David Burney and Matthew Muñoz founded New Kind in February, 2009.

David Burney | Partner & Chief Executive Officer
(919) 235-2626  | |  

David has nearly 30 years experience building and leading creative services organizations. Most recently, David served for 4 1/2 years as Vice President of Brand Communications and Design at Red Hat—one of the most disruptive technology brands in the world. David led the company’s overall brand communications strategy, including all creative communications functions.

Prior to Red Hat, David was the owner of Burney Design, partner and Chief Creative Officer at Capstrat, and Chief Designer at the NC Museum of Art.

In addition to serving as Red Hat’s brand executive, David also created an internal innovation program to drive the power of design thinking throughout the company. The program fast became an integral part of quarterly executive meetings. It was subsequently leveraged across the company worldwide to create departmental and individual goals that align with annual corporate business objectives.

David is an active and long-time member of AIGA, the professional association for design. He was a founding member of the Raleigh chapter where he has served as President. He has also served as the Chair of the National President’s Council.

Matthew Muñoz | Partner & Chief Design Officer

(919) 827-1917  |   |  

Matt is a designer specializing in forming visual identities, storytelling, strategy-building, and making information understandable. He applies these skills to simplify complex ideas and create brand experiences for organizations.

Matt democratizes problem solving through visualizations. He has mapped complex customer interactions and business processes for open source technology leader Red Hat, and built design policy matrices for the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative. Matt created an information system to demonstrate how citizens and state might manage the complexity of compound problems.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from East Carolina University, a master’s degree in graphic design from North Carolina State University and has held design roles at IBM, Capstrat and Work Worth Doing, as well as his own consultancy, DesignHeals.

He has been involved with the AIGA since 1999 and currently serves as the Vice President of Brand and Community for the AIGA Raleigh chapter. His work has been recognized by the AIGA, NYC Type Directors Club, Ad Club, Associated Collegiate Press, Webby Awards, Society of Professional Journalists, International Society for Technical Communications, HOW Magazine and Communication Arts.

Chris Grams | Partner & President
(919) 523-2388  |   |  

Chris Grams builds sustainable brands, cultures, and communities in and around companies and organizations. He has over 15 years of experience in the communications field, including 10 years at Red Hat, the world’s leading supplier of open source solutions, where he played a key role in building the brand and culture, recently in the role of Senior Director, Brand Communications + Design.

During his time at Red Hat, the company grew from about 150 employees in one office in North Carolina to a $1 billion S&P 500 business with almost 4,000 employees and over 55 offices around the world. The open source way—including themes like openness, collaboration, transparency, community, and meritocracy—continues to be a key influence of his work. Chris blogs on brand, community and culture at Dark Matter Matters, and on open source and the future of business at opensource.com.

Before Red Hat, Chris did a two year tour of duty at IBM, and has also been an editor and literary agent in the book publishing industry.  He currently resides in Raleigh, NC, is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and moonlights as a bass player in a honkey-tonk band.

Elizabeth Hipps | Operations
(919) 412-6671 |

Elizabeth has over 10 years experience maintaining internal workflow, defining internal processes, project management and project budgets. She has worked with clients to develop and implement brand and integrated marketing strategies and to build and motivate a team of designers, copywriters, programmers, strategists, interactive designers and multimedia specialists.

She was previously Director of Operations and Finance for Burney Design and VP of Creative Operations at Capstrat. She earned her MBA from Meredith College and her bachelor’s degree in design from the North Carolina State University College of Design.

Art Seavey |  Research Manager
(919) 807-1785  |   |  

Art’s current work focuses on bringing substantive research and analysis to new methods of community engagement and participation. Prior to New Kind, he was a partner with The Estis Group, a public policy consultancy, in Atlanta, Georgia, working with clients such as the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice, North Carolina Governor’s Crime Commission, and Sage Software. He was a member of the government affairs team at Red Hat, working at the intersection of policy and open source software. He has experience in the non-profit sector and has served a number of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial clients through a small political consultancy.

Art is a Government Fellow at the Center for Advanced Communications Policy at Georgia Tech, contributing as a member of the Center for Innovation in Local Government in addition to the Virtualities Group. Art holds a Master of Public Policy from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and a Bachelor of Science from Georgia Tech.