Aesthetics & Creative Direction by Rory Rockmore
Talk about a dream. We partnered with the ultimate fantasy icon for a totally rad, totally California collection of Barbie beauty.
I concepted and designed a collection paying homage to 90’s Barbie, drawing inspiration from retro Barbie packaging to the clothing style options of Totally Hair Barbie — the biggest selling doll in the company’s history.
This collaboration spanned all three of our sub-brands to include: nail lacquers, treatments, and nail wraps; plus lipsticks and a co-branded offering for our professional gel line, Gelous?.
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I was proud to open my apartment to Society6’s home furnishing blog and provide my ‘6 Ways To Turn A Loft Into An Urban Jungle Paradise’.
Read the full story here.
I had the opportunity to art direct the 30th Anniversary Gala for My Friend's Place in Los Angeles — hosted by Jack Black.
Because of the magnitude of this event, I really aimed to have a little fun while elevating the design aesthetic from previous years. Charity events have a tendency to lean more toward serious and dull — this year we did not have that problem.
Attendees included the Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, Jack Black, and Miley Cyrus. The gala raised over $750K and the tequila hangover lasted me all the way thru the weekend — both MAJOR.
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Concepted, designed, and produced the e-commerce home of Jeremy Scott. As huge fans of the client, we knew we couldn’t deliver something anyone had seen before. My partner, Kameron Zach and I came up with the moving model.
Our goal was to reflect the loud and visually stimulating aesthetic of his brand. We arrived at the concept to display the models in full motion on the homepage product grid.
Rather than utilizing the ageless but heavy animated GIF for each model look, which slowed page load significantly on mobile, we used Javascript to animate image sprites in each look to create the appearance of seamless autoplaying video even on mobile (!!!).
The result was an engaging web store that is easily updatable and performant on all devices — it was also sexy.
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Our second partnership with Jeremy Scott was a collaboration with Dreamworks for the new Shrek movie. We designed and created a shopping platform with animated garments interacting with Shrek himself. Working closely with Dreamworks and their animation department we brought the engaging and unexpected site to life just in time for all the clothes to sell out.
God damn, God damn, God damn. This was by far a career highlight for me — creating over 40 designs to have 7 selected for production without an edit, a Vogue launch exclusive, and some of the best press NCLA has ever seen.
Working closely with Beyoncé’s manicurist and now friend, Lisa Logan, there wasn’t a detail we missed — launching 2 different collections in the same year. We drew inspiration from everywhere, including the Tom Ford bodysuit from her 17 minute VMA performance as seen in ‘No Rest in the Kingdom’. Also worth noting — the Mrs. Carter/Texas rollerskates she wore in my personal favorite video for ‘Blow’ skated their way into the ‘Candy Paint’ design.
…There’s a lil more to this story I’m happy to tell in person.
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Shot at The Nail Suite by Lisa Logan in Harlem, New York.
Concepted and designed an 8-piece Good vs. Evil collection with some of the legendary Princesses (+ Dalmatians) paired with their matching evil villain — including custom packaging.
Also I had no idea Cruella De Vil’s last name was just a fancy way of spelling “devil”.
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At NCLA Beauty we expanded our line of retail nail lacquers and nail wraps to include a vegan and cruelty-free gel lacquer for the professional markets.
Our main goal was to depart from the drab, visually offensive, and flat out ugly bottle designs of some of our competitors. Born was NCLA Gelous? — Our little pink science project taking over salons and celebrity nails faster than the lamp can cure the product.
The branding concept for this line was to take something serious and make it — not serious. With our Periodic Table of Gelements and successful collaborations with Le Manoir & Barbie, I’m proud to be a part of the new gel in town.
‘A Vibrant Urban Jungle Paradise in Downtown LA: Rory's house is a wonderland of wild colors, impeccable attention to detail and over-the-top accents. When most people imagine Downtown Los Angeles, the images that appear are usually dark and gritty. Rory's house is the antithesis of this vision.’
Spent an afternoon with Apartment Therapy — showed them my apartment obviously, my dog, my closet, and how quickly I can iron a set of 4 cloth napkins.
Being a fan of Apartment Therapy since moving into my first apartment in New York, it’s an honor to share my House Tour and a few other project we collaborated on from there.
Full House Tour here.
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How To Look Like an Adult (Who Has a Good Time): Rory Rockmore's Style Story
Ahh, my first job right out of college.
