In seventh grade, I quit playing the saxophone so my parents would buy me a computer.
Probably not the origin story you’d expect from someone who eventually made a career out of being creative. This was 1995. Windows 95 was the hot new thing, computers were becoming household fixtures, and I was fascinated by all of it. My parents agreed to the deal, but there were conditions. I had to sell my saxophone and learn how to build the computer myself.
Fair enough.
I had a friend who was also into computers, so we knew a thing or two about hardware. Which video boards worked with which motherboards, what kind of RAM to buy, what was garbage, and what we could afford. There were trips to Fry’s Electronics, a lot of figuring things out, and probably more troubleshooting than I care to remember.
But I loved it.
Not because I wanted to become a graphic designer. I didn’t even know what that meant yet.
I just wanted to see what this thing could do.
Fucking around and finding out
The computer became my playground.
I used it for word processing, chatting, research, and eventually games like StarCraft. Sometimes I had something specific I wanted to accomplish. Other times, I’d sit down just to see what I could figure out—the good and the bad (mIRC, Napster, Winamp, LimeWire… )
There wasn’t always a purpose and I think that’s an important distinction.
We tend to assign value to technology based on what it produces. Did you finish something? Did you learn something? Was the time productive?
But some of the most valuable things I’ve learned started with absolutely no intention of being productive.
Just curiosity.
I was learning how to navigate systems, solve problems, experiment with shit, and deal with things not working the way I expected. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was building a foundation for how I’d approach creative work decades later.
Then high school happened.
My dad worked at a company that was getting rid of some old laptops. He brought one home for me, and suddenly I had a computer that was mine.I was still chatting on AIM, playing around, and doing the usual computer stuff. But now I was also experimenting with recording music and “graphic design” before I even knew what graphic design was (shout out to Jasc Paint Shop Pro!).
Meanwhile, I picked up black-and-white film photography during the first semester of my junior year and stuck with it through graduation. I was spending time in the darkroom developing film and making prints while experimenting with digital creativity on my laptop. I guess I’ve been analog and digital even back in the analog days.
By senior year, I was beginning to understand what graphic design actually was.
Something clicked.
I had spent years figuring out what computers could do. Now I was starting to figure out what I could do with a computer.
The technology hadn’t necessarily changed my interests. It had given me another way to explore them.
And that curiosity eventually became my profession.
The part you don’t see
Fast-forward about 30 years.
I’m a graphic designer, art director, and photographer. Most of my professional work eventually ends up on a computer.
Adobe Illustrator is open on my Mac for probably 80% of my working day. I practically live in that application. Sometimes the only reason I quit it is because Photoshop or loaded Figma files need the extra resources.
From the outside, it probably looks like I spend my entire day staring at a screen, moving shapes around, adjusting typography, and making things look pretty.
And to be fair, there’s a lot of that.
But that’s only the visible part of the process.
I think about it like basketball.
When you watch Steph Curry play, you’re seeing the finished product. You see the shooting, the movement, the decisions he makes in a split second. What you don’t see is all the training that happened before he stepped onto the court.
The repetition. The conditioning. The film study. The countless hours spent understanding the game.
He’s not learning how to shoot during the game. He’s applying everything he’s spent years developing.
Creative work isn’t all that different. The computer is my court. It’s where a lot of the execution happens, but it’s not necessarily where the work begins.
My brain doesn’t clock out
I can be walking around San Francisco and see a terrible billboard.
And immediately, I’m redesigning it in my head.
I’m thinking about the typography, the hierarchy, the composition. Why did they choose that image? Why is the message so difficult to understand? How would I make it better?
Nobody asked me to do any of this.
I’m just walking down the street.
Or I’ll be listening to my wife, Elainea, describe a frustrating experience with something. Maybe it’s a website, an interaction, or a process that makes absolutely no sense.
While I’m listening, part of my brain is already trying to redesign the experience.
