ABOUT ME!

Career, Work, Business

I've always loved art and creating. Everyone around me knew of my love for comic books at any early age. My eighth grade quote under my picture was "Ambition: Comic book artist" The comic books went on hold in high school and I started to delve deeper into art. I've taken night, summer and elective art classes ever since I could remember. In high school I read every Art in America and Artforum that I could find. I chilled out in libraries reading about contemporary art, pop art, graphic design and whatever else caught my eye. While first experimenting on a Mac Quadra, in a high school art class, I knew I wanted to work with computers for the rest of my life.

The Art Institute of Philadelphia was my choice for college. Originally my major was Visual Communication. The school switched it over to Graphic Design about halfway into it. I still chilled out in the library as much as possible and discovered a love for Basquiat, Duchamp, Johns and a ton of others. During my attendance I started working as a Graphic Designer at Koen Book Distributors. Koen was a catalog work, advertising material, trade show creation and web updates. It was a great opportunity to dig my feet into my field. The best part was that every single book that was released for the day was displayed in the morning. I wish I could still go to that shelf.

I worked and went to school finally graduating in 2000. I left Koen as soon as I graduated from college looking for bigger and better things. I took at job in Medford, NJ with MTG where I was a layout artist for a paintball and a limo magazine. The job was great and I experimented with off beat layouts for the paintball magazine and did classy work for the limo magazine. Everyone thought I was completely nuts. I learned about the web and how to create sites. These were the slicing and dicing days of past. It was a great way to get my feet wet in the WWW.

The paintball magazine was sold and I lost my job. I hopped around a bit working at different jobs eventually landing at Pep Boys Headquarters in Philadelphia. My first job with a Trafficer, Production Manager, Art Director, etc. It felt like I was in the thick of a real in-house deal design studio. There was always mad work to be done. People worked around the clock. It was super fast paced and you had to have a large skillset to get by. it was a great place to work and I really loved it there, but I wanted to move back to New Jersey.

I left Philly and took a job doing in-house work at Arett Lawn and Garden Distributors, Inc. in 2004. Alot of newspaper advertising, direct mail, marketing, trade show signage and standard in house stuff. The support for the Design/Marketing Department was strong here and I really loved that. It was here that I discovered web standards, SEO and the current state of the web. I really felt that advertising dollars were going to be directed more towards the web. I decided that every night I would consume everything I could about the web. I immersed myself much like how I did when I was in high school and college with art. I did lessons on lynda.com, read alistapart.com and consumed as much of the web as possible. My focus was now on the web.

I left Arett in Dec. of 2006 and was hired as a full time web designer with Princeton Online. It's a fast paced but relaxed envirnoment working with people that I really respect and admire. I am currently employed with POL and really, REALLY enjoy what I do.

I'm still in love with art and design, do lessons on lynda.com and soak in as much of the current world of the print, web and typography. I love being involved in projects with anyone so please don't hesitate to email, IM or call me whenever's clever.

Please visit the Portfolio section to view projects that I've completed over the years.