About the Designer

A graduate of Minneapolis College of Art & Design with a BA in Visual Communication, I started my career working in marketing communication agency creative teams where I designed year-long B2B print campaigns for Fortune 500 clients in automotive, financial, insurance, interior design, pharmaceutical, retail, technology, telecommunication and transportation markets. I was fortunate to work in company cultures where employee input and continuous improvement was valued, and I enjoyed collaborating with my peers to better our work environments and processes. My internal and client facing presentation skills were honed during these years as well as interviewing and mentoring junior team members.

After becoming a mom and my own boss I specialized in publication design and art direction for clients in lifestyle, fitness, IT and nonprofit circles. My nonprofit client base grew, and I became the designer, art director and production specialist for their annual reports, magazine redesigns and event marketing materials.

For the past several years I’ve helped artists, nonprofits, and small businesses establish their online presence and communicate their missions through user-friendly, visually compelling websites built in Squarespace. With over twenty years of experience in graphic design and art direction, I bring a unique blend of professionalism and creativity, delivering clean yet surprising design solutions that resonate with their audiences.

See My Work

Design Services

  • As an art director I will work with a creative team to establish a unified brand understanding and voice for a project, as well as:

    • Conceptualize a campaign vision and work with established brand guidelines

    • Source stock photography and illustration to convey the right message and adhere to brand standards

    • Harness the best illustrator or photographer for a custom job and follow up with concise direction and feedback until final delivery

    • Establish regular communication with client and team members for project planning, status updates and feedback

    • Quality check project progress from ideation through production

    • Efficiently utilize the right Adobe Creative Suite app for each job, whether it’s building artwork in Illustrator, optimizing imagery in Photoshop, creating multi-spread layouts in Indesign or presenting ideas in Acrobat

    • Design presentations in PowerPoint, dropping in information graphics sourced from stock or custom created in Adobe Illustrator, Indesign or Photoshop

    • Map out the flow and IA of a web site and build it in Squarespace 7.0 or 7.1

    • Make copy and image edits to existing files and adjust the layouts to reflow

    • Retouch images in Adobe Photoshop

    • Optimize visuals in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop for digital or print production

    • Proof files against a pre-production checklist

    • Prepare prepress files for digital or print production

“When I started Hello Cookie® I needed an eCommerce website built. But more than that, I needed a web professional I could trust and two other equally important things — a user-friendly functional site and a visually appealing one that upheld the Hello Cookie brand vision. With Shari Zimmermann, I happily got all three.”

— Pat Wright, Founder and Owner of Hello Cookie

Partial Client List

Ann Bancroft Foundation
BI Worldwide
Delano Historical Society
Education for a Bright Future Tanzania
Experience Life Magazine
General Mills
George Family Foundation

Hanley Wood Marketing
Hello Cookie
Holding Space Sound Bath
Intercross
JT Mega Food Advertising
Land Stewardship Project
LifeTime Fitness

Mindful Generations
Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies
Minnesota Council on Foundations
MSP Communications
Test Quip
Three Crows Cafe & Coffee House