Create with Meaning. Lead with Purpose.
A Creative Life, Still in Progress
I’ve spent nearly three decades making things—and helping other people make things that matter.
My path to creative leadership hasn’t been a conventional one. I’ve been a graphic designer, illustrator, digital designer, art director, entrepreneur, professor, gallery director, mentor, and Creative Director. Looking back, I don’t see those as separate careers. Each one taught me something essential about ideas, people, and the power of thoughtful design.
I began as a designer because I loved making things. I still do. There is something deeply satisfying about taking an idea that doesn’t quite exist yet and giving it form—finding the right image, typeface, composition, phrase, or visual language that suddenly makes everything clear.
But over time, I discovered that what interested me most wasn’t simply making something beautiful. It was understanding why it should exist in the first place.
That curiosity led me toward brand thinking, art direction, and eventually creative leadership.
Ideas Deserve Meaning
I believe design has the power to shape culture.
The best creative work begins long before anyone opens a design application. It begins with listening, asking questions, understanding people, researching context, and discovering the idea at the heart of the problem.
My approach combines strategy, storytelling, illustration, design, and craft to build brands and experiences that feel thoughtful, distinctive, and deeply human. I’m especially drawn to work with history, purpose, and meaning—work that respects where an organization has been while helping it communicate where it is going.
I value clarity over novelty for novelty’s sake. I believe beauty still matters. Craft matters. Details matter.
But they matter most when they serve an idea.
From Designer to Creative Director
I have spent most of my career close to the work.
Early experiences in advertising, digital design, and multimedia taught me how technology could expand the possibilities of visual communication. At Thomson Reuters, I worked as a lead brand designer and art director, developing identities and integrated print and digital marketing while collaborating with senior leadership on conceptual visual storytelling.
I later co-founded a small digital media studio, an experience that gave me an entrepreneurial perspective on the relationship between creativity, clients, strategy, and business.
Then my career took an important turn.
I became a teacher.
For more than a decade, I taught art and graphic design while continuing to practice professionally. Teaching changed the way I understood creative leadership. I learned how to critique without prescribing, how to ask questions that help someone see a problem differently, and how to recognize potential in an idea—or a person—before it is fully developed.
Those lessons continue to shape the Creative Director I am today.
Leadership Is a Creative Act
I don’t believe creative direction is about being the person in the room with all the answers.
It is about creating the conditions in which great ideas can emerge.
My leadership style is thoughtful, collaborative, steady, and deeply invested in people. I enjoy bringing together designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, strategists, and other creative thinkers around a shared idea and helping each person contribute something uniquely their own.
Sometimes leadership means setting a clear vision. Sometimes it means defending a good idea. Sometimes it means asking one more question.
And sometimes it means getting out of the way.
The goal isn't for the work to look like something I would have made. The goal is for the work to become better because we made it together.
Still Curious
After nearly three decades in this profession, I still consider myself a student of it.
There are disciplines I know deeply and others I want to understand better. I want to work alongside people whose experiences are different from mine—strategists, writers, filmmakers, designers, technologists, makers, and thinkers who challenge the way I see creative problems.
I'm not particularly interested in accumulating titles.
I'm interested in doing meaningful work with talented people.
I want to help build brands with something genuine to say, create experiences people remember, mentor creative people as they become better at what they do, and continue becoming a better creative leader myself.
Because after all these years, I still believe what drew me to design in the first place:
Ideas deserve clarity, beauty, and meaning.
And the best creative work can leave something behind that lasts.