Design has Become My Life! That's a statement. How can a guy who studied history and political science at university, then anthropology, be a graphic designer? It's a long and twisted tale. It started for me when I was desperate for work while trying to pay my way through university. A friend, Jamie Belair, had gotten a well paying job through some employment agency. Compared to the near minimum wages I was was getting previously (my highest paid job prior to computer work was $8 an hour for Night Auditor work at a hotel), the $12-$15 an hour he was getting for using WordPerfect 4.2 was tempting. So, having never used a computer before this (except an ancient PET computer at High School), I went in, lied my ass off about my qualifications, and got a job at $12.50 per hour. It really was a baptism by fire, since I had to teach myself how a computer worked and how WordPerfect worked in about a day or two. That's the problem with lies... they can really screw you over. Very luckily for me, I managed to figure out the basics of the program, and was able to barely use it after my first day on the job. One thing I did early on with WP is work with it while it showed all the formatting codes on the bottom third of the screen. I think that helped me with a solid foundation for how HTML works, since both "languages", WP and HTML, are very similar - everything has an open and closing tag. Enter Graphic Design Anyway, I soon caught on quickly to what was what with the pooter, and within 3 months on the job, I was good enough to be a trouble shooter for the place I was working at. In the meantime, I was heavily involved with my university's student newspaper. I wrote for it for 3 years, and I also got deeply involved in all the typesetting work - the layout and design of the paper on Pizza Wednesdays, and operation of the old mechanical linotype machine. This gave my my initial base in graphic design. I've always been a strong learner when it comes to creative things. If it involves math, forget it - I have no capacity for math whatsoever. But for creative things, I delve in full steam, I immerse myself in every reading material I can lay my hands on, and I become obsessed with the topic. I must have read about 500 books directly related to graphic design since the late 80s. In fact, while at Carleton, I read over 300 books from the library - I know because I counted them. The last job I got through the employment agency was for an economics thinktank called Hickling Corporation. I started off as a simple word processor, with graphic skills used, and soon, I was heading up the creation of all the company's documentation. We did it a bit weird back then. My workstation consisted of a Compaq 386 PC, running DOS only, a Mac SE something, with Draw, Paint, WP for Mac, and Pagemaker, and a work room. We didn't set up documents on the computer. We laid out all our documents on WordPerfect 4.2 (then 5.0) on the PCs, then we set up placeholders for images, etc. We then designed all the images, charts, graphs, etc., on the Macs, printed everything once, then we manually cut and pasted all the images into the WP document, and photocopied it. Long process, but at the time, it worked. I was making really good money at Hickling, but felt stifled by the extreme "business" atmosphere - the suits, the lack of allowance for creativity (I suggested many times that we use Pagemaker to do everything on the computer... turned down dozens of times), the meetings, etc., so I quit, and got my first real job in graphic design with a (now defunct) firm, HeAd Media. I was in graphic designer candyland. We still didn't use computers for most of our work (though we had a Photoshop workstation, a Pagemaker workstation, all Macs). This place was cutting edge designs though, and I really thrived in it's environment - and I learned a lot about the art of graphic design. Then I went to Europe. For a long time. The First Pooter I should point out that up to this time, I still never owned a computer. I had use of a laptop from Hickling, but never owned a home PC. I finally bought one when I got to Vancouver. When I started going to UBC, I took my plunge, bought a pooter, and started selling my services to students for essay and thesis typing, and started doing restaurant menu design again, something I did when with HeAd Design. I bought the student version of Pagemaker and business started taking off again. I am self taught in all the programs I use, including Pagemaker, Corel Draw, Word, Quark Xpress, etc. A few upgrades later, and a connection to the Internet, first through UBC, then Internet Direct, I started designing my own web pages (circa Netscape 1.1). Immediately, I was comfortable with HTML, because of my WordPerfect-with-codes-turned-on experience. Since then, I've designed about 2 dozen sites, won a couple of basically lame awards, and now I do contract work for two ISPs, besides my own work. If you want to see some of it, just jump over to my links section. I guess my design history has made me think design first when it comes to the Web, over compatibility with all browsers. I like the added functionality and control many of the netscape-isms and MSIEisms give me, and I use them, which of course is an affront to all the text-only Lynx coders who populate newsgroups like alt.html. Click here to get to the other stuff I do.

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