Veteran partners.

A sharper approach:
Client-centered design.

We weren’t content with how the business of design was practiced at traditional full-service design agencies and consulting firms. For clients or for the creatives who worked with them.

We believe there’s a better way.

We believe a love for complex challenges, an unbiased empathy for real people, a fearless sharing of ideas, and a selfless assessment of process are the best techniques to consistently exceed client expectations, to improve peoples’ lives, and to build the most rewarding place for problem solvers to work and thrive.

And we believe in challenging every assumption about how clients and designers work together. After all, if we can’t innovate on how we do business together, how can you trust us to innovate on solutions for your users and customer.

Read our Manifesto

Our senior partners.

JD Jordan

JD is a veteran visual and experience designer who’s worked for more than two-decades as a creative director and design consultant for some of the biggest agencies and brands in the Southeast. He is the award-winning author of the novel Calamity and has also been featured in Creative Loafing, The Grantville Gazette, The International Journal of the Book, Newsweek, Paste, and Smashing Magazine. He is an experienced public speaker, taught UX design at General Assembly, Creative Circus, and The Atlanta College of Art and taught history at the University of Georgia.

He’s designed experiences for AT&T, Cox, Deloitte, Delta, Emory University, Forward, Georgia Pacific, The Home Depot, IHG, The Magnificent Mile Association, Mannheim, Miller Brewing, NCR, The National Institutes of Health, Samsung, UPS, Volvo, The Weather Channel, WebMD, and many others.

Michelle Morgan

Michelle is an experience designer with a speciality in spatial morphology. She has experience in architecture, co-working, and seed-stage startups. As an architect, her work includes university classroom and facilities, hospital & medical offices, planning for the 2012 Olympics, boutique retail, court and municipal offices, parking structures, museums, experiential game design, adaptive reuse, historic preservation, and residential projects. She wrote the plan for the development of Ponce City Market as an innovation center and is a founder of HUB/NEX Atlanta, a coworking space.

As an experience designer, she has worked on projects for AT&T, Cracker Barrel, Georgia Power, RJReynolds and Shaw Flooring with a focus on integrating multiple projects through customer journey focus.

Our bona fides.

In addition to working with some of the largest brands in the country, Sharpen’s designers are nationally recognized as thought leaders in design-thinking and translating design process into innovation.