Graphic Design

I really fell in love with graphic design when I was a kid, before it was done digitally. My mom worked at the newspaper, and that's where I spent most days after school.

Back then, if you wanted to create an ad for the local grocery store, let's say, you had to go into the big clip art filing cabinet and find the original print out of each image you'd need: pears, steak, milk, a 6-pack of beer ... Next you'd make a copy of that original, shrinking or enlarging it to fit the ad layout, and put the original safely back. You would carefully cut out the copy of your clip art, taking away as much of the white background as possible, then run it through a wax machine before pasting it onto your layout. For a fun read about those days, check out Heavy Metal Madness: Waxing Nostalgic Over Paste-Up.

The whole process took a while compared to what I can do today without getting out of my chair, but it was so rewarding to see the outcome, especially when the newspaper came out in print.

It's amazing what technology has done for us now. I really enjoy the process still, even if it is different. Anytime I get to make a client's vision a reality it's gratifying, as is getting to work creatively on my own.

I am an expert in Photoshop and InDesign. Some of the requests I've tackled make me laugh just thinking about them, like swapping heads on different photos. I've done a lot of touch-up work and photo restoration as well.

During my college years I took journalism courses and worked at the campus newspapers, The Guardsman and The Campanil. It was there that I rekindled my love for graphic design and began taking on newspaper layout and ad design.

I worked for several newspapers after college as a page designer/copyeditor, and section editor for a group of local San Diego coastal newspapers now owned by the San Diego Union-Tribune. In those roles I designed and laid out my sections of the paper.

As the belt tightened on the news industry and I wanted to get out of the city, I found myself back at the newspaper where my mom worked in the role of production manager and eventually operations manager. That's when I became responsible for creating most of the ads, laying out the bulk of the newspaper, and designing and laying out all the special publications the newspaper owned, including a phone book, bi-annual visitors guide, a bi-annual tourism map, and for a time, a tourism magazine.

Below is a sampling of my work.

Miscellaneous Recent Designs

Magazine Design & Local Guides
(click image to view entire publication)