From Brooklyn to Brooksville:

I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, I was creating comic books, telling stories and experimenting with anything I could get my hands on long before I ever considered graphic design a career.

At seven years old, I filmed a stop-motion Star Wars movie with my dad using my original Kenner action figures. In elementary school, I was drawing my own comics, complete with superheroes, stories and adventures.

Looking back, those early projects were probably the beginning of my love for design, storytelling and bringing ideas to life.

From Apple IIGS to AI

I was part of the first graduating class of the High School of Telecommunication Arts & Technology in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. That's where I got my first taste of computer graphics on an Apple IIGS. Keep in mind, this was 1989. The graphics were blocky, pixelated and primitive by today's standards. But at the time, it felt like cutting-edge technology. While most students were making the cursor move around the screen, my best friend Dave and I had the Starship Enterprise blowing up a planet.

I’ll never forget the teacher looking at what we'd created and asking, "Um… how did you do that?"

That curiosity, figuring out how to make technology do something creative, has stayed with me ever since.

A Career Built Around Advertising & Design

In 1989, my family moved to Spring Hill, Florida. After a semester at the University of South Florida, I decided a traditional college path wasn't for me. I attended Tampa Technical Institute and earned an A.S. degree in Commercial Art.

I began my professional career designing advertisements for Yellow Pages companies before moving into newspaper advertising and eventually joining the Tampa Bay Times, where I spent the next 25 years. During that time, my career evolved right along with the creative industry. What started with print advertising and graphic design expanded into:

• Graphic design & advertising
• Digital advertising
• Web design
• Email marketing
• Social media creative
• Video & multimedia
• Interactive PDFs
• Creative production
• Marketing campaigns
• Project management
• Workflow development
• Team leadership
• Emerging AI technologies

Working in a newspaper environment for 25 years also taught me something extremely valuable: how to design for almost anyone.

Every advertiser has a different brand, audience, personality and objective. One minute you're creating an ad for a medical practice; the next you're working on automotive, entertainment, real estate, events or a local business. That experience made me a versatile designer who can adapt to different brands and creative styles rather than trying to force every project into the same design aesthetic.

What's Next?

After 25 years, my time with the Tampa Bay Times came to an end. It wasn't necessarily the ending I would have written for myself, but a quarter-century of learning, creating, solving problems and adapting to an ever-changing industry gave me something more valuable than a job title:

Experience.

The tools have changed. The technology has changed. The industry has changed.

I've gone from Apple IIGS graphics to Adobe Creative Cloud, digital advertising, video, web design and AI.

But the basic idea hasn't changed: I still like figuring out how to make something cool happen.