My first foray into the world of design came in the way of customizing MegaMan sprites in MS Paint on my family's Gateway computer in the very early 2000s. Starting around 10 years old, I began to find my way through the internet and onto message boards that inspired me to make my own Geocities websites, create signature banners for my profiles, and experiment with HTML and PHP. I actually thought you had to 'code' forums yourself and spent hours retyping my 'forum name' into Notepad wherever it appeared in the code. We didn't have ChatGPT back then and I sure didn't know any better.

I'll produce some artifacts from that era if you ask really, really nicely.

At that time, I kept to myself about my artistic adventures for the most part. As you might have imagined, it wasn't exactly normal or common to have gotten so involved on the internet at that age in that era. I did, however, get to start to unleash some of what I'd learned in the MySpace era, when I was closer to 16 years old. I'd bought myself an iMac with my grocery store money and I started making shirts, layouts, flyers, and graphics for bands across the US. It was bound to happen, but I eventually picked up a bass and started my own bands, eventually culminating in one that went on to get signed, release records, and tour the world: a pop-punk band called Carousel Kings.

I'd picked up a habit of sitting on the couch in the back of a record store that doubled as the record label that released my band's music and many others, like August Burns Red and Texas in July. The owner, Jeremy Weiss, offered me a job after I'd made enough show flyers for free. In addition to working for the label, where I'd eventually become Director and sign bands myself, Jeremy tasked me with the art direction and marketing of Lancaster's annual music conference and festival, LAUNCH. I held this role for many years, creating designs for the educational panels and the performers, from Bayside to Panic at the Disco.

‍

In my music days, I learned how to make lyric videos, which in the real world, we call 'motion graphics.' Years later, I picked up Blender and started learning how to model real and abstract things - the latter of which I massively prefer because the style of art I loved as a young digital artist was heavily dependent on crazy extruded renders and mind-bending fractal lights. I'd adopted a grunge-driven collage aesthetic that landed me plenty of album art jobs, including one for one of my favorite bands of the modern era, Hot Mulligan. The lead single from the EP I designed has over 25 million streams and counting. That's a lot of eyeballs.

‍