I spend the meat of my days tucked away in a quiet, darkened room, staring into twin windows that open up to an electronic world. Those “windows” are a pair of 20-inch monitors—the digital canvas where I sketch and build my projects before sending them humming through the cables to join the endless network of interconnected ideas out there.
On paper, my corporate title claims I’m a “design manager,” though how anyone actually manages a design is beyond me. If you ask the company brochure, my job is “designing environments and graphical interfaces that facilitate face-to-face marketing.” Stripped of the suit-and-tie jargon, it just means I design the displays and graphics for trade show exhibits and conventions. (The image attached here gives you a little peek into what that actually looks like.) I’ve always had a habit of reinventing myself every so often, if for no other reason than to keep the myth growing.
I landed in this corner of the world mostly because I was a computer geek back before being one was cool. In the early days, I was hands-on—a builder putting together modular exhibits without a designer or detailer to show us what the end result was supposed to look like. So, I taught myself to draw them. First by hand with pencil and paper, and eventually on the computer. Drawing and sketching always felt like second nature to me, so stepping into the structure of drafting was a natural next move. Originally, I just needed a clear way to communicate setup instructions to the installation crews when I wasn’t on-site.
Over the years, the pendulum shifted from the dusty noise of production to the quiet focus of design. Now, almost everything I create exists strictly in a virtual world. And truth be told, my knees and ankles don’t miss the endless pounding of concrete trade show floors—miles of walking for days on end. So for now, this virtual world suits me fine… at least until I can step out from behind the screens and into the real world of the mountains I’m always dreaming about.
rev. 8/26
