About

I have been working in the Web Technology Industry since the late 90’s. And yes, it makes me feel ancient when I put it that way. I started building and designing websites and other interfaces in 1998 in Big Rapids, Michigan. It was the year before I would get my Bachelor Degree in Visual Communication from Ferris State University.

I worked as marketing manager and webmaster at a small startup that specialized in GPS tracking units for vehicle fleets called AVL (Automated Vehicle Location) Systems, LLC. I learned to solder circuit boards and to drive a rear-wheel drive police car. I learned to sell new technology to people of different backgrounds and levels of expertise. I got to hone my presentation skills young at client presentations and trade shows throughout the US. As I’d learned in speech class at Ferris: I loved presenting to groups, learning people’s stories and using my empathy and problem solving skills to help them do business with design.

Early Work

Right out of college I started work at Crowe Chizek (now Crowe) – a midwest-based accounting firm with a well-respected consulting practice – designing and building websites mostly for financial institutions. Back then we built most of our sites in Microsoft FrontPage, then Dreamweaver back when it was owned by Macromedia, prior to the buyout when Adobe decided to become a monolith in charge of all things digital design. User experience started to become a buzzword around the time we were using cascading style sheets to change the color of hyperlinks to whatever fit with the brand. We started to build wireframes to go with our sitemaps, at the time there was no specialized tool for such artifacts, so we drew the wireframes in Microsoft Visio and embedded them into Word documents.