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.
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Arby's Sauce Fonts: Saucy_AF and Fancy_AF

Moxie work for Arby's Restaurants | May 16, 2018 (Saucy_AF) and May 16, 2019 (Fancy_AF)

GOLD ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Art Direction (for Saucy_AF)

SILVER ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Innovative Use of Technology (for Saucy_AF)

BRONZE ATLANTA AD CLUB ADDY WINNER for Branded Content (for Saucy_AF)

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2018: Saucy_AF

Yes, I was really allowed to design and name a font "Saucy_AF" in 2018, and follow it up with a second, more decorative font named "Fancy_AF" in 2019.

The "AF" (of course) means, "Arby's Font" or, "Arby's Foundry" if you prefer.

As a joke in 2018, we created a post that read, "Our New Year's resolution is the same as last year" with an image I drew in Arby's Sauce that said "1200x1200 / 72 ppi." It was a design joke referring to the dimensions of our standard social posts, but it kicked off a slew of comments asking if Arby's would make a typeface based on my Sauce Writing. Which is really funny to me, because there's no set "font" I base it on. It's literally, "start writing and see what happens." When we did our next round of ideation, I suggested we follow through with the requests and make a font.

When Arby's agreed, we decided to start simple. Saucy_AF is an all-uppercase font plus numerals and all of the diactritical marks and special characters to make it a usable font. I had a full character sheet next to me as I worked, and crossed off each character as I drew and photographed it. After we had the full set, Jen delivered the images to her friend Danny Hong; who had made TrueType and OpenType fonts for Moxie before. It's Danny's screen-recordings you see in the videos tracing each of the letters and vectorizing them.

We won three Atlanta Ad Club Addy Awards for Saucy_AF, and the award submission copy has been adapted below.

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Ever take a good look at the inside of a Classic Roast Beef or Beef 'N Cheddar wrapper? There's a "brick" pattern imprinted on it, and that made a perfect lined sheet for me to slide under the tray liner sheets to make sure all of the characters were the same height.

2019: The Sequel, Fancy_AF

Because Saucy_AF lacked lowercase letters, it gave us the chance to go back to the drawing board in 2019 and create Saucy's swishy sister, "Fancy_AF"—an OpenType font with multiple Swash capitals and a full set of lowercase letters that work with either font.

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Want to download the fonts? You can find them on arbys.com.

“Feeling a bit saucy? There’s a font for that.”

- Ad Age

“Stand aside Google, YouTube, Airbnb, Coca-Cola, and Netflix. Stand aside everyone, I guess. Because Arby’s has its own custom font now, too.”

- Fast Company

“Described as “the ink of the sandwich world,” Arby’s is positioning Saucy_AF™ as an alternative to those who lack the skills to write in sauce like the folks behind the very social media savvy Arby’s Twitter account.”

- The Verge

The Reason

Arby’s fans think it’s cool that Aryb's writes with sauce in their social media content. So cool in fact, they received several requests from their Twitter followers to help them create similarly saucy messages.

The Insight

Fans wanted a way to mimic Arby's celebrated writing style, so all we needed to do was make it easy for them to create their own messages and notes in our signature style.

In 2018, the quickest way to deliver this while offering the most creative freedom was clear: a free, custom font.

The Strategy

No matter the message, Arby’s can make it better with sauce.

Arby’s would put in the work to create our very own sauce font– a QSR first– and make it readily available for download and use by fans and followers everywhere.

The Execution

We set out to create a proprietary Arby’s sauce font, Saucy_AF (AF = Arby’s Font), then place it on public sites via simple download links.

We wrote out the entire alphabet in sauce, then rasterized and digitized the whole set.

The resulting font is perfect for any occasion – especially when you’re feeling a bit saucy.

The Arby’s Sauce font is available for download on the Arby's website and on MyFonts.com. This font was then regularly used by Arby's followers and within our own social creative (alongside papercraft and food craft).

The Results

In an era where most companies are wary of inviting open creativity from its social-savvy base, Arby’s dared to offer a unique creative asset to anyone and everyone. This led to an overall boost in goodwill– with zero backlash, controversy or negativity!

As of the writing of the Addy's entries in 2018, there had been 7406 unique downloads of the font.

The client measured success based on engagement (downloads) and by write ups. Many different news outlets featured articles featuring the Sauce Font.

The Team

Jennifer Barclay - Creative Director

Scott Hunt - Art Director, Photographer, Sauce Artist

Hughston May - Graphic Designer

Brandon Kraemer - Copywriter (for Saucy_AF)

Orin Heidelberg - Copywriter (for Fancy_AF)

Danny Hong - Digitizer / Font Creator

Kirsten Thieman - BTS Photographer

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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.