My Beginning
In my early 20’s, digital & graphic design were foreign to me. Lost in a far-away microcosm. An abstract idea, confined to coastal cities. Developed for Midwesterners, like me, by the Germans & Dutch as a simple A-to-B utility-full stop. Typography was for street signs. Industrial design was for Lego kit assembly. Ads were for making sales. Images that elicited emotion hung in galleries and museums. It was 15 years ago.
The most consequential design choices for my family was what color the hard candy outer shell our home iMac would be accented by. It was post pro aesthetic design boom introduced by Jony Ive. Pre data munching hyper targeting ushered in by Larry Page. It was pre-iPod. A time before Insta-clout-snaps. Before paid-social-organic-mosaics.
At the time; I was primarily gassed up by, and tried to earn laughs from, taking friends pictures from MySpace and AIM, and superimposing their faces on to the bodies of inanimate [and sometimes inappropriate] objects. Photoshop was still testing their second version. I thought of this crafting as more of a toy. I never thought it would be my means to an end. I never guessed it would become my balance. Keep my dreams aloft. Be my safe place. It would save my life.
