LAUREN’S
DESIGN WORKSimply Loud: brand identity, & Design for Marketing & Socials
April 2025- | 216 E. Milwaukee St. Detroit, MI 48202
This work has been created as part of my job at Simply Loud Cannabis Co, a local and black-owned Detroit dispensary in the heart of New Center. I applied for the job because I noticed they had a great customer experience, but lacked design expertise. In my role as Creative Designer, I am the sole creator of all graphic content going out to customers, such as take-home flyers, digital and physical signage, shirts, and social media presence of the dispensary making sure our brand extends beyond the store and into the digital world.
Deliverables:
Social Media Content & Reels || Digital Graphics, Product Photography || In-Store Motion Signage || Printed Flyers & Signage || Branding Supplies
About the Logo and Brand
This dispensary is located in Detroit’s New Center, close to several apartment buildings, coffee shops, and other thriving businesses. Our space being an art gallery is something that also sets us apart from most other dispensaries, and we work closely with several local artists to display their work and offer customers a chance to purchase it through consignment. As the closest dispensary to the Midtown and Downtown area, we offer a luxury customer service experience usually reserved for more high-end dispensaries, with affordable prices and local brands with an authentically Detroit feel, serving everyone from veterans in our community to tourists visiting Detroit for their first Lions game. We are sleek, sophisticated, and modern, yet we’re right down the street, so you’ll always get a luxury deal at a local price.
Creating A Brand New Visual Language, Literally
The majority of budtenders are female at Simply Loud, so I wanted to bring that aspect into our visual language. The logo also being a few shades of pink also helped with this. Graphic style for Simply Loud started out very simple, with lineless vectors in shades of magenta to connect to the feminine energy, but to also stand out against sharp typography. In later updates, I was told to go in more of a sketchy, “fire” direction, with a hand-drawn and more graphical image style, as my manager pushed me to make more eye-catching designs that both highlight our artistic senses and keep our customers engaged and interested.
Once that specific manager was gone, however, our visual language softened, and my remaining primary manager for creative direction decided I use more pastel colors, and overall a more breezy and soft feminine direction, returning back to the roots of the design system I originally created towards the beginning.
Early / Unused Graphics || Simply-Themed Product Categories
updated digital menu Graphics || Simply-Themed Product Categories
5 x 7 Flyers & Menu Refresh
My first task as Creative Designer was to refresh our take-home flyers given out to customers with their purchases. We use these flyers as guides for pricing out deli flower, and for promoting and relaying information about the dispensary outside of the store and beyond. The information provided needs to be clear, easy to read, and accessibility-friendly, as many of our customers are older and cannot read small type.
Point-of-Sale Printed Signage
Our store has a reception counter with a clear, slanted 8.5 x 11 sign for printed papers to be displayed. Near the front, we also have an 11 x 17 vertical sign that stands on its own. Some of the most important signage to convey info to customers is displayed here, so we try to update these monthly and theme them to corresponding events and months. This has been a series that I have continuously updated since June 2025.
Digital Motion Signage: An Ongoing, Thematic Series
Our store has four standard size 1920x1080 TVs on display, generally behind each register and in between the higher shelves. I focused on stationery menus for the first few months because I was still working out the visual language, and I did not have access to the TV software yet. As a motion designer first and foremost, I really enjoy making things like this, and I‘m happy to say I’ve continued this trend with several more updates to this series. We often update the flower menus month to month, to reflect changing prices, holidays, and vibe of the season, while specific days, specials, and deals get their own screens in-store to display their information.
Specials - June to Oct. 2025
Flower Menu - June to Oct. 2025
Flower Menu - Nov-Dec 2025
Lauren vs. Instagram: Bringing Meaningful Design to a Virtual Audience
Soon after my first design projects, I was given nearly full creative control to transform our dispensary’s Instagram page into a regularly posting, vibrant social media presence. I try my best to incorporate a combination of digital graphics, photos, and videos from inside the store, while also maintaining a regular posting schedule and keeping up with the reels to keep viewers engaged with the algorithm. I want to highlight our budtenders themselves and what it’s like to shop with them, as the customer service is the biggest appeal to our store besides the products themselves.
Something very special I always make sure to include is people at our vendor days, where brand ambassadors come into our store and have a promotion on their products, as well as inform customers of new drops and usually pass out merchandise and brand supplies. As someone with a strong interest in the cannabis packaging industry, I always make sure to give them my card.
