Art Director &
Designer

I am Edward Hamel,

a creative explorer endlessly striving to elevate my craft and add to the wonder & joy of the universe.

Let's create together

Selected Work

Brands I work for, and
experiments I can't stop making

Packaging and ads for Vita Coco and Scale Media's supplement brands, the production systems behind them, and projects I make on my own time, lately with Claude.

Interactive

Fridgeface

Five shapes made the alphabet. A partnership with Claude made it playable.

InteractiveAI CollaborationTypographySystems DesignProduct Design
Art Direction

Live Conscious 10 Year Anniversary Branding

To celebrate a decade of Live Conscious, I led a brand refresh that included custom anniversary logo lockups, a cohesive suite of digital ads.

Art DirectionBrand Identity DesignUI DesignPrompt Engineering
Packaging Design

The Systems Behind the Packaging

At Vita Coco I built the systems that production ran on: a request queue that sorted itself, and packaging and render files anyone on the team could update. I also did the design work, down to a sample-pack panel redrawn to pass legal.

Packaging DesignCreative OperationsWorkflow AutomationIllustration

The Human in the Loop

AI image generation couldn't do what I needed, so I built a production process around its limitations.

AI-Assisted Imagery

Alternate Universes

Every design process is full of directions you didn't take. Usually those directions just disappear. This workflow does something different — it materializes the alternatives. So you can test them against each other.

AI-Assisted ImageryArt DirectionVisual StorytellingIllustrationPrompt Engineering

Creative Tool Creator

The gap between what's newly possible and how designers are still working is either a threat or an opportunity. Here's the moment I decided which one it was going to be for me.

Motion Design

The Astronaut, Out of Register

Misregistration is the mistake offset printing works hardest to avoid. I made it breathe.

Motion DesignIllustrationArt DirectionAI CollaborationLottie
Art Direction

The Playbook Behind the Portfolio

I rebuilt my portfolio without a CMS and without writing the code myself. What I really built was a way of working with Claude that survives its forgetting and leaves the taste calls to me. It's now a playbook that runs my other projects too.

Art DirectionAI CollaborationSystems DesignWeb

About

Twenty years of making the work,
and fixing how it gets made

Most of those years were in-house, including three years as Senior Designer at Vita Coco. In between, I designed and managed the brand for a home repair startup, while directing its construction projects, about $1.5 million a year, scheduling crews and learning on the fly. Since 2022 I've designed for Scale Media's supplement brands, including Essential Elements, Live Conscious and 1MD Nutrition, and art directed campaigns like T-Hero Platinum.

At Vita Coco I built an automation system that cut admin from four hours a day to under an hour a week. At Scale Media I built a Figma Weave workflow the team uses to make ten ads in five minutes. By hand, that took at least five hours. The ads it makes run live. Along the way my work has covered brand identity, packaging, motion design, illustration, digital products and experiential installations.

Based in the universe. Available anywhere. Home base is Reno, Nevada, on Pacific time, and I've worked remotely since 2022.

Brand StrategyArt DirectionMotion DesignCreative LeadershipExperientialUI/UX DirectionTypographyStorytellingCampaign CreativeIllustration

Connect

Let's explore together

I'm drawn to strange questions, bold ideas, and the edges of what's possible. If you're here to make meaning, or make something beautiful, drop me a line. Don't be shy. Let's make something weird and wonderful.