About
Creative, Futurist, Smart Aleck
Michael Hilliard is a creative director, designer, and photographer who never could pick just one. Trained as an industrial designer, he treats every interface, page, and product the same way: make it obvious, so nobody has to read the manual. The good stuff happens where storytelling, context, and a striking image collide — preferably across a few mediums at once.
Strategic: He's the one translating fuzzy business goals into a plan people can actually rally behind — building agreement without death-by-meeting, then shaping and pitching the creative that hits the target.
Creative: Decades across design, branding, print, interactive, and motion — ideation through final artwork, scribbles to ship. Also a steady hand at mentoring talent and inventing processes and tools when none exist.
Technical: Fluent in Adobe Creative Suite, Capture One, and the video tools (Final Cut, Motion, After Effects); conversational in Figma. Deep on UX/UI and CMS builds — his studios have shipped sites, CDs, DVDs, and presentations since the 1990s — and bilingual between programmers and designers.
Michael Hilliard is a creative director, designer, and photographer who never could pick just one. Trained as an industrial designer, he treats every interface, page, and product the same way: make it obvious, so nobody has to read the manual. The good stuff happens where storytelling, context, and a striking image collide — preferably across a few mediums at once.
Strategic: He's the one translating fuzzy business goals into a plan people can actually rally behind — building agreement without death-by-meeting, then shaping and pitching the creative that hits the target.
Creative: Decades across design, branding, print, interactive, and motion — ideation through final artwork, scribbles to ship. Also a steady hand at mentoring talent and inventing processes and tools when none exist.
Technical: Fluent in Adobe Creative Suite, Capture One, and the video tools (Final Cut, Motion, After Effects); conversational in Figma. Deep on UX/UI and CMS builds — his studios have shipped sites, CDs, DVDs, and presentations since the 1990s — and bilingual between programmers and designers.
We're nice people and excellent listeners, and we'd genuinely like to hear about your marketing and branding problems. Send a note, or go old-school and pick up the phone. Squiddley's eager to chat.
Squiddley, who’s actually an octopus, began as a charming sketch for an animated Ivar's commercial showcasing delicious calamari and clams. Over time, he has become our beloved mascot, now bravely marching across a ruined landscape on a heartfelt quest for something more. Could it be love he’s searching for?
Like the Italian Futurists a century ago, we hold a few sturdy convictions about what makes art, marketing, and communication actually work.
It starts with discovery — an idea we lifted from our legal clients: a real conversation about your brand, your language, your goals, and the speed bumps ahead. After that, the beliefs:
We believe in plain language over jargon and acronyms. We believe in showing, not telling — mockups, mood boards, real examples — so ideas land without ambiguity. We believe creative strategy has to serve the brand without rigid processes crushing the soul of the work. We believe our best ideas come from summoning the dark arts and stirring that pot directly with you. We believe in clear expectations, honest checkpoints, and the occasional well-reasoned push-back. And we believe in fun. Let's have some.
Our design and narrative sensibilities (and name) owe a sharp nod to great art and writing from the 20th century. The Italian Futurists were a noisy collective of painters, writers, and sculptors caught up in the dynamism of emerging technology and industry. They embraced the science, politics, and communications of a rapidly changing society. They expressed ideas through depictions of motion, publishing manifestos and graphic poetry, and invented multimedia shows (often ending in riots) that laid the foundation for Cubists and Dadaists to follow.
Any similarities to the contemporary futurists at Futurist Juice stop at inciting riots or hanging out with the likes of Benito Mussolini.
Nowadays, our technology and services clients have business collateral printed on century-old letterpress machines, while telling their stories using bleeding-edge web applications. We embrace the fusion of the old and new, creating clever ways to make messages seen, heard, and understood, and depicting complex ideas through capturing dynamic moments.