Early Years
I was born in 1984 in St. Louis, Missouri to Pat and Gina. They would split just a couple years later, and at age 5, my mom and stepfather would move my new baby sister and me to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I would spend the next 20 years of my life, eventually meet my wife, and where we would have both of our kids.
As a kid, I was always interested in art and loved exploring the comics, bands, sports teams, and everything else I loved, through redrawing their characters and logos. At the time, I was just trying to make free things to put up in the space around me, but looking back, I was also learning the power of observation and how to see through what I drew.
When I was approaching driving age, my dad back in St. Louis and I embarked on the biggest art project of my life up to that point—taking his old red, rusted out, 1988 Chevy work truck with 180,000 miles, fixing it up, lowering it, and giving it the sickest custom black with purple/blue/silver flames paint job, making it the coolest first car of anyone I knew, by far.
Music: My First
Creative Love
For most of my teenage years, and well into my early 20s, I was convinced that I was destined to be an artist. At that time, however, I wasn’t so much into drawing, painting, lettering, no—I was going to be a rap artist. From a very young age, I was obsessed with making up random songs, and constantly rhyming words to the inevitable distraction of everyone around me.
As I got a little older, and my ADHD began to present itself more and more, often in the form of an immensely frustrating disconnect between the speed of my thoughts and my ability to keep up with my words, I was naturally drawn to songwriting as a kind of personal superpower that allowed me to carefully design, craft, and memorize exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it, so I could not only convey my thoughts perfectly, but also with style.
In 2009, our son was four years old, and we then had an 18-month-old daughter, when we learned that we would be up-rooting our little family, leaving our new house in Fort Wayne (that we had just custom-built less than two years prior), and moving to Pittsburgh when Brooke got a big promotion. I was working for a regional wireless carrier at the time, so I couldn’t simply transfer, but her opportunity was good enough that I could just focus on the move, and then take my time finding the right role once we were there.
We knew no one in our new city, so for a long while, it was just these two cuties and me, exploring our surroundings, taking care of our new place, and supporting mom’s transition into her big new job.
Married with
Children
In 2003, I met the love of my life and by 2005, we were married and had our first beautiful child. I had gotten a more stable job, eventually gave up on pursuing a music career, and was able to interview my way into management in the wireless retail industry. For years, I managed stores for Sprint, Verizon, and more, and even ran an entire district of 10 stores across the midwest for a Sprint dealer by the age of 24.
I was in charge of hiring and training all employees in my stores, managing the stores’ inventories, tracking and leading their sales performance, marketing in each store’s local community, planning and leading events and live activations with neighboring businesses to drive traffic and sales, overseeing the buildout and setting up new store locations, and so much more. In fact, because we were a relatively small, lean company, I even ended up taking on the responsibility of installing, networking, and managing all new security camera systems across the company’s stores.
Failed Search to Freelance
After writing for one site in particular for quite a while, my boss there moved on to a role at another site, and I threw my hat in the ring for his position. I flew to New York City (for the first time, at 26) for a few hours, to meet with the owner of the site and its UK parent site. Once again, I managed to interview my way into the role of Editor-in-Chief.
I ran the now-defunct site Know Your Cell for the better part of a year, managing the news writing staff, writing opinion features, and reviewing new devices and apps. I was primarily a BlackBerry user at the time, and after using and reviewing every Twitter app for the platform, I decided that we deserved a smarter and better looking experience. So in my free time, I set out to make that happen.
I didn't know anything about app development, but I knew how to use Photoshop, and knew I had better ideas for how a good Twitter client should work, so I figured I’d just start designing one, and then find a developer partner to help me build it. I very quickly found that partner, and within weeks of our launch, our app “Blaq” was already the best-selling twitter app on the platform.
I had some great references and a few solid connections in Pittsburgh from my last employer, but the market for management roles in wireless retail were sparse at the time.
I had so much high-level experience in that industry, that my value as an employee was skewed far higher there than it would have been if I had just taken a comparable retail management job doing something else. So it was hard to find anything good enough to justify the addition of child care costs, and the subtraction of all the other things I was doing at home. Instead, I decided to take that industry experience, and network my way into a few freelance writing gigs at some of the same blogs and publications I frequented for news when I was managing stores.
