Arriving at design
How did I come to graphic design … that is both a simple and a multifaceted thing to ponder.
The simplest answer is that I’ve always loved art and creative action, and reaching a point in my life that I found a career change necessary dove headlong into a world I knew nothing about. I had quite literally never seen the Photoshop interface before starting at Wake Tech, only heard the neologism photoshopped for the previous two-plus decades.
Now for the explanation, well, it would start with a heavy dose of traditional humanities. I studied language and literature in both undergraduate college and graduate school, along the way standing on Monet’s bridge in Giverny, walking till my feet wanted to drop off at the Louvre, meandering into this or that Fifth Avenue site.
One of the most important courses I ever took was cultural anthropology. While in the past this set of concepts may have been used to study otherness, as in foreign-ness or the Other, it can also provide a perspective on the seemingly familar world.
When I was out and about in the Pacific Northwest some time ago, I worked a couple months as a public relations assistant for the AT&T Treasures of Oregon exhibition being prepared by the Oregon Historical Society. That would be my first taste of the practicalities behind artistic and cultural institutions. I began developing my own graphic style using scrap plywood I salvaged in the light-industrial district where I lived in Portland.
This would follow me, along with gestural drawing in journals, right to the design department doorstep. At one point I was studying screenplay writing, and the instructor gave us a piece of advice that I have heard echoed in design: Show business, not show art.
Then I remember watching Grace Potter sing at the second Peach on Montage Mountain and how that business of the arts can still keep the fire alive.
I can look at a piece in my portfolio and say, I made that!