Thirty years
of making the
real thing.

Range, and the patience to mentor one student at a time. Graphic design, typography, illustration, print, packaging, experiential work, product development, photo styling, interiors, fine art and ceramics are all live in my practice, so a student chasing an unusual direction is unlikely to land somewhere I cannot follow. Alongside that, nine years of professional coaching focused on helping people find and commit to a direction that is genuinely their own.

Scope, schedule and deadline are the parts of capstone that break students, and they are the parts I managed at scale. Multi season product calendars, market test timelines, and a 300 person program with dated gates. I teach scope as a design decision rather than as paperwork.

Thirty years of practice leaves you with a lot of phone numbers. Printers, fabricators, photographers, illustrators and studio owners, a good number of them local. I cannot promise that any of them will say yes, but when a student's project needs one I am glad to ask.

This course is my working life. I directed product across print, packaging, screen, motion and interaction for more than two decades, with real fluency in offset and flexographic printing, paper and substrate selection, color management, embellishment, dimensional formats and production feasibility. I know what a press sheet costs, why a die line fails, and how a concept changes the moment it meets a material.

Hallmark gift wrap, boxed cards, stationery, packaging and home office lines produced at national scale for Target, Walmart, Costco, Sam's Club, CVS, Walgreens, Dollar General and Barnes & Noble. Modular collection systems designed so one idea could run across paper, board, film, foil and retail fixture without falling apart.

I also directed production on the client side. Through Hallmark Business Connections I ran print on demand programs, custom mailings, digital touchpoints and online portals for corporate clients, where one system had to produce correctly across thousands of variable pieces. That is production thinking students rarely get to see.

I have worked alongside printers, paper representatives, photo studios and production partners for most of my career, several of them in and around Kansas City. If the department wants guests or a press visit, I am happy to make introductions and find out what is possible. Whether it happens, and on what terms, is the department's call rather than mine to promise.

Professional work that lived in space, not only on a page. Printed programs, retail and exhibition environments, catalogs, signage and wayfinding. One example is Hallmark’s Signature concept store in Santa Monica, where I led the concept, layout, merchandising and graphic program, and the product, the collateral, the signage and the path a person walks all had to tell one story.

Experiential retail and merchandising programs integrating graphics, product, storytelling, signage and physical space. Trade and retailer presentations where a team had to pitch a direction to people who could turn it down. That pitch discipline is exactly what the commencement program assignment asks students to survive.

I led creative direction for Hallmark Business Connections, an internal and external agency serving B2B, B2C and B2B2C clients including Edward Jones, State Farm, AT&T, Wells Fargo, Apple, Goodyear and GE Care Credit, plus wellness programs reaching more than twenty million participants. Every one was a real professional project with a client who could approve it or pass, which is the condition this course puts students in.

My instinct is to run it like a studio with a client, because that is what it is. Real deadlines tied to the printer's calendar, a named decision maker for every deliverable, and a written scope early in the term. That said, this course already has a shape and a chair who knows it far better than I do, so I would want to understand how it has run before suggesting anything.

The relationship between type and image is the whole craft of the category I came from. A greeting card is a two second argument between a word and a picture, made ninety million times. I have art directed illustrators, photographers, letterers and surface designers, and I draw and paint daily in my own practice, so I can teach the image side from inside it rather than only as a critic of it.

I led Sunrise Greetings, a line built entirely on independent artists from around the world, which meant briefing and art directing painters, letterers and illustrators whose hands were not mine. Teaching a student to write a brief for an image maker, and then to respond honestly to work that is not what they pictured, is half of what this course is really about.

This one continues from the fall, so I would want to see that work before week one. The spring should build on what students already own rather than quietly restart them.

Complex typographic systems across media is a problem I solved commercially for twenty four years. A style range had to hold together across a card face, a gift bag, a boxed set lid, a shelf sign, a catalog page and a website, in hand lettering and in type, at six inches and at six feet. That is a typographic system with real consequences, and it fails loudly when the hierarchy is soft.

I have written the brand standards, not only worked inside them. Pattern libraries, logo usage, tone limits, and the pages that say what you may never do, documented so that people I would never meet could apply the system correctly at any scale. Students almost never see the rulebook side of typography, and it is where a system either holds or quietly falls apart.