The Hat Emporium

During my 15-year design career I have worn so many different hats that I often think of myself as being in the hat business.

The biggest hat of them all (big enough wear over all the others) is the hat labeled "Designer" which is also the only hat that I have never taken off for the past 15 years. Other hats I have worn under this one include "Print Designer", "Video Graphics Designer", "3D Animator" and "Multi-media Designer", to name a few. "Interactive Designer" is the one I have been wearing for the past 7 years to the exclusion of all others (except where I use them and the related experience as handy tools in the service of interactive design).

However there has always been a method to this madness and I have changed hats so many times for a very specific reason: I believe that "Design" is one. In fact, I strongly believe that "Design" is a singularity (or unity) which has been subdivided and multiplied by the ignorant and reduced by the specialist. I have always believed this and this belief underlies every professional, career-related step I take.

I decided early on to approach design not from one angle but to approach it simultaneously from all kinds of different angles in order to gain a surer and firmer understanding. Therefore, during the past 15 years, I changed hats often, trying all kinds of different techniques, approaches, visual languages and media on for size and then moving on and refreshing and re-inventing myself with the novelty of whatever came next in the progression. Also, I have always been very much aware of the fact that mastery of tool and technique (i.e. the technical side) is the hidden other face of good designers and for this reason did my utmost to master the technical side of things as well, however deep and involved. For this reason you will find that I am a graphic designer who has a solid grounding in such traditional techniques as airbrushing and type-setting but who can also hand-code HTML, hack PERL and JavaScript and who will discuss with glee the delights of a new printing press with a print-shop owner at the change of a hat.

However, having recently discovered that I have been doing interactive design for the past 7 years almost exclusively, I can now safely claim that this is the hat that fits me. Having for so long approached it from so many angles, I now feel that I have achieved a kind of "unity" in my mind concerning Design as Interactive Design encapsulates all that I have done and experienced in the past. I strongly believe that, with the rich and varied experiences I can now draw from and with the self-confidence these experiences bring, I will be unstoppable in the right job, at the right place, at the right time...