My Story

When I was a whole lot younger, in my teen years, I was involved in Punk Rock. I played the drums in a few bands over the course of 5 years. Around 2003, when I started this venture, there wasn't much of an online presence, but there still was one! I believe you could say I was a little obsessed with it. The idea of getting your information out to people online seemed like a no-brainer, especially if you were a company or brand. From the inception of our band name, I was the one determined to create a webpage that had all our band's information. This way listeners could connect, and this was a fairly new concept. There were other concepts and designs, such as a band logo, banners to be displayed behind the band, decals for the front of my big bass drum, album art graphics and more. These designs seemed to fuel me more so than creating the music, although I still thoroughly enjoyed playing and still do to this day. It just seemed like the band was a business and that business needed those website & design elements fulfilled. As I did this for the bands I played in, the other bands we would play with would ask me to do their websites, logos & graphics. This was the beginning of my graphic design career. I remember my first check coming by mail from a fellow band-mate's mom's checking account for about $25. This gave me hope that one day, just maybe I could do this for a living.

After grasping the concept of design and the hope that I could potentially be a graphic designer one day, my dreams flourished. I dreamt of being a t-shirt designer for Nike®, or even cooler, Hurley™. I have always been very interested in art and always sketched, painted, and often fueled my creative side. You could say art classes in the summer was a pretty normal thing for me. As I realized how important having a website was, I began to take classes on coding html, CSS and more. (All the languages) I took Photoshop classes, read several books on design, and took a few online courses. The most important thing throughout all my education for design was probably my persistent opinion on what I think looks good. A huge driving factor was my knack for clean space, minimal style, good padding, functionality and user experience. Wherever I turned I was always slightly disappointed in other designs, forcing me to attempt to show the world how it's done. A good example was my Android coding experience. The only reason I started developing for a messaging app team was because all the themes in other apps were kind of gross. The shape and color of the chat bubbles, the space between chat bubbles, when the time and date stamp was displayed and so on. So, I developed themes for a chat app so that I can finally have a messaging app that agreed with my standards. I realized my opinions were in a good spot when several other team members started agreeing with my style.

I am still designing in my professional career. I work for a big beer company and manage a team of designers for the Pacific Northwest region. A lot of printing is involved where me and my team print ads to be displayed in the market. My education in the professional space continues to grow, as my role is to help build new brands and keep their marketing themes consistent. This has helped me understand the whole aspect of marketing from start to finish.