1. How did you get your start?
My start? Raw curiosity for one. That’s where it all started, that drove, and drives everything that I am made of. I am one that is easily enchanted by content. I can be ignited in a moment, if the right spark is there. A love of the exploration of many things. Many, many things — so much so that my real beginning was as a biologist, a naturalist, with a leaning marine natural sciences . And from there, my professor suggested that I take the lab journals and drawings that I’d done, and explore art, history, writing, culture — and merge them somehow. So in the beginning, my work was about fine printing, papermaking, press work, book design and customized typography and type design. That was, literally, the design of typefaces — the art of conceiving the letter form as an object of potent scrutiny. But doing that meant that I could also do signwriting and truck lettering, painting on boats. Windows. Retail and shopfronts. And from there, that love combined to emerge in a grouping of ways for working with my clients (friends) to take all of those things, like printing, calligraphy and the fine arts, and make them into something that could be retooled and remade as a kind of specialist designing and consulting service. The beginning, alone, later, to small teams — and finally out to nearly 90 employees. Then back to a more manageable size. Something better, that would be my goal, in strategy and scale: 40 people — more capable of visioning and surveilling the work — as a creative leader.
