Journey to Adulthood Volunteer Coordinator: 1998-2001, St. Luke's Episcopal Church
Computer Skills Instructor: 1999, Blowing Rock Elementary School
Board Member and Western North Carolina Diosician Director of Campus Ministry: 1996-2002, Westminster-Canterbury Fellowship
Board Member and Publicity Chair: 1996-1998, Watauga Youth Network
Publicity Co-Chair: 1995-1997, Watauga County Habitat for Humanity
Adjunct Instructor - Freshmen Seminar: 2004, Appalachian State University
Adjunct Instructor - Media Graphics: 2004, Appalachian State University
Adjunct Instructor - Interactive Media: 2007+, Belmont University University
1979 Newspaper Printing Corporation • Nashville, TN • 615.259.8000 – Layout Artist
With a portfolio built from student work in commercial art in high school I was able to spend a summer in the advertising department of the Tennessean newspaper. As a layout artist I took assignments from advertising sales executives to design display ads for the newspaper. This entailed a tracing of the ad to size with specifications for headlines and text, artwork sizing and placement tracings that required camera work. I also operated a Variatype photo typesetting machine.
1989-1990 Brentwood Music Publishing • Nashville, TN • 615.373.3950 – Macintosh Artist
Working directly with the art director I helped develop promotional materials for new recordings including posters, point-of-purchase displays, t-shirts and print advertising. I also designed all and parts of label specific recordings and sheet music covers, including illustrations, basic designs and title art.
1990-1991 Hedrick, Daniel, Richter and Rood • Kansas City, MO – Production Artist
HDR&R was a design studio that served large ad agencies in Kansas City. The art directors primarily worked in markers to mock up print pieces from ad executive's pencil concepts. I was a computer specialist who did technical illustrations of everything from cars to small appliances. I also prepared boards for Cytex production from image setter output (image setters could only do line art at the time). I was able to work with clients like Toastmaster, the NCAA, and the Kansas Lottery.
1991-1992 Shick Tube-Veyor Corporation • Kansas City, MO • 816.861.7224 – Designer
As the staff designer for this industrial engineering and manufacturing company I developed trade advertisements, brochures, trade show graphics and internal materials. I also worked directly with ad agency executives and art directors on larger projects.
1992-1995 Art Dude Graphics • Kansas City, MO – Owner/Creative Director
With a desire to expand my creative endeavors, I started my own design studio. I had to learn quickly how to sell, manage projects, account book keeping and develop creative solutions. Throughout these years I worked mostly with agencies and a few end user clients. I created whole corporate identities, product catalogs, company brochures, newsletters, magazine covers, annual reports, billboards, posters, stationary packages, direct mail pieces, packaging, trade show displays and many other print and publishing products.
Some of the clients included Kodak, ADM, The Kansas City Auto Show, the Kansas City Convention Center, Butler Buildings and many others. I was involved in every aspect of most of these projects including concept, writing copy, layout and design, photo art direction, prepress production, and press checks.
1995-1996 Precision Printing • Boone, NC • 828.265.0004 – Systems Administrator and Prepress Manager
Relocation to the Boone, NC area put my small business on hold and Precision Printing offered a position that took advantage of my technical skills. I oversaw all prepress operations and caught layout tasks for jobs that required an artist’s skills.
Precision Printing had just purchased new computer equipment for scanning images, compositing pages and outputting film. I received specialized training for the Linotype-Hell scanner and the RIP/image setter. I also managed the computer network, and wrote a database application for managing job tasks and work flow.
1996-1999 EB Wall & Associates • Lenoir, NC • 828.757.0047 – Senior Art Director, Technology director
The creative work at EB Wall was gratifying. I managed two art directors and a production manager. We served a variety of traditional and technological clients. As a full service ad agency we dealt with print as well as television media. Clients included Broyhill Furniture, Greer Laboratories, Bank of Granite, West Glow Spa, Hickory Metro Visitors and Convention Bureau and several others.
The world wide web was just coming into its own as a viable advertising medium and I was anxious to learn about this emerging technology. The ownership at EB Wall was gracious in allowing me to learn html on several real projects. The first whole web site I produced was for Valley Hills Mall that featured an animated logo. From that site I produced several more and began training one of the art directors everything I was learning.
Currently Art Dude Graphics Nashville TN - Creative Director/Owner
The prospect of an independent web project allowed me the freedom to open the doors of Art Dude Graphic Design Studio again in 1999. From the start of the Boone iteration a large percentage of my work involved the web. Since, my business is approximately 40% print or traditional media and 60% web.
Technology has leapt forward in great spans since 1999 and I've tried to keep up with them as much as possible. In the print arena I've applied a plug-in technology for QuarkXpress called XData. With this plug-in and a scripting language that it enables I can produce thick product catalogs in a tenth of the usual time. I've designed and programmed XData catalogs for wholesale and retail businesses around the country. On several occasions I've traveled to Iowa, Missouri, Massachusetts and Utah to train people to use the catalog products I've created. These opportunities come to me from Image One Technologies.
I attended an Apple seminar in Atlanta overviewing their industrial strength web application development software WebObjects. From that day in 1998 I sought a way to build dynamic sites for clients that would take them well beyond a simple online brochure. In 2002 I found an open source preprocessor page rendering technology called php that, when connected to a database could make miracles. The miraculous thing was that they were happening within my reach. I use php to handle everything from simply posting the current date, to allowing clients content control, to operating every aspect of a dynamic ecommerce web site. There is not much I cannot do with the help of php developers with whom I work.
With creativity and technology I've been able to work with clients like Mid South Marine Wholesale Supply, Sylvania, Rural Electric Cooperatives, DeWoolfson Down, Cytosol Ophthalmics, Harmony Exchange, Goodnight Brothers, Hemostat Labrotories, Sun Bank, the Hickory Crawdads, Mike Wallace Racing and many others.
