About Me
Graphic design got its hooks in me before I even knew it had a name.
In junior high, I’d spend evenings absorbed in CD inserts, fascinated by how the interplay of typography, color, and all kinds of weird and wonderful imagery could convey not only simple moods but entire conceptual worlds. Before long, I was "designing" inserts for my own mix tapes and CDs, shoehorning design into school projects, and looking for any excuse to be visually creative.
When a friend introduced me to web design in 6th grade, I was immediately enthralled by the seemingly unlimited creative potential of this new medium — even within the primitive confines of Angelfire and Geocities — and began to invest more and more of my free time learning how to harness its power (why waste your time playing sports or video games when you could be building Knight Rider websites*?! …I wish I was joking).
Over time, childhood tinkering with Corel Draw and MS Publisher gave way to complex vector work, hardcore photo editing, and other design skills in more grown-up tools like Creative Suite, and early forays into simple static HTML pages were eclipsed by intricate, database-driven PHP websites managed through a custom-built CMS. I started picking up freelance gigs and, before long, found myself serving as the official webmaster and one of the go-to artists for one of the very bands that had inspired me toward design in the first place. Like a double helix, these twin passions of graphic and web design continued to intertwine and reinforce each other until they coalesced into a career.
After earning a related degree from UAH, I joined the award-winning team at BakerWoodward Communications, where I worked both as a full stack web designer/developer and in more traditional design capacities (mostly digital, with occasional print work). A few years later, I joined The Trident Group, Inc. (TGI), an elite team of software developers, where I spent the next 15 years designing, implementing, and sustaining UI/UX solutions — not only for our homegrown OneTeam.net product (a full-time job in and of itself), but also for more than two dozen web app projects in the national defense sector for customers like Boeing and Intergraph. All the while, I’ve continued to work on logos, icons, ads, trade show booths, and even tapped into photography and video editing when opportunities arose — both at work and through freelance projects.
If I had to sum up what I'm all about — both personally and professionally — it's bringing order from chaos and beauty from "blah," whether that involves photography, video editing, typography, UI design, or a good old-fashioned album cover.
If you want to get in touch, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn
*To clear up the timeline a bit… Knight Rider went off the air in the mid-Eighties. I was a toddler at the time and obviously there was no “web design” to speak of back then, so yes, I was building a website in the late Nineties for a bad TV show that had ended over a decade earlier. I can offer no explanation or excuse for this behavior — only my deepest apologies to the friends and family who had to put up with me back then.