Every Name, One Portrait
An Employee Tribute for Ralph Lauren
Concept · Creative Direction · Design
The people behind a brand are part of its story.
For a special employee gathering at Ralph Lauren's New Jersey headquarters, I developed a tribute that transformed the names of the people who worked there into a collective portrait.
Using a Richard Phibbs horse photograph as the visual foundation, I reimagined the image entirely through typography, constructing its light, shadow and form from the names of employees across the New Jersey office.
From a distance, the piece reads as a horse portrait. Up close, the image reveals the community behind it.
- My Role
- Concept
- Creative Direction
- Design
- Creative Approach
- Employee Culture
- Conceptual Design
- Visual Storytelling
- Created For
- Ralph Lauren
- New Jersey Employee Community
The People Became the Image
Rather than create a conventional commemorative gift, the concept was built around the employees themselves.
Hundreds of individual names were used as the visual material, changing in scale, weight and density to reconstruct the tonal structure of the original photograph.
Together, those individual names became a single image.
Every Name, One Portrait
Look Closer
What appears at first as tone and texture is actually hundreds of individual names, each contributing to the larger image.
A Portrait of the Community, Presented to the Founder
The finished piece was framed and presented to Ralph Lauren during an employee gathering at the New Jersey headquarters, turning a collective expression of the people behind the brand into a personal moment of recognition.
Every name belonged to an individual. Together, they became a portrait of the community behind the brand.