I work by day at a large software company based in Redmond; I've been there 21 years now. With degrees in both Fine Art (drawing and painting) and Commercial Art, I've always dabbled at least a little in personal painting and craft projects while working days in a more commercial aspect of the arts. Within the last several years I've become more focused on spending serious time on my own paintings, the results of which you get a snapshot of by browsing this site. Over time I hope to transfer all my energy into my home studio and leave the corporate world behind....but read on to hear about my course as I made my way through school and career.... 1974-'77 : Attended Juanita High School in Kirkland, Washington
While in school I spent all extra time in the art room... my teacher and first design mentor was
Lee Bogle 1977 : Cellar Gallery, Kirkland - Scholarship winner
I entered the Cellar Gallery student competition and received first place and a small scholarship prize to the college of my choice. '77-'83 : Attended Western Washington University
Graduated with a bachelors degree in Drawing & Painting, minors in Psychology and French. My primary artistic influences while at WWU were R. Allen (Bob) Jensen - who taught me how to make great breakthroughs through "art marathons". '83-'85 : Attended Art Institute of Seattle
Was part of the last graduating class to attend AIS when it was still located up on Capital Hill in the old Burnley School building.
- Graduated with a degree in Visual Communication.
- While at AIS, I had several classes with Bill Cumming, who was to influence the way I thought about drawing from life, the use of color and the combination of decorative expression and real-life subject matter.
- Through an AIS instructor, I was introduced to Bruce Hale, Seattle hand-lettering artist, who mentored me in letterform design and hand-lettering techniques '85-'86 : Banner Marketing
The AIS placement center helped me get a part time job at a small furniture marketing firm while I was in school, and this later turned into a full time job after I graduated. 1986 : Harper & Associates
Moved from Banner Mkt to take advantage of the opportunity to work for a design house. Primary work was in logo and identity design and print collateral material. '87-'89 : Colores International
Primary Designer & Art Director for a small art shop which produced a line of windsocks and decorative banners. Duties included designing the product and building prototypes, illustrating presentation pieces to illustrate outdoor large-scale installation, preparation of collateral material such as sales sheets, catalogs and magazine ads, directing photography for promotional material. '89-'90 : Freelancing as a graphic designer and illustrator
Various jobs including logo/identity design and collateral design and production. One intermittent but recurring job which proved interesting was to do illustrations of schools facilities for reproduction in high school graduation announcements. 1990 - present : Microsoft Corporation
Hired as a production coordinator for the production of localized (non-english) software manuals, within 2 years I had transitioned into a Designer role, first for printed manuals then for wizard illustration and layout, and finally by 1993 into Product Design for software such as Access, Visual InterDev and Visual Basic. Eventually I accepted a position to manage a group of product designers that cover all of Developer Division, for the entire suite of Microsoft software lifecycle products (Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System). Today I am the divisional expert on the Visual Studio Guidelines, a set of guidelines for all internal groups and external companies who write software that will run on Visual Studio Platform. I am passionnate about creating processes and guidance that assist teams in creating consistent, usable and useful tools for development teams! |