A digital painting displayed at the Islip Art Museum’s show, A Passion For Pixels, curated by Bruce Deitrich Price;
June 20 through September 7, 2008.
When you are alone and all of your responsibilities are answered for, what do you do? I have friends who read, play sports, listen to or write music. I create. I am always problem-solving or thinking of my next project. Whether I am writing, drawing, or cooking what I am creating matters less than the fact that I am creating.
My relationship with creativity started early on in my childhood. I taught myself how to draw by copying the Peanuts comic strips from the Sunday comics strips. In high school, I focused on the arts and was sent to study advanced courses on Saturdays at the Fashion Institute of Technology by my art teacher.
During my highschool years, I created over 150 cartoon characters. They all had stories specific to their personalities. My goal was to mimic the Merrie Melodies shorts that I had grown up on. One day I hope to give these characters life. These characters became the backbone of a portfolio to have The School of Visual Arts accept me as a student in their BFA program for cartooning.
I was only 17 and I had a lot to learn about the world. Speaking to my peers I saw they all had several interests. Looking at my focus on cartooning I learned that my stories lacked life experience. They were developed by observing other people’s lives, but not on my own experiences. After a year and a half, I left the School of Visual Arts on a journey to better understand myself.
This journey led me to take a stab at independent film-making. I took a small acting role in a short movie where my scene was the comedic climax of the short. My character was the catalyst for the chaos in the scene.
I developed a working relationship with the writer, Mike Polizzi. Mike had the idea of building the short into a full-length feature. He developed a draft and worked with him to refine it. We worked for months developing the screenplay and when we thought it was ready we went into pre-production.
After 2 years we were prepared for a two-week production. We used my parents’ house for most of the main scenes and we secured several locations for other scenes. The filming taught me to be agile. There were new problems to be solved every day. Weather, casting availability, location availability, among other barriers became challenges to both Mike and me.
We spent one night completely rewriting our climactic scene to work around a pool instead of a beach because of logistical issues we discovered while scouting the location and weather concerns.
The film was not a success. When we finally were able to get it into an editing room, we learned most of the sound was unusable. We considered several options including dubbing the whole movie and turning it into a silent film. Ultimately the project was scrapped. This led me to return to school and pursue a career in graphic design.
I have carried the lessons I learned on that project throughout my career and my creative journey. From scoping to budgeting to managing personalities many of the soft skills in my career were formed during that project.
I have worn several hats over the years. I started out in a warehouse preparing color separations for silkscreening. In the printshop, I worked as a graphics manager and pre-pressman for offset and digital printing. As a freelancer, I learned to be an entrepreneur, interactive media designer, and front-end developer. this whole journey led me back to school.
At Quinnipiac University I studied for a Master’s of Science in Interactive Media. It was there that I first discovered my passion for user-experience design. Education doesn’t stop in the classroom. I sought out mentors at work. I learned from my peers.
Everyone around you helps inform your point of view. Whether you agree or disagree with their ideologies or viewpoints, listening to them can help refine your own.
If I could offer you one word of advice, be a sponge. You never know who or what will inspire your next idea. I am always looking to learn and evolve. Most recently I have been reading up on best practices at the Nielsen Norman Group. Understanding and communicating human touchpoints with software and interactive media seems to be a very good fit and I love the psychology of asking the who, what, why, where, when, and how of people’s interactions to improve their experience with products.
Looking ahead, I want to continue to grow creatively and I hope to teach the next generation of creators.
I’m starting by sharing my experiences here, so if you are still interested please bookmark this page and follow me on my social media links.