It was my first experience with freelance work, and the freedom and flexibility of it all was intoxicating. For someone who had never been without at least one job since he put in an application at McDonald’s on his 15th birthday, it also offered a release of some fully self-applied pressure I was feeling to contribute more.
It was so popular in fact, that at one point, RIM (the company that made BlackBerrys) paid my partner Jerome and I a large sum of money to be able to offer it for free during a back-to-school promotion. I was actually able to keep that unexpected influx of money a secret long enough to finally surprise Brooke with the engagement/wedding ring she’d loved for 10 years, but that we were way too poor to afford when we got married.
RIM also ended up hiring Jerome and I around that time to design and develop the official BlackBerry app for Foodspotting which, for the kids out there, was a service people used to post photos of their food and share restaurants and guides before Instagram just swallowed that concept whole.
I kept at it, trying to stay ahead of the curve, and around six months in, managed to get an invite to Dribbble. I started out posting elements of UI and visual design projects I was working on, but very early on, I was stopped dead in my tracks by some of the incredible lettering work being posted there.
Having spent a lot of time, by that point, wondering how (or if) I might ever manage to catch up enough in the web design world to be able to keep up. Let alone, do anything innovative or creative in that space that might make me stand out and win business, over people who hadn’t just decided at the age of 27 to start dabbling in it.
With lettering, it certainly wasn’t a matter of discovering something I was surprisingly and naturally good at (quite the opposite, as you can see from this Pittsburgh sketch from November 2011), but it was a ton of fun, and I saw a future there, where I might truly be able to do something notable and new, and perhaps make a name for myself.
Doubling Down
on Design
Those first experiences as a designer helped me realize that while I very much enjoyed writing as a creative outlet, working visually was doing more to stimulate and propel me forward in my freelance career. In March of 2011, I decided to leave as head of Know Your Cell and focus on design, exclusively.
Having immersed myself in UI/UX and mobile design with my BlackBerry app, I figured the next logical step would be to teach myself HTML and CSS. It was surprisingly easy to find the answers to just about every question I came across with a quick Google search, and I started picking up the basics fast. That was right at the time when responsive web design was really taking off, and while it was obviously a move in the right direction, things were changing so rapidly that, for someone trying to learn the foundations while simultaneously staying abreast of all the new developments, it was a bit overwhelming.
I did have an early moment of success, when I had learned enough to slap in the necessary amount of custom css to turn my Behance ProSite portfolio responsive long before it was meant to be possible, even drawing props from Eric Snowden, the then head of Behance and current VP of Design at Adobe.
Failed Search to Freelance
After writing for one site in particular for quite a while, my boss there moved on to a role at another site, and I threw my hat in the ring for his position. I flew to New York City (for the first time, at 26) for a few hours, to meet with the owner of the site and its UK parent site. Once again, I managed to interview my way into the role of Editor-in-Chief.
I ran the now-defunct site Know Your Cell for the better part of a year, managing the news writing staff, writing opinion features, and reviewing new devices and apps. I was primarily a BlackBerry user at the time, and after using and reviewing every Twitter app for the platform, I decided that we deserved a smarter and better looking experience. So in my free time, I set out to make that happen.
I didn't know anything about app development, but I knew how to use Photoshop, and knew I had better ideas for how a good Twitter client should work, so I figured I’d just start designing one, and then find a developer partner to help me build it. I very quickly found that partner, and within weeks of our launch, our app “Blaq” was already the best-selling twitter app on the platform.
I had some great references and a few solid connections in Pittsburgh from my last employer, but the market for management roles in wireless retail were sparse at the time.
I had so much high-level experience in that industry, that my value as an employee was skewed far higher there than it would have been if I had just taken a comparable retail management job doing something else. So it was hard to find anything good enough to justify the addition of child care costs, and the subtraction of all the other things I was doing at home. Instead, I decided to take that industry experience, and network my way into a few freelance writing gigs at some of the same blogs and publications I frequented for news when I was managing stores.
It was my first experience with freelance work, and the freedom and flexibility of it all was intoxicating. For someone who had never been without at least one job since he put in an application at McDonald’s on his 15th birthday, it also offered a release of some fully self-applied pressure I was feeling to contribute more.