Hey Karen,

I’ve been a partner of Adobe in countless ways for over a decade now, and I’d love nothing more than to chat with you about making it official and finding a place where my vast experience could be best utilized as a full-fledged member of your team or the design teams that make the products the best in the world.

At the end of last year, I made a big move away from my near-15-year career as an independent freelance designer, and accepted a full-time role at a large school district here in Texas. What was initially supposed to be a job managing the district and it’s 50 schools’ websites and an occasional graphic design project here and there, quickly shifted to more of a Design Director role as soon as word began to spread about the first couple projects I got involved with and elevated so substantially. I’ve been collecting some of the brightest highlights from my time here at ryanhamrick.com/lisd.

At the end of the day, though, it’s still a public school district in Texas, so not only is there no extra money laying around for a salary bump commensurate with my growing role, but budgets and positions are being more scrutinized across the board, and regardless of my impact, I’m still relatively quite new. So the landscape of stability that enticed me to take this gig has certainly changed, and it feels wise to keep an eye to the future and what might be next.

Over the summer, I had a blast hosting one of the weekly community shows on Adobe Live, where I talked about and worked in real time on the huge undertaking of trying to rebrand all the individual identities across a 50-school district, and develop a shared visual language that makes them feel of a piece with each other, while maintaining their individuality and sense of school pride. I was particularly proud of the name: [Branding Class: Making Top Marks for a 50-School District](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZDFuZIEzbKKOX66mHEWsQSuxjqLaKGHh).

I was also just selected as a Mentor for the Creative Apprenticeship Program! The opportunities where I’ve gotten teach, mentor, and advocate for younger designers and artists has been some of the most rewarding work of my career, so I’m incredibly excited about that. I think that passion for guiding and helping others translates naturally to brand/product marketing. Whether it be through evangelism, or even simply knowing intimately the kinds of things that resonate most powerfully with people, through years of sharing tips and secrets in workshops, Adobe Live appearances, Creative Jam/Create Now talks, [Adobe Express booth duty at cookie conventions](https://www.instagram.com/p/DAG2_MXxJGE/?img_index=1), and more recently, changing the lives of numerous educators and school administrative staff in a very Canva-heavy school district, by showing them the vastly superior ways they can do things more easily and infinitely better in the Adobe products they *also* have full, free access to.