Graphic Design

After college my goal was to become a full-time graphic designer, I believed that this was going to be the path to great things . . . well great things maybe not but since the September of 1998 I have been fortunate enough to work full-time in the graphic design field (with a 7 month stint of unemployment back in 2003-2004). I've worked on a lot of projects including menu's, newspaper ad's, wine list, table tents, posters, invitations, wedding programs, book design, dust jacket design and many other design related projects.

I  spent a summer in college working for the Slidell Sentry News which was an interesting start and I got a quick lesson in how things in the real world work . . . lot's of ad's to be done . . . very little time to get them done . . . go . . . repeat. After college I started working for what was called Magnolia Marketing Company in New Orleans, Louisiana and it was really a fun place to work (when the boss wasn't around) and had plenty of off the record benefits like free meals and concert tickets. The work load there was pretty heavy and everything needed to be done today. I did tons of wine list, posters, menus and table tents for this company and it was really cool to see my work in restaurants all over the city.

At two different times I worked for www.customweddingprograms.com which provided wedding programs for customers all around the country. It was a fun job especially since I got to do it from home and dealing with people who are about to get married is pretty insane . . . they have no idea what they want or how to spell anyone's name correctly.

After getting laid off from Magnolia Marketing Company it took seven months to find a temp position at The Daily Star in Hammond, Louisiana, The job was actually pretty fun for two months, everyone loved me there and although it was a lot of daily newspaper ads and grocery store ads it was fun. The manager wanted to hire me full-time but there was an issue with the temp-agency I was working through and they wanted a huge buyout of my contract and it didn't work out. Fortunately about a week or so after this job ended I got my current job at Pelican Publishing Company in Gretna, Louisiana. I worked from 2004 to 2013 as a typesetter (an old word for graphic designer) doing book layout and design. Lot's of pages of text and photo's . . . sometimes this became boring but I've learned a ton about how to make a book work, about the software we use and how to overcome many different problems. In August of 2013 I got promoted to Art Director at Pelican Publishing Company and this involves designing the covers and dust jackets of books, working on ad's and finding artist to illustrate out children's books. It is a really good feeling to walk into a book store and seeing a book cover that I designed.

As for the future I'm not sure if I'll stay where I am or if I will move on to something else. I've worked in a lot of different places in the graphic design field none of which were perfect but I can not think of anything else that I want to do. I don't know if I will be at Pelican for the rest of my career or not but I do want to do better work and more things that I can be proud of.