What’s causing the friction? Where’s the disconnect? How could this be easier?
That’s what designers do. We notice things, question things, and imagine alternatives.
Photography works the same way for me.
I don’t need a camera in my hand to think like a photographer.
I might see the way light hits a building and immediately start composing a photograph in my head.
What if I framed it from over there? What if I had a strobe? What would happen if I changed the white balance? What would this look like from a crane or jib?
Sometimes I see something and think, Damn, that would be a fire-ass photo. And I keep walking. I didn’t take a photograph. I didn’t produce anything. There’s no file to save, no image to post, nothing to show for that moment.
But I was still practicing photography. I was observing, composing, experimenting, and making decisions. Just without the camera.
Give the ideas somewhere to go
Not every idea deserves to become a project.
Some are terrible. Some are interesting for about five minutes. Some need a few years before they make any sense.
But when something sticks, I try to capture it.
That’s where my notebooks and sketchbooks come in.
I have plenty of them. They’re filled with fragments of ideas, rough sketches, thoughts, observations, and things that probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone else.
Sometimes it’s a composition. Sometimes it’s a phrase. Sometimes it’s a problem I haven’t figured out how to solve yet. The point isn’t to make something beautiful. It’s to give the thought somewhere to live.
I can return to it later, combine it with something else, or look at it with a completely different perspective.
That process matters to me because the moment I open Illustrator, I’m already entering an environment that encourages me to start making decisions.
Typefaces. Colors. Shapes. Alignment. Tools. Menus.
All useful things.
But sometimes I don’t need any of those things yet.
Sometimes I just need a pencil and a blank piece of paper.
Or a walk.
Or time to sit with an idea without feeling obligated to turn it into something.
It’s easy to confuse making progress in software with making progress on an idea.
They’re not always the same thing.
The tool isn’t the thinking
I love technology.
Clearly.
I’ve been fascinated by computers since I was a kid, and that fascination hasn’t gone away. If anything, the tools available to us today are more exciting than ever.
You can create things now that would’ve been unimaginable when I was assembling my first PC in 1995.
And I think that’s incredible.
I also think it’s worth remembering that having access to powerful tools doesn’t automatically make us more creative.
A pencil doesn’t make someone an illustrator. A camera doesn’t make someone a photographer. And knowing every shortcut in Illustrator doesn’t necessarily make someone a designer.
The tools give us possibilities.
What we do with those possibilities is something we have to develop ourselves.
That means experimenting. Making mistakes. Getting distracted by an interesting idea. Following a curiosity without knowing where it’ll lead.
But it also means learning to step away.
To sketch before clicking. To observe before photographing. To think through a problem before rushing to solve it.
I still do plenty of aimless experimenting. I’ll open an application just to try something, with no particular destination in mind.
That’s the same kid from 1995 showing up.
I don’t want to lose that part of myself.
But I’ve also learned that sometimes the best thing I can do for an idea is close the laptop.
The light is always on
…when there’s something dark that needs a little illuminating, I have somewhere to point that light.
I’ve been thinking about how much of creative work is invisible.
There’s the work people see, and then there’s everything that happens before it.
The observing. The questioning. The collecting. The wandering. The half-formed ideas that sit in the back of your mind until something finally connects.
I like to think of my brain as a light that’s always on.
I’m not always shining it at something.
Sometimes I’m just letting it illuminate the things around me, noticing details, collecting information, and making connections.
And when a problem comes along, when there’s something dark that needs a little illuminating, I have somewhere to point that light.
That’s when I open the computer and get to work.
But the thinking didn’t start when I launched Illustrator, Figma or Lightroom.
It started long before that.
Maybe while I was walking through the city. Maybe while I was sketching something in a notebook. Maybe while I was having a conversation, listening to music, or staring out the window.
Or maybe it started in seventh grade, when I traded a saxophone for a computer and had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
I was just curious.
Thirty years later, I still am. The tools have changed. The curiosity hasn’t.