Daniel Rutkowski

Creative Director with Czarnowski. Developing exciting in-person experiences and events for incredible brands.

Creative Director, Catalyst Exhibits Pleasant Prairie, WI 2013-Present
Developing interactive experience concepts while closely working with digital and experiential partners to fulfill the initial journey's vision. Collaborating and providing guidance to internal teams to rapidly generate concepts for trade-show
booths, synchronize the experiential development with the physical exhibit structure, and align client's marketing goals with the production. Designed both the physical architecture of and the various attractions, digital experiences, and
events shown within. Clients include high-profile companies such as Mitsubishi, Wargaming, Siemens, CDW, Astellas Healthcare, Unity Game Engine,along with several others at premier shows such as CES, E3, GDC, HIMMS, IMTS, SEEMA, AACC, and many other events.

Additionally, I’ve worked to bring more tools into the company’s pipelines to expedite the
ideation and visualization proces. From simple techniques that cleverly blend Autodesk Maya’s
viewport with hand-sketched enhancements to rapidly produce concept art, to using the Unreal
Engine 4 (AAA-level video game engine) to produce beautifully crafted imagery that can also
live as an interactive piece for clients to explore with sales and design staff leading the journey.
The software also naturally provides the opportunity to generate full-fledged interactive
experiences or video games, some of which used the Microsoft Hololens, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift headset to immerse tradeshow-audiences into the digital journeys as well. I’ve had the great opportunity to direct the
production of a few of these digital journeys, acting as an art director for them, and was happy
to see the technology added to Catalyst’s myriad of offerings to clients.

Providing a range of creative direction and digital services for a number of high-profile clients,
DCI has afforded a multitude of interesting projects. Designing traditional in-store displays,
generating large-scale roll-outs for newly-designed showrooms and supporting elements for
automotive companies such as MOPAR, Mazda, Hyundai and Cadillac, and working with teams
to script the development of forward-thinking marketing strategies for Sony’s VITA and Subaru
have been enlightening experiences that encourage professional development beyond typical
design positions.

Apart from the traditional design-pipeline, there has also been a significant amount of
converting static, rendered designs into 3-dimensional environments that can be traversed and
explored (like a video-game environment) before going through the costly expenditure of
producing a physical prototype. Utilizing Unity3D 4.0 (typically used as a game engine), my
team and I pushed to create AAA-level visuals that allowed clients to explore our designs in a
virtual environment, that told more of a story than any rendering ever could. This experimental
process took a lot to finesse into a viable extension of DCI’s available product line, but has since led to also offering a mobile virtual wrap-around, environment product-offering that clients can have setup at their own office.

This position focused on the final design of FIAT dealership elements and how they would
become manufacturable pieces living within the car company’s dynamic, signature
environments. The results of this design work can easily experienced by visiting any US FIAT
dealership today.