Hi! Thanks for visiting my site and taking the time to look around. Since you’re here, let me tell you the story of how I found myself building a career in graphic design.
As a young child I had my heart set on an entertainment career. It was my sole focus for the first 18 years of my life and I hadn't considered any other career options. Ultimately, it wasn't meant to be (boo!) and I was at a loss as to what to do.
I found a job working as a receptionist, and while I didn’t know it at the time, I was starting to build some valuable skills.
As the receptionist, I had some bandwidth to work on special projects — one of which was the design, creation, printing and distribution of the company newsletter.
I taught myself how to use Microsoft Publisher and found that I absolutely loved working on that newsletter. I was always so excited to find out what people thought of the latest and greatest edition and I would get some awesome feedback.
As I started to move up into secretarial and administrative work, I would continue to look for opportunities to take on creative projects. When I started a new administrative assistant job at a new company, I expressed my interest in pursuing a creative path — perhaps as a graphic designer or something with websites.
Nine months later the company created a Graphic Designer role and moved me into it. I emphasized that I would need to learn everything on the job and the response I received was — “We are taking just as big of a risk on you as you are on us. You’ve expressed interest in pursuing a career in graphic design and we have an interest in bringing our design work in-house.”
I understood completely what an absolutely outstanding (and incredibly lucky) opportunity I had just been given and I dove into my new role with everything I had. I focused on learning all of the amazing new design tools I now had access to — Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and eventually, Adobe InDesign, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and Bridge. I took classes, devoured the design books I bought and scoured the internet for design tutorials. I studied existing templates and branding guides and quickly developed and built up my skills.
For the next 10+ years I was driven to learn, grow and succeed as a graphic designer — and I flourished. Eventually, I was able to take on most of the work that had been previously outsourced. I worked on collateral layout, formatting and design, presentations, various graphics for web, email, social media, and events. I created posters and signage, worked on trade show booth artwork, designed logos and even designed and developed front end navigation systems for CDs and DVDs. At one point I learned how to edit and produce videos.
One day I found myself promoted as the new manager of the brand new in-house production and creative services team. My first priority was to start building my design team by hiring a new designer. Which I did. I eventually built up a team of 3 designers and for the next 12 years we were the in-house design agency for the entire global company.
During this time I built my skills in team development, management, and leadership. I became experienced in and skilled in managing and coordinating projects and workflow for my multimedia design team. I also continued to work as a graphic designer and had even started to learn about website management, maintenance, design and page builds, which allowed me to develop skills with HTML, CSS and CMS systems.
I was with that company for over 23 years and I will forever be grateful to the people who gave me the opportunity that I know I could not have found elsewhere. I was in the right place, at the right time, working for exactly the right company with exactly the right people — and I spoke up about the creative path I wanted to pursue.
Being creative is a fundamental part of who I am and I found a great passion for graphic design, both print and digital, as well as a love for working with, and being inspired by, creative people.
If you’ve made it this far, then I’d like to thank you for reading my story. I hope you found it interesting and I hope you spend some time looking around and perusing my portfolio.
Thanks for stopping by!