Catherine Denzer Garate

Designer - Creating custom donor recognition walls, plaques, awards and
signage. Working mostly with educational, healthcare and nonprofit clients
to create unique designs for each project. Creating presentations with
renderings of the proposed designs that accurately represent the final
look and feel of the final product. Traveling to installation sites to supervise
final placement and photograph for company records and promotion.

Using creative cloud to produce a wide variety of home decor, gift product and packaging for a home decor and photo frame company located in New York city. Creating assorted graphic design projects for a variety of companies and clubs.

Senior Product Designer - Designing of a variety of home decor products including frames, albums, wall art, storage, candle warmers, decorative tabletop and gift items. Using current trends to create groupings of innovative and coordinating products that are also suitable for each retailer. Working with marketing and sales to create specialty product according to buyer’s requests. Experienced with a variety of finishes including: cast metal, stamped metal, wrought iron, wood, resin, glass, ceramic and paper. Designing facepaper and packaging that coordinates with the trend the products are communicating. Compiling product images and combining into graphic representations of in store plan-o-grams. Creating presentation materials for the marketing team. Managed freelance artists and buying original artwork for various projects. Traveling to New York, Las Vegas, Highpoint and Atlanta Shows for researching product trends and competitive product. Traveled to Asia (Hong Kong, China and Thailand) to oversee production and approval of time sensitive product, to vendors researching capabilities and selecting new product. Organizing and creating mock-ups of product to go to Atlanta Market. Styling product in showrooms and creating an interactive product sheet for tracking customer interest and to quickly relate selections back to the main office.

Worked independently designing photo frames. Researched trends to created a large variety of trend right, original and best selling designs. Sketched for multiple categories of product including baby, wedding and sentiment frames. Designed product for both stamped metal and diecast metal materials. Create specialty product to fulfill specific requests when given input from sales team. Used Photoshop and Illustrator to create realistic renderings of product for sales presentations.

Created cross-sale flyers, mini booklets and advertisements. Attended turn-in meetings with sales team members. Used design styles from existing packaging to create related materials. Supervised photography, retouched photos and created clipping masks. Worked with copywriters to complete the projects under time conrestaints.

Supervising small in-house design staff of three designers. Assigning multiple jobs to each designer, keeping the work flow moving and the deadlines met. Managing outside vendors for large design projects, photography and freelance illustrators. Researching home decor trends and colors, applying these current themes to album product designs. Creating trend boards for buyer presentations.

Product design of photo albums and associated marketing collateral, packaging, labels, sell sheets, point of purchase, signage for trade shows. Designed two large lines of photo albums yearly. Created technical drawings and original artwork for Asian and domestic production, approval of print proofs on all production pieces and final approval of color on press. Worked with local vendors to introduce new materials and techniques for use in product production. Created hand made samples of product and improved the methods for creating these samples by researching new construction possibilities.