The first job I ever loved was at T-Shirts Unlimited, behind the Mazzio's Pizza (where I worked just before). I started my design career doing ink-on-vellum illustrations, while the printers smoked ... not cigarettes ... next to highly-flammable emulsion. After, I took a segway into retail management, but came back to design in 2006. Since then, design has been a core aspect to every role I've had.
Clearly Media hired me as their first employee. Starting as a graphic designer, I quickly discovered the role – and it's owner – would greatly benefit if I learned the basics of HTML / CSS. From there, I learned how to take my designs and incorporate them into php-based CMS platforms (Concrete5 and Wordpress, specifically). I worked directly with Clearly Media clients to produce over seventy-five websites like this. If you're very quite, you can still see a few of them scampering in the wild. At United Methodist communications, I learned to work with back-end developers to create SiteCore (another, rather robust, CMS) page templates and components. At Wellview, I created Razor .NET front end assets and provided extensive styling documentation and support for a contracted Xamarin developer to implement. I've learned a tremendous amount from each of these roles, and learning is one of my favorite parts of life.
There are better designers, and more capable developers. My career success, though, has typically been the result of my ability, and willingness, to communicate. User Experience professionals exist squarely between product and development. This space is often the key point of failure or frustration in tech, and tech-adjacent, organizations. My understanding of the development cycle, experience in management, and willingness to compromise have allowed me to function as a communication bridge between product owners and development teams. From gathering business requirements, to explaining technological feasiblity, I have always found communication to be a critical ingredient in all successful team processes.
I love to draw, and have been professionally published several times. These days, I work exclusively on my own odd little stories. I often dream of selling my books and artwork in retirement. The ability to sketch and dreamcast has been a critical part of my design process since the beginning. I often create custom icons, illustrations, and other assets to help bolster presentation, or simply support the primary brand narrative. "Hello, my name is Ste-phen, and I like to do draw-rings!" (for my fellow children of the 80s.)
I grew up in the prime movie-watching era. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Terminator, Predator, Splash, The Dark Crystal, First Blood – these and a thousand Saturday-morning cartoons filled my head with a lot of really cool nonsense. It's been hard to turn off the wild barrage of "what ifs" that began in my childhood. I've only done a few professional writing assignments, but writing and drawing has become a key aspect of my never-idle life. My mind doesn't turn off, so I do my best to focus it on harmless silliness: it can also come in handy when considering content and messaging.
Welcome to mid-life, 80s kids! So much of today's entertainment is rooted in the bully-rich adventure-prone daily grind of growing up before a thousand missing-kid news stories scared parents into hyper-attentiveness. I spent my childhood riding bikes across the small towns of my youth, and walking anywhere within a few miles. I wasn't super-active or cool, but even as a nerdy kid who liked to draw muscle-bound superheroes – I wandered all over creation by myself. I'd fallen out of trees, stepped on rusty nails, been called things that would mortify my children, and watched USA Cartoon Express every day after school. Man, the 80s were a fantastic time to grow up ... yunno, aside from all the parts of that era that were awful.
