What Shapes a Designer?

Long before I knew what a designer was, I was a kid in my room painting, drawing, and building computers with my brothers. I didn’t know design could be a profession—it was just something I loved to do.

After art school, I worked as a designer and art director at several firms in Miami: Pinkhaus, Beber Silverstein, McFarland & Drier, and eventually Tinsley Advertising. When I started at Tinsley, they offered me a big office in the creative wing, but I chose a small room near production instead. I knew I had a lot to learn. Nancy, the producer, was incredibly generous—she taught me everything from press checks to photo markups to commercial shoots. That hands-on education was invaluable, especially since my account was Florida and The Florida Keys.

Accolades and awards were never the goal—it was always about learning. One day, I saw a two-week freelance job posted in Adweek for an art director in San Francisco. I sent my portfolio, got the job, and flew out. Afterward, I returned to Miami, packed up my life, and moved to San Francisco with my young son. I even refinished the wood floors in our new apartment before job hunting—optimism and priorities of a designer.

Thanks to a recommendation from Joel Fuller (of Pinkhaus), I met the always-gracious Michael Vanderbyl, who pointed me toward local studios. I worked briefly at Cronan Design before getting a call from Steve Tolleson, who invited me to join Tolleson design studio as an art director. After a few years, he offered me a partnership—but I decided to open my own studio.

When the internet was emerging, many designers dismissed it as “production work.” I saw it as the future. I believe if you can’t execute a part of the project, the client won’t come back—so I learned everything, start to finish.

Since then, I’ve worked on branding and design for clients like Hillary Clinton (as one of 45 designers invited to contribute campaign collateral), Vertu, Nvidia, Vital Voices (with Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton), Luna Textiles, and restaurants like Café Monk in San Francisco for LIMN. My projects have included branding, packaging, textiles, annual reports, illustration, photography, and more.

Recently, I taught myself coding and animation. Despite attending Pratt, I wasn’t a great classroom student, but I could open almost any program and figure it out. That led to animation exhibits in China, India, and the U.S.

I’ve had a three-month solo show at SFMOMA (plus eight group shows), and my work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cooper Hewitt, and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. In 2000, I was inducted into Alliance Graphique Internationale.

I call myself a designer—not an art director, creative director, animator, or content creator—because I do it all. Knowledge has always been my goal. I am a designer.