I'm Brian Gundersdorf, a creative director and brand journalist. I help companies find their stories and build the creative experiences to tell them.
Over the last twenty-five years, I have designed complete brand systems, illustrated editorial content, captured and curated photography, written customer-centric brand messaging, published long-form articles, and led digital product teams from concept to recurring seven-figure revenue. As a full-stack creative, I provide a single point of view across the full creative process, not just a list of services.
Photography
I'm on a solo cross-country journey documenting America's landscapes, trails, and coastlines by car, foot, camera, and keyboard. Here are a few photos I've taken along the way.
Writing
As an outdoors creative, I write trail stories with a strong narrative point of view. They are investigative and practical, and typically include useful information for hikers. As a consultant for growing brands, I teach, workshop, and execute best practices of persuasive communication.
WRITING SAMPLE:
The Best Hike in Big Sur is Officialy Closed
The bartender slid a coaster in front of me and set a pint of Pool Service IPA neatly on top of it. "What brings you to Monterey Bay?" he asked. As soon as I mentioned hiking, the recommendations poured in faster than the IPA...
WRITING SAMPLE: A FOUR-PART, PHOTO-RICH ARTICLE:
Hiking San Luis Obispo's Morros
One day, if you’re lucky, you’ll drive Cabrillo Highway along Morro Bay and see Hollister Peak off the side of the road. If you're like me, you'll exclaim, 'How do I hike that!?' And you’ll risk your life trying (in vain) to find it on AllTrails while driving.
Maybe this article will save your life.
WRITING SAMPLE:
Me and The Bear - Hiking With AFib
There are obvious reasons to panic when a bear is nearby. I did not panic for those reasons. I was not afraid of being eaten. I was afraid of being excited. I was willing away the adrenaline. I was like Bruce Banner trying to keep the Hulk at bay.
WRITING SAMPLE:
Good Dirt - How I Became an Oboz Hiking Shoe Convert
My Oboz hiking shoes have wandered the 100-degree desert floor and surrounding hills of Palm Springs, explored the snow-covered alpine forest of San Jacinto Mountain at 10,000 feet, scrambled through the wild rocky playgrounds of Joshua Tree National Park, summited every hikeable volcanic peak in the Nine Sisters chain above San Luis Obispo, hiked every bucket list trail along the Big Sur Coastal Highway, looped Point Lobos, and crossed Pinnacles National Park end to end through the High Peaks (12 miles, 3,500 feet of gain). That's quite a resume for one pair of hiking shoes.
WRITING SAMPLE:
30-Point Brand Messaging Checklist
Let’s face it. When teams sit down to write messaging without a plan, it shows in the results. The message meanders formlessly as value statements, features, and differentiators occur to the team. Starting with a plan makes all the difference. To help you get started, we’ve created this 30-point checklist with some of the most important ingredients for a clear and persuasive message.
Use this list to evaluate your current brand message or inspire your next one.
BrandLab Messaging+ Workshop
I created the BrandLab workshop, which I've used to align and energize over 30 business teams around their brand’s purpose as we extract a clear, persuasive message for website, pitch deck, and sales collateral. AI can now handle some of this writing, but it doesn't replace a seasoned consultant asking the right questions to align and energize teams around their purpose. The images here are the slides I designed for the workshop, and on the far right are sample client outputs (each of these maps to the client's visual brand).
The BrandLab output is exceptional and we’ll use this as a reference for EVERYTHING!
– Judy Schaefer, COO, Allied Executives
POV: People are motivated by more than quality and price. Understanding the internal and social factors that trigger decision reflexes is key to achieving business objectives and guiding customer decisions.
Brian is the coolest product strategist I’ve met. He surfaced market opportunities, clarified our offering, and codified our customer’s motivations. Now we have an unforgettable story to help musicians, fans, and investors understand how our product can improve their lives. With Brian’s help, we’ve found ourselves.
Omar Alsafadi, Founder/CEO of Aria Music
Additional Writing Samples:
- Website Clarity (Why it's a Race, and How to Win): UX research tells us how people really read a website.
- Interview a Customer (Best 30-Minutes Ever): How to interview for and write a customer story.
- Customer Experience Blog Series: Three succes stories of brands that got customer experience right.
- The Persuasion Framework: How to captivate, engage, guide, court, and close customers.
- Storytelling for Marketers Whitepaper: These story templates keep brand messages focused and engaging.
- Decision Science Whitepaper: A research-backed exploration of the reflexes that govern decision-making.
Video / UGC
While I haven't invested in the gear you'd find at a video-production agency, I do know have the skillset and on-screen comfort to create UGC-style videos and have done quite a bit of that on trails. Here's me showing off a new pair of Oboz hiking shoes at Point Lobos.
Design, Data Visualization, and Illustration
"I beam with pride sharing our logo and collateral now. I have no doubt that Brian’s brand and messaging work contributed to our 200% year-over-year growth.” – Jason Boyce, Founder and CEO, Avenue7Media
POV: Customers evaluate your brand in a fraction of a second. They form an opinion—and then seek out facts to support that opinion. The right design will help them read your message with optimistic abandon and want to believe.
See more graphic design examples here.
Digital Product Design & Leadership
From engaging mobile-first consumer apps to deep enterprise platforms across a wide range of industries (music, environmental, banking, medical, e-commerce, marketing, medicaid reimbursement, and enterprise communications)—my Figma prototypes fuel the discovery process and accelerate development.
POV: When digital products feel disconnected from customer needs, it's often because discovery and research are managed by one crew, design by another, and development by another. Getting everyone on the same page (customers, stakeholders, designers, developers) requires learned empathy for every participant.
Profitable Innovation — Business Intelligence Platform
Amidst growing demand for ad hoc analysis, I leveraged emerging JavaScript libraries to realize a new category of drag-and-drop business intelligence product. I grew that from nothing to recurring six-figure contracts and $12M in VC funding, and sold it to a global agency.
- Designed from gound up.
- Profitable MVP within 3 months of dev kickoff.
- Attracted global agencies and Fortune 100.
- Won recurring annual 7-figure contracts.
- Tracked billions in annual ad spend.
- Owned roadmap, feedback prioritization, functional requirements, and design.
- Grew to a multi-application platform with fully self-service instance deployment, data ingestion, cleansing, transformation, joins, business rules, AI insights, dozens of configurable data visualizations, as well as cross-tab, nesting, and pivot tables.
- $12M in VC funding.
- Sold to a global agency.
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“Brian was the secret sauce that made our products great.”
– Aviv Roth Senior Software Engineer, Clarium
”A favorite collaborator of customers and colleagues.”
- Rich Boniface Head of Data Engineering, Conservation Labs
The traits anyone would desire in a creative problem solver.
Brian would take a challenging problem, turn it sideways in his head and find a new way to think about it that was unseen before. His designs were always compelling without ever losing sight of the audience(s) they were designed to reach.
Andy Fox, Founder/CEO of Unista
