NWTC
2000–2001
Apple had just released the iMac — the translucent ones, the Bondi blue and the fruit colors, Steve Jobs’s triumphant return made physical. NWTC had a whole lab full of them, freshly installed, and they came loaded with the full Adobe suite. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, the works. Real copies, not the pirated versions I’d been scraping by with at home. Sitting down in front of one of those machines for the first time felt like trading a pocketknife for a full workshop.
I’d enrolled in the graphic design program right around the time I was quitting Humana. The timing wasn’t an accident — I could feel the next thing forming, even if I couldn’t name it yet. Humana was still paying for my classes, which I took for granted at the time and deeply appreciate now. They also paid for my marketing degree at Lakeland College, which held night classes in the same building Humana rented. I’d work my shift, walk down the hall, and become a student again. Convenient in a way that probably shouldn’t have been possible.
Mary Sue Fenner was my professor. Black dresses, wild crazy curly hair, and an endless wardrobe of high Doc Martens. She was also an artist and a welder, which I admired — the combination of fine craft and industrial muscle. I asked her once if NWTC had fine arts, already feeling the bug to do more than just commercial work. She looked at me and said, “This is as fine as it gets.” I loved that answer. It was true in ways she might not have intended. The distinction between fine art and design was already collapsing for me, and she was proof that it didn’t need to exist at all.
Quark XPress was a mystery at first. The whole paradigm of page layout — master pages, text boxes, the precision of print — was foreign to someone who’d been doing web work. But I learned it the way I learned everything: by sitting with it until it made sense, by breaking things and fixing them, by refusing to admit I was confused.
The lab had a T1 line. After years of dial-up, this was like going from a garden hose to a fire hydrant. I’d bring ZIP discs — the 250-megabyte ones that cost so much I felt like I was financing each ten-pack — and download MP3s during class. Not my proudest academic moment, but the bandwidth was right there. You could feel it. The internet at that speed was a different animal entirely.
I was also taking the web designer certificate — a one-year track. Between the graphic design program, the web certificate, and the marketing degree at Lakeland, I was stacking credentials like someone who didn’t know which door he wanted to open, so he was making keys for all of them. I had to stop some of the programs later. Life and money intervened, as they do. But NWTC planted the seed. It was the first time I sat in a room full of design tools and thought: this could be what I do. Not data entry. Not claims processing. This.
Mary Sue’s Doc Martens clicking down the hallway. The hum of twenty iMacs. The smell of new plastic and fresh ambition. That lab was where the graphic designer in me was born, even if it would take another seven years and a move to Minneapolis before he grew up.