People
The Firebelly Family is a tight knit collective of strategists, designers, writers and developers working hard to change the world.
- meet the team
- Dawn Hancock, Owner + Creative Director
- Will Miller, Art Director
- Darren McPherson, Designer
- Charlie Smith, Motion Designer
- Shannon Medic, Program Director
- Alex Killough, Senior Web Engineer
- Name: Dawn Hancock
- Title: Owner + Creative Director
- Favorite Flavor: Strawberry
- Childhood Nickname: The Red Tornado
- Drink: Bloody Mary, spicy w/ jalapeño-stuffed olives
Dawn calls the shots. As creative director and owner of Firebelly, she cultivates the studio’s design culture and inspires the best work with vision, compassion and an infallible gut instinct.
It’s that gut feeling—the fire in the belly—that motivates Dawn to take risks and challenge the status quo. And it’s ultimately what caused her to renounce the safety net of corporate America and do her own thing.
Dawn started the studio in 1999, at the height of the dotcom era, a time when all the big agencies were buying up the boutique firms. Leaving behind inflated budgets, corporate greed and style-over-substance, she cashed-in her 401k and started creating Good Design For Good Reason™.
From fledgling nonprofits and hungry startups to major corporations looking for complete brand overhauls, clients of every size and industry trust Dawn’s independence, ingenuity and proven approach to authentic, broad scope branding.
Under Dawn’s guidance, the studio has won awards in nearly every American design journal and was made part of The Newberry Library’s permanent collection and the Society of Typographic Arts’ Chicago Design Archive.
But Dawn doesn't dwell on awards and achievements: she trusts the work to stand on its own and believes success comes from listening to clients not listing them.
When she’s not designing for world change, Dawn mentors the next generation of maverick problem solvers through job shadowing, studio tours and portfolio reviews. She also spends time on the lecture circuit, speaking at design schools and conferences as far away as Doha, Qatar and teaching workshops on sustainable design.
In addition to inspiring young designers, her other endeavors include: the annual Firebelly Design + Marketing Grant, Camp Firebelly, the Firebelly Foundation, and its first nonprofit program Reason to Give.
Dawn holds a BFA in Visual Communications from Northern Illinois University. She completed the Ultimate Business Mastery Program, Las Vegas in 2009.