Yeah, the length of your last email got kinda epic on me there! But surprisingly, it was a fast read. And a very interesting story about how you worked with the live musicians, “orchestrating” them in the studio. That had to be as cool as sh*t! I bet every moment of it was exhilarating. What a great opportunity!

And thanks for laying out your educational background. I’ve been away from school for so long that It’s interesting to find out what kind of stuff is being taught these days, and at what level.

I went to college between 1987 and 1992. (Seems hard to believe it was so long ago. The memories are still fresh.) Memphis College of Art was a traditional art school - - mostly geared toward fine arts - - and although the school had been around since 1936, the design program there was probably no older than five years when I started. Around that time, design as a profession was just starting to get mainstream attention. Before then, graphic design had been one of those “professions of old” that people never really heard about. (Kinda like masonry or something.) Nowadays, when you say you’re a graphic designer, people don’t even turn a head, because it’s so common. But back then, most people still didn’t know what a graphic designer was or did - - including most of us who went into the field! More stories on that later...

(Although, I’m sure your dad has told you plenty of his own stories about the profession! My dad was not a designer, but he worked in printing. More about that too.)

MCA was a small school, and we had a couple of very good design professors. BIll Womack, rest his soul, was a prominent regional typographer, logo designer, and my first mentor. From him I learned that software, production techniques, graphic styles, and whatever kind of designer one happens to be are all secondary to learning how to THINK like a designer. That’s the skill that will take you furthest in your career. Designhood, as I call it...

In any case, even though I was taught the traditional ways of our “design forefathers” (using rubylity, wax, stat machines and copy cameras for production), I never actually got to use any of those skills in the real world. You see, the period of time when I was in school was right at the transition between those traditional design methods and the age of what was then being called “desktop publishing.” (Using software, particularly this atrocity called Pagemaker, for layout.)

For some context, Photoshop had just been created in 1987. When I started, our computer lab was full of Apple II’s and Mac Classics. By graduation, our fastest Mac was something called a Quadra 900. It had 4MB of memory, an 80MB hard drive, and got just 25MHz to the gallon! There was no such thing as web design, at the time. The Web didn’t come to my doorstep until around 1995, in the form of Geocities (precursor to today’s social media) and my then-employer’s dedicated T1 line. (A 1.5 Mbps connection, considered “riding in luxury” compared to a measly 14.4k dialup connection!)

I never thought I’d hear myself waxing on like some old guy. (“Back in my day, we just had Photoshop 1.0!”) But fact is, having watched (and been part of) this whole transformation from traditional ways to the technology we have now is pretty amazing, when I think about my humble art school beginnings in the 80s. Lots of great memories.

I’ll write more about my design background and how I ended up at ALSAC, in the next email.