HIGHOPES Design

Where did you study and what were some of your first jobs?

I graduated from California State University Long Beach with a BFA in Graphic Design.

Some of the first jobs I got were freelance gigs while I was still studying at Cal State Long Beach. I believe my very first official job was through the Long Beach restaurant, Lola’s Mexican Cuisine, where I was waiting tables at the time. After providing customers with a poorly designed menu over and over again, I convinced my boss to hire me to redesign the menu which eventually led to other paid small jobs for the restaurant. I still stop by the restaurant when I’m in town and the menu design has remained the same.

Another freelance project I completed while attending the BFA program was for an Orange County-based business owner starting a chain of infrared sauna therapy locations. I worked with that client to design the business’s logo and, later on, the website as well. I look back at this project as one of the first times I got to really sink my teeth into branding and started growing the passion I have for it today.

Immediately after graduating from Cal State Long Beach I secured my first full-time design job on the in-house creative team for The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf where I worked until I moved from Southern California to Seattle. It was a great first job to dip my toes into having a full-time creative career and I received some fantastic guidance from both Creative Directors I worked with there.

Give us the elevator pitch on what you do.

I am the Creative Director and Co-Founder of HIGHOPES Design. We are a creative studio that focuses exclusively on helping cannabis businesses nationwide unlock their potential through branding, packaging, web design, and marketing services.

How did you name your practice and what does the name represent to you?

When the idea of starting HIGHOPES came to me it was still something I was solely handling on the side of my day job at an ad agency in Seattle, Washington. Upon moving to Seattle and experiencing the recreational cannabis market for the first time, I recognized an opportunity, and established a passion for, helping cannabis businesses build successful brands. I captured a couple of cannabis clients within Washington and decided it would be best to brand myself as a more established business than just a freelancer to provide myself more growth opportunity.

I wanted a business name that slightly nodded to the cannabis industry without going overboard and falling into the stereotypical woes I had seen other similar businesses fall victim to. I also really wanted to communicate to my future clients that I was not simply targeting the cannabis space for the money, but truly because I wanted to lend a helping hand to an industry I had personal connections with and belief in. As a cannabis consumer and supporter, I wanted to see the cannabis industry achieve the success I felt it wholeheartedly deserved. You could say I had high hopes, which was a perfect name for the business.

Who’s on the team, what are their roles and why do you love them?

The HIGHOPES leadership team consists of myself as well as my two partners, Thomas Warinner and Mina Johnson. We each have separate roles at the company but are all co-founders of the business. Us three comprise the core team at HIGHOPES but we frequently work with a variety of contractors on a project-to-project basis that includes copywriters, strategists, designers, and developers.

Thomas Warinner is our Director of Development at HIGHOPES. In addition to managing our developer contractors, he takes lead on a majority of the high-level development projects that come through our doors. Thomas is hands-down the most skilled developer I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, but it’s his passion and ambition to constantly expand the skill set that makes him integral to our success. Whether it’s learning new development languages or experimenting with ones he already knows, Thomas is always looking for ways to increase our studio’s value and our client’s satisfaction.

Mina Johnson is our Director of Operations, but that’s just a fancy word for making sure we move like a well-oiled machine. Mina handles pretty much everything behind-the-scenes from building project timelines to paying our business taxes. We frequently call her the mom of HIGHOPES and that’s not just because she also kills it at motherhood on top of all her business duties. Mina is crucial to our team because she always brings a level-head and balanced point of view to any situation. HIGHOPES wouldn’t be able to operate day-in and day-out without Mina at the wheel of our ship.