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Resume

Client

Access Direct

Role

Creative Lead: Branding, Print & Front-End Development

Timeline

4 years (Part-time)

Platform

Brand / Print / Web

Four years, one client, end to end ownership: the brand, the print, and a website coded from scratch in React

Access Direct website homepage on Macbook

Overview

Access Direct is a security solutions company based in Farmingdale, NY, providing businesses with a comprehensive range of physical security products and systems: access control, surveillance cameras, intercoms, door hardware, alarms, and monitoring solutions. Founded by David Smith, the company had established itself as a trusted provider in its market, but its digital and brand presence hadn't kept pace with the depth of its offering.

I was brought on as the creative lead across all of Access Direct's visual output, a part-time engagement that ultimately spanned four years and touched every surface of the brand: logo, print, digital, and a fully custom-coded website.

My Role

Over the course of the engagement I was responsible for:

Brand refinement: logo cleanup and color system standardization

Print and marketing materials: trade show brochures, pamphlets, digital flyers, and social media graphics

Business document design: Quickbooks templates and branded company documents

Full website design and front-end development in React.js

Ongoing webmaster responsibilities for access-direct.net

access-direct.net, a custom-coded React application built from scratch to put the company's full inventory online.

Design Goals

Access Direct didn't need a reinvention, it needed elevation and consistency. The brand had bones worth keeping, and David had a clear sense of what the business was. The work was about bringing the visual standards up to match the professionalism of the products and service Access Direct was actually delivering.

More specifically, the goals were to:

Refine the existing logo and establish a clean, consistent color system applicable across all brand surfaces

Build a library of print and digital marketing materials that could serve the business at trade shows, in sales conversations, and across social media

Design and develop a professional website that showcased the full breadth of Access Direct's inventory and services

Create a scalable, maintainable web presence David could rely on long-term

Brand Refinement

The Access Direct logo had the right spirit but needed tightening. I refined the mark for consistency and legibility across applications, ensuring it held up whether it was embossed on a trade show pamphlet, placed in the header of a Quickbooks invoice, or rendered on a digital banner. The color palette was preserved and standardized, giving every piece of output a shared visual language for the first time.

That consistency became the foundation for everything that followed. When every touchpoint, from a business card to a product brochure to the website header, uses the same refined mark and the same palette, the cumulative effect is a brand that feels established and trustworthy. For a security company, where credibility is part of the product, that matters.

A Standardized Brand System

I standardized the Access Direct palette around its core blues and a structured dark mode, paired with the Avenir type family across weights. Codifying the colors and typography gave every surface, print and digital alike, a single consistent visual language to draw from.

Print & Marketing Materials

A significant portion of the engagement was devoted to the physical and digital materials that drove Access Direct's business development. David regularly exhibited at trade shows, and those appearances required a complete suite of print-ready materials: brochures, pamphlets, and flyers that communicated the company's range of products clearly and persuasively to prospects who were encountering the brand for the first time.

I designed each of these pieces to work both as standalone marketing collateral and as a cohesive system, materials that felt like they came from the same company, told the same story, and reflected the same level of quality. Digital versions of the same materials extended the reach to social media and email.

Beyond marketing, I also handled document design for internal business operations, formatting Quickbooks templates and company documents so that every client-facing piece of paper carried the Access Direct brand properly. For a small business, these details are often overlooked, but they contribute meaningfully to the professional impression the company makes.

The Website

The centerpiece of the engagement was the website, and it represented the most technically ambitious work of the project. I built access-direct.net entirely from scratch using React.js, with no page builders, no templates, and no AI coding tools. This was before those resources existed in any meaningful form. I learned React, HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript specifically to build this site, studying best web practices and applying them to every page I wrote.

The decision to build in React was deliberate. A custom-coded React application gave the site performance, maintainability, and flexibility that a CMS template couldn't match, and it gave David a foundation that could grow with the business rather than hit a ceiling.

Access Direct website shown across desktop screens

Homepage & Services

The site was structured around four core sections, each serving a distinct purpose. The homepage was the entry point for the business, establishing credibility immediately and orienting visitors to what Access Direct offers. It needed to communicate that this was a professional, full-service security solutions provider, not a reseller or generalist.

The services section presented Access Direct's full offering across the spectrum of physical security: access control systems including key cards, intercoms, and door hardware; surveillance cameras and monitoring; alarms and broader security infrastructure. It was designed to help visitors self-identify which category applied to their need and understand that Access Direct could handle it.

Access Direct product detail page for the Highpower One controller

A product detail page within the services section, presenting individual security hardware with specs and supporting resources.

Brands

A major component of Access Direct's value proposition is the quality of the manufacturers and product lines it carries. The brands section gave David a place to showcase these relationships, signaling to potential clients that they were buying from a company with serious, established supplier partnerships.

Access Direct manufacturers directory on iMac in dark mode

The manufacturers directory, with searchable filtering across the brands Access Direct carries.

Responsive Across Devices

Access Direct mobile product page in dark mode

Access Direct mobile product page in light mode

Resources & Contact

Beyond the core catalog, the site included supporting resources like a searchable terminology guide to help visitors navigate industry definitions. The contact section was the conversion point for the site, designed to make it as easy as possible for a prospect to reach David and start a conversation. Security solutions are typically sold through consultation, so the contact flow was treated as the beginning of a sales relationship, not just a form.

Content direction across the site was handled by Wendy Majewski and Alek Vasic, with all design and development in my hands.

A searchable terminology resource, helping visitors decode industry definitions.

Collaboration

The four-year engagement was built on a close, ongoing working relationship with David. Unlike project-based work with a defined end date, this was a long-term creative partnership, which meant understanding the business deeply enough to make good decisions independently, and being responsive to new needs as they arose. New trade show coming up? I built the materials. New product line to add to the site? I updated the pages. Quickbooks templates needed the logo? Done.

That kind of embedded, trusted role is different from typical freelance or agency work. It requires genuine investment in the client's business, not just the deliverable in front of you.

Challenges

Building the website without AI assistance and largely self-teaching the technology stack was the defining challenge of the project. React, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript each have their own learning curves, and applying them together to build a production-ready, professionally coded website required sustained effort and discipline. There were no shortcuts available, every component, every page, every interaction was written by hand.

The upside of that constraint was total ownership and understanding of what I built. When something needed to change, I knew exactly where to go and how to fix it. The site didn't have black-box plugin dependencies or template limitations. It was code I wrote, which meant it was code I could maintain and evolve.

Outcome

access-direct.net launched as the company's primary digital presence and has served that role across the span of the engagement. For David, the website transformed what was previously a word-of-mouth and trade-show-dependent business into one with a professional online presence that could do the work of representing the company around the clock.

The four-year partnership produced a complete brand system: a refined identity, consistent print materials, a working Quickbooks and document infrastructure, and a custom-built website, giving Access Direct a level of creative and digital maturity that most small businesses in the security space simply don't have.

Reflection

Access Direct taught me something that no single-project engagement can: what it means to own a brand over time. When you're the creative lead for a business across four years, you stop thinking in deliverables and start thinking in systems. Every decision has to hold up not just for today's trade show but for the next one. Every page of the website has to be maintainable, not just shippable.

Building the site in React without AI tools also shaped how I think about front-end development. There's a particular kind of confidence that comes from having built something hard the hard way, from understanding the code because you wrote it, not because a tool generated it. That foundation informs how I think about technical constraints, feasibility, and the relationship between design and development even when the tools have since made the work faster.