A Brief Hello

Howdy.
Web design, game design and programming, curriculum and course design, it’s all good.

In Winnipeg, I was lucky enough to study graphic design for two years in junior high school (that’s grades 7-9 for you non-Manitobans out there), and three in high school (10-12). In the 80s, this meant a lot of drafting, lettering, illustration, photography, airbrush illustration and photo retouching, typesetting, letter and platen press, a little offset work, and, towards the end, a bit of digital, as the first Mac Plus was acquired by the graphics shop in 1987. Hours of entertainment came out of watching the multi-pen plotter inching back and forth, and trying to discern a pattern to its movements.

Moving to the University of Winnipeg, I studied English literature and a bit of history, and just a smattering of education. Two particularly influential books there were John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy and T.C. Boyle’s Descent of Man—no one told me you could write literature like that! So I devoured almost every example of contemporary American and Canadian pomo fiction I could get my hands on (not many in the Peg, for sure),

I moved to Vancouver to study Electronic Communication Design at Emily Carr Institute, and while designing and programming web sites, games, and educational software, have taught a variety of design courses at Emily Carr since 2000. I’ve also spent many hours wrasslin’ with HTML, style sheets, JavaScript, PHP, Director, Lingo, ActionScript, all that good stuff.

My approach has always been to examine assumptions, and see if there’s a better way to do something, right now, for this project. If the next project is a wheel that needs reinventing, so be it, it will be its own thing, as this one is. So I try to keep an open mind about software, about ideas, to see if there’s a different way to make something happen, to make something look, to make something feel, while respecting the needs and possibilities of the moment.