I live in Lex­ing­ton, Min­neso­ta with my wife of 20+ years and our four chil­dren, a dog, and three cats.

My love of graph­ic design had its begin­ning when I was a cashier for Office­Max in ‘97.

When Office­Max cre­at­ed the Copy­Max seg­ment of their stores, I was cho­sen to tran­si­tion to the new depart­ment, due to my love of work­ing with the var­i­ous copy and print­ing equip­ment. With very lit­tle train­ing avail­able to new Copy­Max Asso­ciates, and a brand new Mac com­put­er in the store (full of design soft­ware) I bought my first train­ing book from the book­store next door and taught myself QuarkX­press 3.11 dur­ing my shift.

In the years to fol­low, I soaked up all the infor­ma­tion I could on var­i­ous com­put­er pro­grams and the best ways to use them.

But it wasn’t until the Spring of 2001 when a broth­er-in-law (who was a graph­ic design­er him­self) got me a job as a desk­top spe­cial­ist at an Alpha­Graph­ics print shop.

Like an appren­tice to a mas­ter, I learned every­thing I could about graph­ic design and the print indus­try from my broth­er-in-law (Aaron), in a way that I wouldn’t learn in a school…on the job, with real clients, real prob­lems and I learned real solutions.

I now run my own free­lance pho­to stu­dio & design com­pa­ny out of my home, while work­ing the third shift as a Senior Enhanced Desk­top Spe­cial­ist. My goal is to one day be able to work from home exclusively.

With over 16 years of graph­ic design and cre­ativ­i­ty flow­ing through my veins, I love being able to pro­vide solu­tions to clients’ design needs. As well as learn­ing new tech­nolo­gies to pro­vide even more solu­tions to them. In the past few years I’ve been able to learn pro­grams such as Adobe Live­Cy­cle, 508 Acces­si­bil­i­ty stan­dards, and more.