About Me
The quick version:
I became a graphic designer because the job combined three things that tend to get me excited:
1. Good story telling.
2. Problem solving.
3. Exploring and learning new stuff.
It isn’t always glamorous, but I love building presentations.
Yes even corporate keynotes and technical 30-3-30’s.
Because – most of the time, you’re helping someone convey the story they need to tell.
And sometimes, you luck out and the client does a first draft.
Not because it saves work, because usually it doesn’t.
But it gives you a window into what they’re passionate about.
How they see the story unfolding.
It might look like a Rube Goldberg machine combining ancient clip art, two dozen fonts, and 30 partner logos into a flow diagram.
But – that’s a kind of magic. That is them speaking in their language to get the story out.
And the thing that drew me to this profession wasn’t the desire to make things that were pretty, or reflected what I personally like, or always followed one specific design philosophy.
Using skills and tools to help a partner tell a story, or solve a problem that they have – there’s a joy in doing that well.
I could easily go further, and speak with near rapture of working in motion graphics, and having time to get the story right, with all the key moments and movements hitting the beat and moving with just the right personality. But I’ve already rambled too much for an opening statement.
That’s the gist.
All of that said, if you’re in any way curious about the story of how I ended up here…
It’s Pablo Ferro’s fault.
I was just sitting there, still a kid, trying to watch a movie with my Dad.* The movie was Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen, and features a ridiculously long car chase.
The problem was – there was no way that the car chase could live up to the opening 4 minutes of the film, which featured music by Lalo Schifrin, and titles by Pablo Ferro.
The visuals hinted at mystery and action and coolness that just never shows up once the title sequence wrapped.
From then on – I was paying attention. But either the people around me didn’t know what graphic design was, or just never mentioned it, and I ended up grouping it with the special effects industry in my head. Kind of like matte painting!
The next key moment for me? I remember going to Disneyland and being fascinated by the fact that I could tell a sign in Frontierland had been painted in the 1970’s, because I could see that it was old west lettering through the filter of 1970’s aesthetics.
And then – eventually I was at college about a year into an unrelated path when I ended up taking a 101 level graphic design class, and was like “ohhh!”
Since then, I followed a path that took me through building websites for small businesses, designing gig-posters for music venues, a bizarre several month stretch of accidentally project managing, a veritable ocean of Microsoft Powerpoint, over a decade of working to brand guidelines in whatever came up in the B2B world, and – of course – motion graphics.
Fun fact: one of the first things I did when I got my hands on Adobe After Effect was to try and recreate the opening titles of Bullitt.
If you haven’t seen them, they’re amazing and worth the 4 minutes.
*My dad took me to alot of movies when I was visiting him.
I’m honestly not sure if he just really loved movies, or if he was just trying to find things to do with this kid on the weekends.
I’ve decided to choose to believe that he was broadening my horizons.
And since I was too picky to eat french food, and annoyingly too young to introduce me to the world of fine whiskeys, we went for film?