CLICK TO VISIT OUR INSTAGRAM
Carousel & Post Collection: Combining Photo, Color, & Language
In my series called Simply Spotlights, I highlight brands I personally enjoy, and display products as both beautifully designed objects to celebrate and brand identities to remember. This is especially because I’ve learned working as a budtender that customers knowing brands by visuals alone is quite common, since there are hundreds of brands on the wall all competing for their eyes’ attention at once, and packaging could be the difference between one purchase or another. In Simply Reviewed, I have some of my budtender friends give me descriptions of some products they enjoy, and why they reccomend them to customers.
black history month: calyxeum
black history month: calyxeum
black history month: calyxeum
black history month: calyxeum
Product Photos, Captions, and Simply-Themed Posting
Starting in November, and now since becoming fully remote in January 2026, I have been enjoying revisiting my love for photography, specifically product photography, that I discovered at CCS. I always enjoyed photography in general, but I’ve found it’s easier for me when I have a clearly defined subject. I love visiting the store and photographing things as they exist in real life, to give the social media audience an authentic inside look, and to remind them to visit on their day off. I absolutely love connecting the visual design language of Simply Loud with the photos and videos of our people that keep the store running every day, as I feel like it gives another layer of meaning to the posts I create for the digital audience.
Easter Sunday 2026: Motion and Social Graphics
For April 5th, 2026, our store celebrated Easter with 15% off storewide. I was tasked to create a themed TV screen to display in-store, as well as a matching graphic for socials.
Detroit’s Opening Day 2026: Motion, Signage, and Socials
On Friday, April 3rd, the Detroit Tigers played their first home game, and since our dispensary is only 20 minutes away from Comerica Park, we saw this as a big opportunity to invite people going to the game to our place for “The Loudest Pregame in the D”.
We had several storewide and brand discounts, and a food truck in the parking lot for a limited time. This was one of the biggest days of the year for Detroit tourism from other cities, so I wanted to get as many new & returning customers in our doors as possible with a system of socials, print, and digital signage.
12 Days of Weedmas 2025: Motion, Reels, & Signage
For the final sale of 2025, my managers decided to create a list of deals that would be available from December 20th to January 1st. Originally, it was going to be an advent-calendar style series with a new discount or deal every day. However, due to changes from higher management, the end result ended up being a more simple series of deals availiable for all of the days 12/20 to 1/1, no avent calendar, with just one screen of moving signage displaying them all.
Social Reel (Broken Down into GIFs)
Behind the Scenes: Early Assets and Process
I completed the series and sent prints before our due date, and I had to change the core design last minute. Though I was disappointed, I also understood that these things happen sometimes, so I was able to be flexible and create a new composition hosting all of the discounts and deals for the whole 12 days. In this experience, I learned that working with both my managers and their superiors is important to meet a common goal.
Printed Signage Advent Calendar (Unused Assets)
Thanksgiving 2025: Reels, Prints, & Signage
These designs were some of the quickest projects I’ve had so far. I got my list of information to include for the promotion on the same day I sent the prints in. Thankfully, CCS taught me well in terms of thinking under pressure and being able to make designs with a fast turnaround time, so I’m really happy with my design that I ended up with. As for the motion, that took a little longer as I had to actually animate a vector turkey, but that being said I am also proud of myself with how it turned out, and how quickly I got these together.
In-Store Signage: Horizontal Reel (Broken Down into GIFs)
(shown at each of the 4 registers)
Behind the Scenes: Original Text & Vectors
As my job provides access to an Adobe subscription, it also provides access to Adobe Stock, where I often find what I need when it comes to textures, stock footage, motion backgrounds or loops, or several types of images or even vectors. Other websites I like are Texture Labs, Unsplash, or almost anywhere that I can find something that is public domain or open for commercial or personal use. I do not use AI generated assets or text in my work, ever, as a matter of moral principles.
Simply’s 1-Year Anniversary Party: September 13th, 2025
In September, our business had a party for it’s first full year open. We wanted to bring lots of new customers in, but also welcome returning customers back with goodie bags, free products, local artists and food trucks in the parking lot, and just an all-around good time for our birthday. Naturally, we printed flyers to pass out to customers before the event, and at Detroit’s Dalley in the Alley event on the 6th. We would also have a crew documenting the party for socials.
To Be Continued...
Working in the Detroit community and being able to contribute meaningful design materials to a place I enjoy shopping and working at is a really big deal to me. I am so thankful to my managers Trinity, Marjorie, and Abs, as well as the owners of Simply Loud, for their continued support and guidance as I expand my portfolio and skills while they give direction and continue to trust me and my work.
Not everyone is lucky enough to work in one of their target industries straight out of college and be able to apply their skills on a near daily basis, in a way that gives me a unique sense of purpose and feeling of moving forward. Stay tuned for more updates and even bigger projects!
-L
LAUREN’S
DESIGN WORK