I’m a hands-on Creative Director, Art Director, Illustrator and Maker with over twenty years of professional experience and a track record for creating thumb-stopping social creative and developing high-performing teams. So yes… I’ve been around the block a few times; and starting my career post-grad in a small town and exhausting all the creative roles there meant that I learned a lot—but the job titles I had never matched what I did. I led all Creative for Dippin’ Dots, Inc. for over five years—and helped develop “Minion Madness Cookie Dough” as a co-branded tie-in with Illumination Entertainment when the first “Despicable Me” came out—but my title there was only ever “Designer.” I’ve driven initiatives for scalable digital creative solutions in addition to leading custom social content and video productions that resulted in double-digit sales increases. My career began in print design and gave me a strong grounding in production specs and “doing work right the first time” to avoid costly reprints. I’ve championed the power of social and new media; leading the launch of Facebook for Dippin’ Dots, Inc. (2007) and TikTok for Arby’s (2018) and The Home Depot (2022). I empower and challenge my teams to think strategically—not just creatively—as we work to elevate the brands we touch and make content that resonates with our audiences. I enjoy passing along what I’ve learned and teach new shooting, editing and software techniques to my teams on a regular basis to help everyone develop new skills. I’ve worked freelance, long-term contract, in-house and agency-side as a single contributor on a larger Marketing team as well as a Creative team leader and mentor—hence the number of titles that don’t accurately reflect the job I was hired to do. I identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and proudly bring my whole self to every role. I’ve won awards for my work, including a Cannes Silver Lion and a Shorty Award for Art Direction; but the one that means the most to me is the HOW Design award for the wedding invitations I created for my husband and me in 2014.

Brandon D Hunt and Scott Andrew Salchli Wedding Invitations

June 21, 2014
Hunt Wedding Inviations
The one that started it all...

Back in 2013 when I proposed to my husband, the only wedding invitations you could find for two men were... garish. WHY did everyone think that just because you were a gay couple getting married, you would automatically want rainbows on EVERYTHING? Don't get me wrong: I like rainbows, I LOVE them during Pride...but wedding invitations that look like Lisa Frank designed them just weren't what my husband and I had in mind.

We talked about what we wanted, and I had the idea to make them a die-cut project inspired by a papercraft piece I'd seen on Pinterest by Jonathan Shackleton. My husband took a huge leap of faith and let me make the invitations, knowing full well that I would either go crazy or make them EPIC. I bought Jonathan's template through Behance, and then completely redesigned it to make it work as an invitation. One of my goals was to make them without using glue; and I almost did it. The only pieces that needed glue were the bow ties; everything else was held together by tabs and slits I'd engineered into the die line.

I hand-cut more than 130 of them from March to May 2014, making three or four every night (and went through a LOT of X-Acto blades).

The white shirt (the first fold-out section) had two different versions; one for the small group of people we invited to attend our wedding ceremony in Davenport, IA, and a second for everyone we invited to our wedding reception (i.e., excuse to party) a month later in Atlanta. The other three pieces were identical and listed the details for our wedding website, Atlanta reception and wedding registry.

...

Did I mention we won a HOW Award for them? (Go about halfway down the page and look under "Personal Promotions")

Or that these invitations are the reason I got the job at ROAR Groupe?

...

And for anyone curious: as soon as my husband said, "Yes" after I proposed, I asked if I could take his last name when we got married. Although the alliteration of "Scott Salchli" worked well for 37 years, I was OVER the number of times people misspelled or mispronounced my last name ("Salchli" rhymes with "broccoli"—the "a-l-c-h" is pronounced like the "a-l-k" in "chalk"). I was really tired of "Salklee," "Saulchlee," "Zalicki" (my personal favorite [WTF "Z"?]) and "Socklee."

"Scott Hunt" is foolproof...although the State of Georgia gave me one heck of a time changing it.

BONUS

What it looks like to make 130+ bow ties in one evening...plus one of my favorite photos from our wedding day. Our Best Men look SO amused.

Tagged: award winner | gay | invitations | super gay
Papercraft | Personal
Comments

No Comments.

Leave a replyReply to

Wanna find me elsewhere?

You'll get bored quickly... it's a lot of photos of my adorable husband, our kids and our rescue dog, Porter.