I’m self-educated… There was no college degree. Instead, I’ve always tended to find jobs that gave me the opportunity to learn and grow.
My self-education began very early with the “How to Draw” books by Walter Foster Studio that my mother bought me as a reward for good grades in elementary school. So my artistic training started really early. After high school graduation I spent a year at college and realized I would much rather be working. The fine art classes I was taking in school were not teaching me what I needed to know to be a graphic designer. Dad was a talented amateur photographer and we were project buddies, so I spend countless hours watching him develop his pictures and teach himself darkroom skills. So, by the time I got to college, I didn’t need training in dark room techniques. He taught me dark room skills that I used to get my first graphic design job…as well as building skills I learned helping him build a fiberglass sailboat. But, I think the most important thing he taught me was how to teach myself. How to find the knowledge I needed to grow.
I learned my craft by hard work in the printing and design industries – the old-fashioned way – and owe tons of gratitude to the mentors that took me under their wings, giving me opportunities to try new things and trusting me to help them succeed. Their success became my own.
My first creative job was for a department store in Jackson, TN doing visual merchandising for their downtown and mall locations. That is probably the most fun job I’ve ever had. The next step was prepping artwork for newspaper ads for a store in Louisville, KY. In Louisville, I also spent a year doing theatrical lighting and set design/building (for the Miami Ballet and the Louisville Opera company…oh…and a Santa house for a local mall) – projects that taught me to use power tools and to design 3-dimensionally.
But, a move to Atlanta, GA in 1975 is what really kick-started my graphic design career began. I took my very humble portfolio of sketches to a job interview at a small t-shirt printing company and managed to convince the owner to allow me to come in (without pay) every evening for a week after the store closed so that he could train me in the silk-screening processes and color separation techniques I needed to understand to be his art department. After coaching me for that week, he hired me on Saturday afternoon and over the next few years we built the business from a 3-person strip mall shop to a thriving, 40 person, textile printing factory with national clients in the liquor and soft drink industry.
When it was time to make a career move in the early ’80’s, I found an industrial designer, Cassandra Henning, (still in Atlanta) doing tradeshow and event design for Coca-Cola and, several other large companies, and over time, became her right hand. – lots of travel and really fun, larger than life, trade show/corporate event props and signage ensued – Every project was different and required learning new techniques and skills. First, we developed an idea and then we figured out how to make it a reality. The money was good and every project was exciting, challenging, and tons of fun. I worked on staff with her for four years and then rented my own little shop and did contract work for her studio and slowing built my own clients. What I found was that I love doing the work, but not the marketing aspects. I missed the built in security of working for a design studio. Eventually I decided to go for something more secure, so my next move was into a corporate job.
By this time, the graphic design industry had gone digital and I had spent a year or so doing marketing for my brother’s software company, learning Coreldraw which was the first graphic software that crossed over to the Windows PC platform. Adobe was strictly a Mac program at that time and corporate businesses were either DOS based or gingerly moving into the early Windows environment.
With that experience under my belt, I was lucky enough to land in the marketing department of one of Atlanta’s top architectural/interior design firms, doing proposal production and presentation design. That set up 15 years of working in that industry, in Atlanta and then in Nashville, TN where I mainly did architectural project rendering and report/presentation design. In February of 2009, I was one of the many seniors who go laid off during that very stressful period of economic crisis. Fortunately, I had just upgraded to a new computer and I plunged into finding freelance work. I knew I needed to up my web design skills and was able to take classes from a local computer training school in Nashville, with one of the Obama Administration’s programs to help workers who had lost their jobs. And that got me up to date enough to start doing web design.
While in Nashville, I was also renovating a small Nashville cottage…pretty much gutting it and bringing it up to date – doing most of the work myself. I have to admit that project (that little house) changed me more than anything I’ve ever done.
In 2015 I moved to Chattanooga – phase 1 of my retirement plan. I was working remotely doing web design and marketing collateral for a construction industry company, so that made the move really easy. After retiring in 2017 I put my focus onto loosening up and creating more from the heart and I’m finally settling in to what mediums I do and don’t prefer. What was a graphic design office has evolved into an ever changing creative space that accommodates both digital and physical mediums – metal, clay, stone, paper, fabric, acrylic paint, metallic mediums and, of course, digital art.
So I’m definitely a jack-of-all-trades – tending to shift from one medium to another depending on what the project requires – happiest working in a variety of mediums and styles and creating from a combination of my own and other peoples ideas. Creative collaboration is my favorite way to work!
– Alicia