process to publish a final product. I improved the quality of our advertising and created several successful demo ads for potential clients, which helped contribute to increased advertising revenue and a tripling of publication size. I also improved the production method, where we were regularly shortening our production times and beating our scheduled press time by hours.
My second stint with Columbus Employment News was to launch a second publication that covered the Cincinnati and Dayton markets, as well as overseeing the quality of design and production of the Columbus publication. I also spearheaded the move to deliver the publications to the printers using electronic modem delivery. This again reduced production times and improved the quality of printing. I also transitioned the papers from a two-color process to a four-color one. The additional production costs were more than made up by the sales teams being able to sell color advertising. The publications again continued to grow and saw a growth in page size by 400 percent.
Graphic designer at the Haunty Agency (April 1994 – August 1994), under the guidance of advertising legend Jack Haunty. As a designer, I created several successful promotional projects and advertising campaigns for clients, including Donatos Pizza and The Hills Market.
I also taught for periods of time at my alma mater, the Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) (September 2011 – December 2015), as well as Columbus State Community College (August 2018 – June 2021). At CCAD, I developed an introduction web design class targeted toward print/traditional design professionals wanting to break into the web design field. The curriculum walked through the differences between print and web design, the elements of effective web design and SEO, and understanding HTML and CSS. The class also walked through taking a static design concept and turning it into a functioning web page.
At Columbus State, I created a WordPress class that was aimed to educate students on not only the basics of WordPress, but also how to build an effective WordPress site using a customized child theme.
During a large part of my professional career, I worked as a freelance designer for a number of other agencies and operated as an independent design consultant for several small businesses and organizations. Some of the agencies I worked with over the years were Atomic Advertising, Clary Communications, RMD Advertising, Ten United, PPA Graphics, Stonefly Communications, Buchanan & Associates and Blue Diesel; as well as non-local studios such as Involution Studios in Massachusetts.
Education
Growing up, I had aspirations of being a comic book artist. But after ready Ogilvy on Advertising, I wanted to get into the advertising field. I graduated with a BA in Advertising Design from the Columbus College of Art & Design in 1993. I had a double minor in Illustration and Photography.