I've been in creative field for about 25 years now. I started out in Virginia after graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University. First real job was at a still highly regarded ad agency where I learned from the best about typography, layout and the most important part of any creative project, the killer idea.
I had a great intro to advertising and I still love a good ad but I felt I was better suited as an illustrator and had started to freelance at the local newspaper. Soon I decided to take it further and moved to Washington D.C. to pursue illustration full time. Within a year, I became a regular contributor to the Washington Post and a myriad of other publications in the area. I developed 2 distinct styles. Aside from actually making pictures, my job as an illustrator usually included the task of reading the outline of a story of some kind and coming up with up with an idea that represented what the story was about. This is how it became further engrained in me that above all, you have to start with a good idea and a pretty picture won't cover a bad one. It wasn't long before I felt like it was time to do something big. A college friend who was living in San Francisco invited me out for a visit and within a few months I was living there. I had a lot of good years as an illustrator in San Francisco. I worked with a lot of the major design firms in the city and across the country on editorial projects and package design.

As technology grew and everything became digital, the business I had built of drawing pictures by hand started to fade away. It was time to reinvent a career. I bought my first Mac and started to figure it out. I dabbled in animation and learned Flash which started to exercise the left side of the brain. I started looking at more code than layout and surprisingly found it kind of fun. I did a lot of work in Flash and thought I would specialize in that but as each version became more complex and it's popularity among clients and designers has declined, I've found that's it best to stick with the basic building blocks of the web which by now has evolved incredible functionality and usefulness.
That's my job now. To embrace and master the new things that come along that can be translated into interesting solutions for both myself and my clients.

Life in California has been a great experience. I've become a pretty serious cyclist and as much as time allows, a backpacker and climber. There's a real "work hard, play hard" mentality here and anyone who lives here knows you have to work pretty hard to stay. Being an outdoors person I've been able to indulge my love of photography to document some of the places around me and develop yet another creative outlet. I plan to stay around for a while.