So, here’s a story for you to read. My name is Zach by the way.
I remember several years ago my brother and I fought over who got to use the computer first. It was an old Gateway monitor and tower desktop—A real dinosaur fossil now in days. The whole sharing thing was not easy, and being the big brother after all, I shoved him off the chair and opened the Windows 1995 Paint program.
It was love at first click. Our eyes fixated on the screen that flickered pixels into our minds. (It was not this telepathic in real-life, but you get the point. The possibilities of the blank canvas were infinite and this new technology spawned something greater to come.)
It was the first “Photoshop-like” program that we would day after day spend hours creating digital art with. Suddenly, what was once something that we fought over, my brother and I began to bond with and not exactly the computer itself, but the art we made with it. The limited, default color palate, pencil, paint bucket, selection, and eraser tools could not match the consequential experience of drawing on the walls of our bedroom with crayon (unfortunately our chalkboard too) only to be later wiping the walls with peanut butter in what followed more tears than all the nagging my dad had to put up with earlier to actually have this clunky thing in our shared bedroom.
But, you see, it was this unimaginable-almost-never-thought-it-would-happen-best-day-ever event in my life as a child, that later opened my eyes as an adult into pursuing Graphic Design as a career and perhaps taking my “art” more seriously. I certainly could not starve!
Those several years passed, I excelled at art classes in high school—Thanks, mom—and design, computer courses—Thanks, Dad. I do not say that lightly. Many life and design decisions were made. The countless setbacks that once broke me but drastically steered me along the path followed. Now, I am finally going to be a graduate at La Roche University doing what I love most in the real world:
Being a kid again.
Designers and Artists that Inspire me:
Aaron Draplin (Vectors, man. Bitmaps just cannot keep up.)
Saul Bass (The Classic, Graphic Designer inspiration example)
Michael Bierut (I acquired a taste for Pentagram)
Jim Carrey (Yes, the Comedian, and his humor too.—Ah, there’s the punchline.)
