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Email: darrius@darriusrankin.com
Location: Greenville, SC
Experience
Senior Graphic Designer | 6AM City Inc.
- Led advertising creative across 30+ markets, doubling ad engagement and contributing to consistent year-over-year ad revenue growth; clients regularly requested campaign work by name
- Produced ads, graphics, and video content across print, social, email, and other digital formats, and built reusable templates for social, articles, and landing pages that scaled across 30+ markets
- Contributed to brand initiatives including DrinkUp, Today's Best, Six and Main, and Give Butter
- Gradually pushed the visual language of the brand toward more personality through experimentation with gradients, texture, type scale, and animation until it became the new standard
- Worked with the Creative Director to convince ownership to consolidate 30+ market color palettes into five core colors, making the case that market personality could live in other brand elements. Let each market pick their color.
- Worked directly with company leadership and cross-functional teams to understand business objectives and translate them into creative direction
- Supported junior designers and freelancers by reviewing work for brand accuracy, offering direction on efficiency, and making sure creative was serving the right objectives
- Built tools and resources for the sales team including pitch materials, cutsheets, and the 6AM Ad Library, a searchable creative archive that helped reps quickly pull campaign examples for clients
Brand Strategist & Designer | Neesh (Self-employed)
- Lead brand strategy and visual identity development for clients across sports, hospitality, food and beverage, media, retail, real estate, health, fashion, and nonprofit industries
- Before touching a file, audit the brand from the ground up: customer profiles, reviews, questionnaires, market positioning, differentiators, touchpoints, analytics, and what the market is actually looking for at that time. All of it informs the creative direction.
- Develop full brand systems from the ground up including positioning strategy, identity design, campaign creative, motion graphics, marketing collateral, and custom applications, covering everything a brand needs from concept to market
- Drove $80K+ in attributed sales and counting for ORR Cycling through sustained brand and marketing engagement with significant creative and strategic ownership
- Doubled client engagement for Newbreed Jiu Jitsu within 60 days through targeted brand and social campaign work
Apparel Designer & Production Artist | Bay Island Sportswear
- Designed 100+ production-ready apparel graphics for major retail clients including MLB, Barnes & Noble, and Old Navy
- Produced brochures, catalogues, and print-ready apparel files for screen printing and embroidery production
Apparel Designer & Production Artist | Southern Tide
- Developed seasonal apparel graphics for t-shirts, polos, outerwear, and accessories aligned with brand aesthetic and seasonal trends
- Created technical production files ensuring accurate color matching and print quality for manufacturing
Production Artist & Designer | Infinity Marketing
- Collaborated on Comcast Xfinity customer notification materials, managing production workflow for high-volume marketing campaigns
- Designed print ads, digital banner ads, and email campaigns
Education
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Graphic Design | University of South Carolina Upstate
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