I started at MTV Networks as a graphic designer for MTV.com. There I was able to align myself in Ad Sales projects with cobranded campaigns for Pepsi, Toyota, Starburst, truth.com, Canon and more.
I was also able to spearhead the site design for the 2009 Video Music Awards and 2009 Movie Awards, including night of show — also fondly remembered as the first and last year we added a Facebook feed to the homepage. An exploratory dream if you ask me.
My favorite, however, was the task of creating MTV logos for the various show and platform pages that lived on the site. Picture being a 20 something year old designer fresh out of college with a mohawk and a sneaker habit designing fucking MTV logos… I’m hot just thinking about it. A few of my faves are shown here and if you’re unfamiliar and interested, there’s a cute story about the logo’s origin here.
MTV really was the most magical place to venture into the corporate world. I was there as we sent our first tweet. I was there while we figured out how to navigate something called “social media”. I was there for the famous freelancer walk-out. But most importantly, I was there to experience the MTV Holiday parties and the week-long hangovers that came with them.
I also made a few friends at MTVstyle and moonlit as a fashion blogger using my vacation time during NYFW. You can peep my lil by-line page here, though most of the images have sadly been removed.
I designed the RuPaul’s Drag Race themed #DragRaceKeyboard as part of Logo’s digital marketing initiative around their Season 5 launch. The app includes over 20 RuPaul’s Drag Race emoticons, emojis, stickers and GIFs — including my fave, the breastplate emoji.
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I mean, did you know that Hello Kitty was a girl and not a cat? I had no idea. But after this project I’m happy to report she’s 5 apples tall and has a boyfriend named Daniel.
All concept, design, and art direction by me. Over the course of 3 years, I can’t even keep track of how many collections we released with Hello Kitty — from seasonal releases to limited edition Holiday offerings and a few special edition designs featuring her friends. Our main goal was always to mesh whatever we were seeing on the runway with the most successful licensed entity of all time.
The only thing that didn’t go over so well was when I submitted a few illustrations (shown below) that featured homegirl in some nipple tassels… it was worth a shot.
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This is my little sideline passion project, RORY ROCKMORE — jewelry designs for he or she, by me. I contemplated whether or not it belongs in my portfolio and since you’re here reading this, you can conclude my answer.
Showcasing on the left some of my campaigns and product features, with all art direction and design by me. I had quite the year in 2018 with celebrity features on Nicki Minaj, Kali Uchis, Kim Petras, and more. You can click here to peep my AS SEEN ON PAGE that I’m rather proud of.
We set out to to arrange a marriage between beauty and technology with the launch of our NailBooth by NCLA app (previously myNCLA). A custom nail wrap app that could take any image off your camera roll and later apply it directly to your nail.
Logo concept/design, app design, product design & packaging, campaign creative direction, and marketing design all by me. This project was especially fun to work on as we produced everything in-house and were able to capitalize on internet subculture with lightening fast turn around times for hit content.
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Co-founder and Art Director of Love/Hate Creative, a collective specializing in e-commerce creative and development platforms with my business partner (and most of the time friend), Kameron Zach.
Solely responsible for design, concept, production, and maintenance of e-commerce and website platforms including mobile (at a time when the web wasn’t fully responsive) for our clients, which included: Jeremy Scott, BravoTV, TopChef Restaurant, Melody Ehsani Design, Distilled New York, the Higher Education Channel, and more.
It was pretty cool to be a part of the premier of The WW Club in Los Angeles as an honorary member and creative designer.
Working closely with the club’s founder Phoebe Lovatt we created the logo crest and social media campaign around their launch event.
“The name is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the working men's clubs that were once prevalent across the UK, they still exist, but in much reduced numbers. Those spaces were founded in the late 1800s to give working class men a place for education and recreation, and The WW Club is founded in the same spirit - it's a space for women to meet, network, learn, but also to just have a laugh!”
As the only child of a single working mother, I found this project to be quite beneficial to the soul.
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Image via i-D
Image via i-D
Art directed and shot a few campaigns for Los Angeles based designer (and my sis), Laina Rauma.
For her ‘New Money’ collection launch - we shot the entire collection on a pair of found antique mannequins and threw Laina in for good measure. Her campaigns need to be as fun and fearless as her clothing.
Teamed up with Guess? via NCLA to concept and create a collection of nail wraps that effortlessly combined classic Guess? with their ‘Nashville by Night’ collection — launched during NYFW. All product and packaging design was done by (you Guessed it)…me.
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