The Catch-Up
2008–2012
When the Patterson job came through, it didn’t feel earned. It felt granted.
The job at Patterson was a big deal to me, because I finally felt like a graphic designer. What I’d wanted to be for years. But I knew — and this is hard to admit — that I had no business being there.
I’d spent my studio art school years immersed in grungy, textured, gritty things. Paintings and sculptures and printmaking. Punk life. I’d actively resisted clean design in favor of lustful, angsty art — the kind with torn edges and ink under your fingernails and nobody asking about brand guidelines. I’d ignored most digital things on principle. And now I was the Art Director for Interactive at a company that expected me to know what I was doing.
I had to flip a switch. Overnight.
Lynda.com bootlegs were my best friend. I watched everything — After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver — anything I could get my hands on. I’d find new educational vendors online, figure out ways to watch tutorials at work during lunch, watch more at home at night. On Saturdays I’d walk down to the Dunn Brothers, get a huge marshmallow Rice Krispies treat and an iced caramel mocha, and spend the morning working through Flash programming exercises. It’s better when other people are around, even strangers — the café noise, the Saturday energy, the sense that you’re not the only one trying to get somewhere.
Leo Laporte and design podcasts played while I worked, as if proximity to the conversation might accelerate my understanding. JavaScript books sat just slightly out of reach — I forced myself through them anyway.
It wasn’t just the technical learning of the Adobe programs. It was styles. Trends. Designers and their histories. Swiss grid systems. The International Typographic Style. I absorbed it all. The stuff that studio art school had deemed uncool, I was now devouring with the same intensity I’d once reserved for etching and lithography.
Flash was huge back then, so I made sure I watched every resource on it. ActionScript tutorials, animation principles, interactive design patterns. As director of digital, I leaned hard into that world, and it was a glorious time of the web — right before and right after HTML5 changed everything. Right after the iPhone was released and nobody knew yet that it would kill Flash and reshape the entire industry. We were all reinventing ourselves. Slicing PSDs, breaking things, learning to fix them again.
The web felt alive — unstable, transitional. CSS was becoming something more expressive. There was no single correct way to do things yet, which meant everything felt possible and provisional at the same time. I was trying to catch a moving target.
When I’d worked at NetFX Studios, a little webshop in Green Bay, it was just bevels and non-smart edits in Photoshop to create 640-by-380-pixel web interfaces. This was something else entirely — going to the top floors of skyscrapers, Adobe-sponsored after-parties at FlashBelt, talking to people who made the tools I was teaching myself. The distance between those two worlds was the distance I was trying to close inside myself.
I can still picture those nights. The glow of my monitor. Tycho playing through my headphones. Snow piling up outside the window. Me trying to make something beautiful in code or on paper. I didn’t know which one I was yet — a designer pretending to be an artist, or an artist pretending to be a designer. But I was learning. Every day. Every tutorial. Every late night.
The tutorials didn’t stop when I left Patterson. They became my life for the next eighteen years. Always searching for new knowledge, new techniques, new ways of seeing. I think my growth mindset cemented here — not in college, where I’d been protected by the structure of school, but in Minneapolis, where I had to prove I belonged. The stakes were real. I had kids counting on me. I had a salary for the first time. I couldn’t afford to be behind.
I was always feeling behind.
But every day I knew a little more than the day before. And that was enough to keep going.