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When did you fall in love with design and how did you get started?

I have 2 early creative memories as a child. As a kid in primary school, I remember making greeting cards for family and friends and my favorite part was the type. I would take big felt, neon markers and draw out nice big letters. From there I would take a fine point sharpies and add a thin black stroke to each letter. Looking back this seems subtle, but the amount of pleasure I got from the precision and detail still resonates with me as I consider craft in building software. My second memory was when my father bought our first computer. I remember spending hours making my own characters….crafting pixel by pixel and making color variants of each character with that magical paint bucket tool.

I got in to design by way of fine art and painting. I always dreamed of being a professional musician and touring the world as a drummer. As a senior in high school (marching band, garage band, jazz band, drum corps, indie music scene, and drum lessons), I found myself enrolling in a random painting class to fulfill my elective credits. I fell in love with painting and illustration and continued to pursue studio art in college. Once I realized music was a tough career, I declared my major in art and graphic design. FWIW, I still have dreams of quitting my job and going on tour with a metal band.

What qualities and skills to you look for in a graduate?

This is a hard question to answer due to the fact that it could be largely contextual to the position. In general, I always look for a graduate who loves their craft and can display that through industry-level work. There is a large gap between the work that students leave university with, and what the real industry expects from a design professional...which leads me to the qualities I care about more most.

Any passion projects/collabs you would like to share?

My recent passions these last years have been making videos about my life and design on YouTube.

As I said before, I love music...being able to take music, moving images, and topics I'm interested in (design, my family, culture) and layer them into a narrative on YouTube has been a life-giving hobby. It’s definitely a time-suck on my responsibilities as a father and professional, but having an outlet where I can create in isolation without any reviews or constraints has kept me inspired through the more difficult parts of a design job. I’ve made vlogs, design tutorials, and personal self-reflection videos that are all about documenting my life, sharing with my community, and hopefully growing and engaging in new conversations.

I have also slowly become entirely too domesticated as a husband and father of 3 boys...currently obsessed with making keto baked goods and smoking meats.

What have been some of your biggest disasters and how have you learnt from it?

I’m not sure if I would call these disasters, but I have for sure made plenty of mistakes in my past. I wouldn’t call this a disasters because I learned a lot for this time in my life, but my year as Design Director at a startup was anything but a success. Let me be clear...I’m not even specifically referring to the success or failure of the business itself, but rather my contributions and how I managed to keep my head above water in the #StartupLife.

Everyone know startups are hard and that you have to wear many hats, but I gravely underestimated how incapabable I was to do other tasks well outside of design...interviewing, team management, marketing, sales, etc. These other tasks I had to fulfil we soul-sucking for me and took a lot of perseverance to “get it done”. I pushed forward and did the best I could as a core member of the founding team, but found myself slowly falling apart in the process. The disaster was much more of an internal negativity, isolation, and stress...which resorted to a lack of sleep and an overindulgence in caffeine and alcohol. I pushed through burnout and developed some terrible rhythms in my life. I found myself as unhealthy as I’ve ever been, unhappy, short-tempered, unable to “leave work” mentally and was often absent when I was with my family.

In retrospect, this could have all been prohibited if I had more discipline and maturity, but it’s my nature to go 110% into something...this time it bit me in the ass. I still have some small corners of my life that I’m still repairing from the damage I did in that intense 12 months of grinding. I am grateful for the journey because I am a much stronger person and have learned a ton about myself and where I need to grow.