When I was in 3rd grade a friend brought a collection of blank books to class. He was making pretend novels out of them, and somehow I convinced him to give me one. I still remember the title he had scrawled on the cover: Planes, Trains and Motorcycles. When I got home, I quickly scratched out this title and turned it into some type of 3rd grade sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel, complete will illustrations of warriors and dragons.

I never got past two or three scribbled chapters, as carrying the story through a long plot arc was beyond the attention span of a child. I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, but my true fascination with this process was not in the story, but in the book as an object. I wanted to see the pages full of ink, letters and images. Those were the things that truly inspired me, and the object would have great value if I could thumb through dozens of pages covered with stuff.

Despite my preference for the presentation of content, rather than its writing, I was a good writer. This back-and-forth relationship between writing and design is a contest I still carry with me to this day, and I frequently spurn one for a time in pursuit of the other, and back again.

It wasn’t my first foray into book making. From the time I could write, I would staple together groups of pages and fill them with comics, stories and drawings. I drew pictures constantly, especially at school. Inspired mostly by 80s action movies like The Terminator, Commando, American Ninja, Iron Eagle, Star Wars and Red Dawn, my drawings usually involved war and combat, a fact that occasionally got me into trouble.

In the meantime, somewhere in the mid 1980s my older brother had convinced our dad to buy a computer. Not everyone had one at home in those days, but Dad knew they would become more and more important with time. On a glorious day I walked into the kitchen to see the new IBM 8088 they were unpacking. It had no hard drive, instead booting off of a DOS floppy, and an EGA monitor. I began writing stories on the word processor, and my brothers taught me basic operations in GW Basic and Q Basic (programming languages). We would spend hours creating Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories, and when we got a bit more confident we tried our hand at writing text based Role Playing Games. Arranging the logic in Q Basic for statistics and combat was no easy task, and we ended up with several games that never made it past character creation. After my first sitting at the 8088, the three great loves of my life: writing, design and all things digital had been established.

By the time I was in high school, I was still drawing but I had never made a connection between it and Fine Art or Graphic Design. My Junior year, I was disapointed to learn I had to take either Art, Music or Drama. I can’t sing, and I turn into a piece of wood on stage, so I took Art. My career goal was video production, as I was great at filming even the most mundane scene in a way that brought interest and emotion from the viewer, and I had already won several awards in high school videography competitions. I was reading John Lennon’s biography at the time, and it described a piece by Yoko Ono that consisted of a blank canvas and a jar of rusty nails. I had also happened across some work by Jackson Pollack. I was so smitten by the absurdity of such artwork that I confronted Mr. Brite, my art teacher, the next day. He was happy to receive the challenge, and he very thoroughly explained to me, while other students listened distractedly as they worked on their projects, a simple line of reasoning that changed my life.

In short, it went like this: Putting on a show of technical skill, such as photo-realistically repeating a scene on canvas, was not the end goal of art. The end goal is to give the viewer an experience, whether they experience an emotion, or learn something, or see something new. The artist is simply giving the viewer something that they didn’t have before, and it doesn’t matter if that is done with rusty nails, or splattered paint, or a perfectly drafted depiction of a person or still life. All that matters is the concept and the experience.

With that in mind, you can think about real world examples that are, for some reason, easier to swallow as abstract or non-representational pieces. When you listen to a symphony, the music does not representationally recreate the experience it describes: the orchestra does not make the sounds of birds chirping or bubbling creeks. There are no lyrics that narrate a meeting or a break between lovers. Instead, the music is layer upon layer of abstract tone, harmony and tempo. If you watch South Park, you don’t sit there and stew about how the characters look like they were drawn by a 3rd grader. Instead, you become wrapped up in the content of the comedy. The visual arts are no different.

I was hooked. I began drawing and painting at home constantly, and my senior year I took all the art classes I could fit in my schedule. I went to college the next year with no idea of what I wanted to study. When I saw my advisor, he asked me what I wanted to major in. I told him I wanted to study art, and he asked me in what form… Fine Art? Commercial Art? Teaching? At the time, Graphic Design wasn’t as widely understood as it is today, Photoshopping was not a verb, and there weren’t millions of myspace pages with people “designing” stuff. To be honest, I don’t know if I had ever even heard the phrase “graphic design.” But I liked the idea of being able to make a career out of my artwork, so I said “Commercial.” He signed me up for the first two classes in the Graphic Design program. I was still considering studying video production, but I thought I would give this “commercial art” thing a try first.

When I got into the design classes, the Trains, Planes and Motorcycles feelings began to return, and I realized that I could make a life out of covering those pages with ink and letters. There was no turning back.