Carl Owens is a visionary and strategic leader passionate about creating design that hopefully inspires while improving the lives of others. He has an award-winning art background as well as award-winning marketing and brand materials in higher education.

He has developed print and digital assets for over 70 organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Mattel toys, Hilti tools, Siemens, Sanofi, Amgen, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Merck, Reckitt Benckiser, Kaiser Permanente, Pfizer, British Petroleum, Northrop Grumman and the U.S. FDA.

Carl has strong conceptualization skills and thrives on bringing blank canvases of any scale to life. From enormous blank walls in new college buildings to the blank slate of marketing campaign collateral, he has proven his ability to deliver solutions again and again for high-profile clients, executives and stakeholders. His versatile and adaptable design style merges color theory, typography, white space and composition across a wide variety of applications for engaging aesthetics. Carl has a solid track record of success as a creative director, brand manager, marketing designer, environmental and wayfinding designer, graphic designer, multimedia designer, conceptual artist, eLearning designer, fine artist, event planner, interior designer and landscape designer.

A drive to holistically elevate College of the Mainland’s brand, marketing, fundraising initiatives and student experiences have contributed to his recent success as Creative Services Manager. He collaborates daily with the marketing team and strategically creates forward-thinking approaches and designs for campaigns and other marketing collateral development across multiple channels. Over the past two years he has helped bring in four gold medals and three bronze awards with his marketing design work.

Carl’s strategic efforts to redefine the college’s brand architecture, typography and overall visual communications have helped reposition the college image contributing to semesters of record enrollment at College of the Mainland. This has included a strategic and distinctive architectural separation of institutional and campus events allowing for effective structures of branding prioritization. Significant branding changes also include the design introduction of the “brand box” (a visual element creating hierarchy and distinction of the college’s primary logo across print and digital mediums), the redesign of the college’s mascot logo (to artistically represent in one element the spirit, determination and focus of the COM student body), a redesign of the college’s Lifelong Learning catalog (introducing production efficiencies and elevating the design to garner community brand affinity), the development of a strategic campus-wide wayfinding plan (spanning journey experience touchpoints across exteriors and interiors defining hierarchies while including the design of 22 large-scale wall murals in campus buildings), and his design of the college’s first donor wall (encouraging cause-driven fundraising through a sub-branded, tier design approach leading to an 800%+ donor contribution increase).

At a tactical level, he physically creates multi-channel marketing campaign material and collateral daily including social media graphics, email marketing, brochures, flyers, posters, magazines and catalogs, graduation programs, direct mail, marketing tagline ideation, donor materials, event graphics, promotional swag, invitations, billboards (OOH), geofencing, vehicle graphics, logo design, motion design video with sound design and 2D animation, landscaping design, water tower graphics, executive PowerPoint presentation decks, a crisis communication flip book and extensive brand guidelines development (redesigned and expanded from 6 pages to 102 pages). His role often collaborates with all levels of college staff and stakeholders while managing and maintaining relationships with creative partners.

In his previous role as Creative Director & Manager of Multimedia Design and Development at Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Pure Learning, (a SaaS company now known as UL Solutions), he cultivated and led a high-performing creative team of 6 to 12 in-house and remote multimedia designers across four states (TX, NJ, PA, TN) and Canada, a remote audio team of two, and numerous international vendors in the creation of +1,500 custom-designed, compliance-based, eLearning solutions, delivered to 50 countries in 34 languages.

The global portfolio of over 70 companies spanned biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, life sciences, healthcare and other industries including clients such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Amgen, Blue Cross Blue Shield, HCSC, Novo Nordisk, Reckitt Benckiser, Bausch and Lomb, U.S. FDA, Pfizer, Stryker, Novartis, Celgene, Cardinal Health, Siemens and Sanofi, as well as Northrop Grumman, Hilti and Mattel. He served as a liaison between the product team and learning services department while also serving as the key point of contact for the department. He mentored designers, established processes and optimized workflows ensuring the seamless flow of high quality deliverables. With an entrepreneurial mindset, Carl proactively collaborated with all company departments and executives while spearheading the creation of original eLearning and training approaches designed for engagement and knowledge retention.

Carl was involved with eLearning software design and online course development within the platform, direct customer interfacing, HTML, CSS, jobaids, customer and employee experience, interface design upgrades for the company’s Learning Management System (ComplianceWire), interactive module design, accessibility, translation and narration integration, the design of client login pages, campaign landing pages, gamification, innovative conceptual design, motion design, animation, storytelling scenarios, video production and streaming video, infographics infused with integrations of Edward Tufte’s information design principles, demos, client webinars, event planning and marketing collateral, wayfinding, brand management, logo development (including an effort designing a logo for an internal department of Merck), tagline ideation, copyright and trademark governance, photography, sales collateral support and executive PowerPoint presentation decks. He led eLearning quality assurance design efforts, and the creation and management of the production department’s design and technical standards. The team’s high performance led to countless positive client reviews and revenue generation, not only showing that learners had memorable and engaging experiences but that highly crafted instruction empowered talent growth through organizational success. In addition, Carl initiated company research at UL to explore and evaluate augmented reality and virtual reality successfully developing working prototypes for each.

Committed to driving company success and seeing a weak brand representation in the market, he voluntarily adopted an additional simultaneous role at UL supporting marketing B2B efforts designing trade show exhibition graphics, signage, posters, direct mail, how-to documentation for self-serve client tools, promotional videos and social media graphics. Carl also initiated, conceptualized and led the interior design for two UL office lobbies in Princeton, New Jersey and Houston, Texas to elevate brand equity and visually align the environment’s aesthetic with the company’s technological prowess and value proposition.

Prior to those roles above, Carl worked for United Space Alliance (USA), a NASA contractor, implementing updates to Space Shuttle technical blueprints, Hernandez Engineering designing user interfaces for the Harris County Department of Education’s (HCDE) databases as well as custom interactive training development for the U.S. Meat Export Federation. While at Bastion Technologies, another NASA contractor under supervisor and owner Jorge Hernandez, he designed NASA proposals as well as a website for NASA’s Texas Aerospace Scholars program that taught young kids about planet Mars. Previous to that role, he worked onsite at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) matting and framing, with immaculate attention to detail, signed astronaut and Space Shuttle photographs for numerous world dignitaries including U.S. President Bill Clinton, presidents of Spain, Italy and many others. Early in his career, he obtained a NASA JSC clerical summer internship where his ambitious efforts led to receiving a distinguished NASA GEM award in a short span of time.

At one time, Carl worked at Six Flags AstroWorld in Houston, Texas drawing caricatures. This experience later led to opportunities that included drawing a caricature of the head director of NASA Johnson Space Center (George W.S. Abbey), retirees at NASA, guests at the Lunar Rendezvous Festival and dozens upon dozens of coworkers.

Carl has a strong fine art background with the achievement of a number of awards including winning first place in the United States twice for a Federal Aviation Administration art contest that extended to a second place award internationally and his artwork displayed in Paris, France. He won a number of awards in the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo art contests with two best of show awards and two gold medals. These led to being awarded an elite, one-month art scholarship residency in back-to-back years where he was 1 of 8 artists selected from the state of Texas to study oil painting and sculpture at the Cowboy Artists of America Museum in Kerrville, Texas. He also won fourth place in an international art contest sponsored by Pentel pens in Tokyo, Japan.

Carl has a wide array of hobbies and interests outside of design, some of which include drawing and oil painting, nature, gardening, playing musical instruments, photography and Mexican food.