Fractional Creative Director before it had a name.
Most of my career, I was doing CD-level work without the title to prove it. Building brand systems. Directing strategy. Sitting in C-suite rooms. Producing events that defined industries. Eventually I stopped waiting for permission and started doing it on my own terms.
That's Brand of Misfits. Senior creative leadership — for the brands that are ready for it.
The Story Behind LaWilliams Designs
Strategy was always the real job.
I spent 18 years inside agencies and corporate creative departments — consistently doing work that operated above my role. Building brand infrastructure from scratch. Leading global teams across time zones. Producing industry-defining events. Developing go-to-market strategies that opened doors.
What I learned along the way: most brands don't have a creative problem. They have a clarity problem. Get clear on the strategy, and the creative follows. I've been solving that problem my whole career — for Fortune 500 companies, for scrappy startups, and everything in between.
Brand of Misfits is where I do it on my own terms.
I started BOM because I kept running into the same gap — brands that needed senior creative leadership and couldn't justify (or didn't want) the full-time cost of a CD. That's the fractional model. You get the thinking, the experience, and the direction without the overhead.
It works because I've already done the job at every scale. From a Fortune 500 brand guide to a flagship industry event to a one-pager that needed to close a deal. The scope changes. The standard doesn't.
"Most brands don't have a creative problem. They have a clarity problem."
What I believe
The Experience Behind Fractional Creative Direction
These aren't principles for a website. They're how I make decisions on every project, every day.
The Experience
FORTUNE 500
BRAND STRATEGY
Brand strategy and creative direction supporting Capital One, Kroger, McDonald's, Home Depot, and Coca-Cola — across campaigns, brand systems, and marketing materials.
FLAGSHIP EVENT
PRODUCTION
Conceived, directed, and produced the AXIS Conference — a flagship fintech industry event for Candescent (spun out of NCR). Concept to close, including brand identity, experiential design, and global creative team management.
TRADE SHOW &
EXPERIENTIAL
Environmental and experiential design for trade show activations across multiple industries — from initial concept through on-site execution. Emerald Expo and beyond.
GLOBAL CREATIVE
LEADERSHIP
Directed offshore creative teams across the Philippines and Malaysia, Europe — managing output, quality, and brand consistency across time zones.
BRAND INFRASTRUCTURE
FROM ZERO
Built comprehensive brand systems — guides, architecture, audience strategy, go-to-market frameworks, and production tools — for companies that needed it yesterday and had nothing to start from.
Fractional Creative Direction and senior creative leadership across agency and in-house roles, spanning financial services, defense and law enforcement training, hospitality, events, and lifestyle brands.
18+ YEARS
Brands I’ve have worked with
Outside the Work
Originally from Louisiana, based in Atlanta — which means I take food very seriously and never apologize for it. I learned and shoot film photography on my grandmother's Pentax K1000. There's something about working with a finite number of frames that keeps you honest about what's worth capturing. It's not unlike creative direction, actually — you don't get unlimited takes to say the right thing, so you learn to know it when you see it.
When I'm not working, I'm usually playing guitar or piano, painting badly on purpose, or refinishing something that didn't need refinishing. I like things with a little history to them — cameras, chairs, stories.
I'm also a mom to two awesome boys, and a wife to a husband who puts up with my ideas turning into weekend projects. Being their mom is one of my favorite parts of who I am — chaotic, loud, and completely worth it.
Beyond client work, I write about the business side of creative: brand, culture, and how companies can get more from their creative teams. You'll find those insights on Brand of Misfits, the platform I founded for creative and business leaders.
I Was Bad at Math, So I Went to Art School and Ended Up a Mathematician
Creative work seems to be doing something a little different. It's trying to model what hasn't happened yet - reading a market, an audience, a moment, and making a case for a direction the numbers can't prove yet, because the numbers won't exist until someone builds the thing first.
Creative Isn't the Last Stop. It's the Engine.
That's not a finishing touch. That's the engine that gets an idea from a whiteboard to something a customer actually feels something about.
Field notes on the brands that refuse to fit in.
Nobody sets out to build a forgettable brand. It happens one reasonable decision at a time. Here's why playing it safe costs more than you think, and what the brands that refuse to blend in do differently.