Connecting The Dots
The story of following a passion to find a career

Steve Jobs told the Stanford graduating class of 2010 something that has stuck with me ever since I saw the video of his commencement address. He told the recent grads that “you cannot know what is going to happen in your future, you can only connect the dots of your life after you’ve lived it.” As I move forward with my own life, I have only realized that to ring true.
The Early Days
Some of the first “dots” of my life as a designer appeared while sitting at the little desk my Dad set up for my brother and I as kids. On the desk sat an old PC computer. It was situated in the corner of his home office. I would work on the “paint” application and try my best to make digital paintings while he worked on his graphic designs on that classic blue Macintosh. I would call him over and he would help me print off my work. This was the first time I experienced how magical a piece of software can be. My efforts and intentions were leveraged by a computer to impact the world. It may have been a barely recognizable stick figure playing baseball, but feeling was wonderful and has not been forgotten.
My Grandfather was a commercial artist and product designer by trade. Against his parent’s better judgment, he went to art school and made a living through making. As a boy, my family would visit their house in Minnesota and I would spend hours in his workshop sifting through the half finished works. Drawings, paintings, carvings, and sculptures filled the workshop and would spill out into the rest of the humble home. The smell of freshly carved wood still reminds me of my Grandfathers remarkable talent. He would take walks through the Northern Minnesota woods to find all kinds of beautiful pieces of fallen wood. He was a wise and caring artist, full of ideas on how to transform these forgotten pieces of wood into some of the most inspired works of art I’ve ever seen.
Students Sit Still
Later in childhood, I would again come to think of myself as an artist. While I was a smart kid, excelling in math, science and writing, I had trouble staying focused and I became a pain for my teachers. More interested in the other kids than in the subjects, my teachers would often move me only to find that I made a new friend to talk to on the other side of class. This was not the case in my Art classes, however. Driven to create work that would shock and excite my teachers and peers, I would work passionately for hours. Aside from being in the advanced classes, my only academic honors came from my art teachers.
In high school I took every art class I could, not thinking that it would ever lead to anything more than an A. While I loved to make, it was impractical and my dreams of art fell behind, I went to Colorado State University for their excellent environmental science programs. After three semesters I realized my passions for the outdoors lie in what they can do for people. My fundamental interests had not changed from when I was a kid looking through my Grandfather’s work. I changed my major to a Bachelors in Fine Art. I started taking psychology classes and prematurely visited grad schools to assess their programs in Art Therapy. I started meditating and exploring the intersections of art and psychology. It was an exciting time in my life. I was able to hone my skill of drawing, and put my energy towards learning more about struggles of others and how I might one day be able to help them.
It wasn’t until I took my first Graphic Design class my Junior year of college that I started thinking about it as a way to affect people. It was only an intro class to fill an elective, but as the semester went on I couldn’t resist the practicality of design. The history of typefaces, the fineries of leading and kerning, the design leaders who have come to shape so much of our world, and of course the powerful impact design has on people, all enticed me to once again change the trajectory of my life, this time it was to stay.
Enter The Workforce
My first design job came that summer. I was taking typography and branding classes to catch up on my late major change, when I decided to send a small portfolio to the CSU newspaper. They liked my work and invited me for an interview. I was out of this world about having my first design job start later that week. At the paper, I learned about layout design for magazines, newspapers and other special print projects we had running from time to time. My main job was to work with the Ad staff on creating designs for their clients. I was doing it. I was working with real people doing real work for real clients. I got to make people excited about the look and feel of an ad. It may only amount to pixels on a screen and ink blots on paper, but it mattered. Oh, and I got paid.
Taking 18 credits and working at the paper kept me busy, but I still needed to pay for food and rent. I got a job shucking oysters at an upscale restaurant in Fort Collins called Jax Fishhouse. One day while shucking behind the bar a customer sat down with a Colorado Web Design hat on. I had been learning the basics of coding websites and struck up a conversation that resulted in a discussion about web design over coffee the next morning. By the end of the week I was a Jr. Web Designer working with both graphic and web design to enhance the brands of Colorado Web Design, and it’s clients. The opportunity filled me with passion and enthusiasm for the capabilities of digital products. My work could reach far more people on the web and make each dollar my client spent go further.
The next summer an email landed in my inbox for a Visual and Digital Design Assistant at Bohemian Nights. Bohemian Nights is a premier brand in the Fort Collins area, they are a non-profit arm of the Bohemian Foundation that focuses on bringing live, local music to the community. It was a dream summer job that allowed me to design for the beating heart of Fort Collins. I learned about event production and the many moving parts that go into putting on festivals and concerts for over 100,000 music lovers.
The Co-Producers of the famous NewWestFest music festival are the Downtown Fort Collins Business Association. During my time with Bohemian Nights, I met some of the wonderful folks at the DBA and heard that they had an upcoming event. It was called the 307 Wyoming Appreciation Weekend and it needed a logo. I got some info from a friend of mine who was working at the DBA, and built the logo for fun to see if anything would come of it. My friend sent it to his boss in the morning and I found myself with another design interview. I became a contract graphic designer for the DBA and had the pleasure of working with the team on many of the winter season events. I developed complete brand strategies with the marketing team and had rounds of meetings with the DBA executives to approve of my designs. What I took from those days is invaluable, I tried to absorb all of the professional and positive enthusiasm that filled their company culture.
My last semester of school I was a full time student working for the DBA and the school newspaper, I was building various websites for freelance clients, tackling application design and usability projects for my capstone courses, and compiling my portfolio for my senior design review. I loved every second of it. Running from class to work to class and back to work, staying up all night with other design students to discuss ideas and work out complex visual problems, learning more software for tools of the trade. I was wireframing, prototyping, and designing interfaces for application ideas, it was all the dots coming together.
More Dots Ahead
I graduated with a BFA concentrating in Graphic Design with a business minor. I spent a month and a half skiing and road tripping through the Pacific Northwest and Canada, spent two months backpacking, hitchhiking, and volunteering on organic farms in New Zealand, and have since started working at JG Management Systems in a contract design support position. I am helping the senior engineers at JGMS and WAI make visual what is an impossibly complex set of organizational structures. My work will help their teams secure a 10 year, multi-million dollar proposal for technical consulting to the military. It is another dot that I am so grateful to have shown up on my map through life.
As I look back I am amazed to see the threads of ideas being woven together into usability design. What has made me most excited about design, whether it be print or digital, is how people interact with it. I started in graphic design knowing that I was most interested in web design, and that a solid understanding of typography, branding and visual design, would serve as a foundation for designing digital products. Learning HTML5, CSS3, and the WordPress platform have given me a deeper understanding of how those digital products are produced. My passion for psychology, design, and technology have finally found a home with product design. I get to go to work and help make better applications, websites, and brands. The dots of my life have come together in such a way to give me a shot at living a life that positively impacts others. I’m so grateful for the opportunity, and excited beyond words to see where the next dots take me.
