ABOUT AARON + BENT BARN
I help organizations see what their next chapter needs and build towards it.
I’m Aaron Embrey, a brand strategist, creative director, designer, and educator with thirty years of experience helping ideas find clarity, become visible, and move through the world with greater coherence.
Bent Barn is the independent practice where those experiences come together: strategic thinking, visual craft, organizational perspective, and a belief that worthwhile growth shouldn’t cost an organization its meaning.
I learned to design the pieces very well, and over time, I also learned to see the whole picture.
My career has moved across graphic design, corporate creative leadership, freelance photography, website design, video production, marketing, campaigns, publications, creative education, and independent consulting.
That breadth taught me more than how different creative disciplines work.
It taught me how they affect one another and how a visual decision can reveal a deeper question about an organization’s identity, priorities, audiences, or direction.
A client may come to me asking for a logo, website, campaign, presentation, or new platform.
My strongest contribution usually begins one step earlier, with a kind of curiosity that decades of making things has sharpened into a distinctive inquiry:
What's changing? What needs to connect? What deserves distinction? And what kind of structure will help all of it move forward?
Bent Barn exists to make that deeper level of thinking visible, intentional, and properly valued from the beginning.
“My work is about helping organizations find clarity as much as it’s about helping them communicate more effectively.”
EXPERIENCE FROM INSIDE THE SYSTEM
I understand how creative decisions move through real organizations.
Before founding Bent Barn, I spent more than fifteen years inside a large global corporation, and earlier in my career, I navigated creative needs across multiple in-house and agency-side partnerships.
I learned how creative work moves across departments, leadership levels, deadlines, technologies, budgets, production constraints, and competing stakeholder priorities.
It rarely moves in a straight line.
That experience allows me to move between leadership conversations and creative execution (without losing sight of either) and to build strategies that can survive contact with the real organization expected to use them.
THE STORY BEHIND THE NAME
Bent Barn began as an homage to my father.
In his seventies, my dad designed and built a large red barn in his suburban backyard, bringing a piece of his rural history into the life he’d created.
He planned it, worked steadily, adapted when necessary, rested when he needed to, and asked for help when he (and the work) needed it.
During the final years of his life, he kept encouraging me to leave my long corporate career behind to build something of my own.
After his death at the end of 2015, I finally listened...
The word bent already held special meaning for me. It represented imperfect human making, unconventional paths, and the ability to be changed by pressure without becoming broken.
The barn represented practical creativity, a working structure built by hand to hold tools, labor, ideas, and possibility.
Together, the name expressed the kind of creative practice I wanted to build. One that’s approachable, resourceful, thoughtful, & more interested in making something meaningful than maintaining an image of perfection.
A working structure shaped by resilience, adaptation, and care.
The practice grew into its name.
During Bent Barn’s first decade, the practice moved through a relocation, a pandemic, changing clients, caregiving, and evolving creative work.
Then, in July 2022, the physical art barn—my studio, its tools, and years of work inside it—was lost to a devastating fire.
The building burned, but the name endured.
Rebuilding taught me more about structure, resilience, and what actually survives a season of change than any professional engagement could have.
A barn is architecture: a working structure designed to hold valuable things through changing conditions.
Bent does not mean broken. It means adapted. Shaped by experience and capable of yielding without collapsing.
That idea now lives at the center of my work.
Organizations change. Ideas outgrow their original containers. My job is to understand what should remain, what must adapt, and what kind of structure will hold what comes next.
A DISTINCTIVE COMBINATION
Strategic enough to see the big picture. Practical enough to build the individual pieces.
Systems thinking: I notice relationships, patterns, contradictions, and structural questions that are hard to see from inside the organization.
Cross-disciplinary fluency: Because I’ve created many of the individual pieces myself, my strategies remain grounded in what successful implementation actually requires.
Teaching clarity: As an educator, I know how to make complex ideas understandable and help people participate confidently in creative decisions.
Intuitive discernment: I listen for what’s being said, what’s being assumed, where tension is gathering, and what the organization may be trying to become beneath the immediate brief.
Together, these qualities allow me to move between strategy and making, leadership and implementation, structure and expression.
INDEPENDENT BY DESIGN
When you work with Bent Barn, you work directly with me
I remain closely involved in the strategy, direction, and key creative decisions throughout every substantial engagement.
Clients are not passed from a senior sales conversation to a junior production team.
When the work requires additional expertise or capacity, I collaborate with trusted designers, developers, writers, photographers, production specialists, and other creative partners, gathering the right people around the actual need.
This structure keeps the practice focused, responsive, and personal.
Bent Barn has always been family-rooted. My mom, Velda, brought four decades of banking and bookkeeping experience into the business. She retired from her retirement to do it and helped give the studio operational steadiness from the very beginning.
THE ETHICS OF THE WORK
I stay conscious of what my work is helping grow.
Creative strategy can help an organization become more effective. That makes discernment part of my responsibility.
I’m drawn to leaders and organizations working to improve an industry, expand access, treat people well, strengthen communities, build responsible systems, or bring something genuinely useful into the world.
A client doesn’t need to be a nonprofit, activist organization, or flawless model of ethical business.
They do need to be building something I can stand behind and able to invest in the work without asking my family or practice to subsidize their mission.
My strongest creative relationships combine:
Purpose: The organization creates genuine value.
Capacity: It can invest responsibly in the work.
Momentum: Something meaningful is growing or changing.
Trust: Leadership is willing to think honestly and collaborate deeply.
Meaning and money are not opposing values. The right work for Bent Barn needs both to remain useful and sustainable.
THE HUMAN BEHIND THE WORK
The rest of my life informs my unique perspective.
Outside Bent Barn, I teach emerging creatives, write about identity and becoming, make art and photographs, care for my family, and explore the places where visual language, personal meaning, and cultural change meet.
Those parts of my life aren’t separate from the way I work.
Teaching makes me a better communicator. Caregiving has deepened my understanding of capacity, patience, and attention. Art keeps me connected to experimentation and uncertainty. Writing helps me recognize the deeper story beneath what appears visible.
Bent Barn is the commercial expression of that larger perspective, focused toward the needs of organizations and the structures they’re building.
WORK WITH BENT BARN
Bring me the parts that no longer fit together.
You may have several ideas competing for direction, a new initiative that needs a place within the larger brand, or an organization that has outgrown the story and structure that brought it this far.
You don't need to show up with the answer.
Tell me what’s changing, and we’ll begin by understanding what your next chapter needs.