My first paying design project was all the way back in the summer of 1996. Business cards for a local hairdresser.

Octopus Red has been in business nearly 13 years. I’ve been a working commerical artist (fancy talk for graphic designer) for 26 years. I am every bit as passionate and excited about my craft today, as I was when I started. My portfolio is my most prized worldy possession.

I produce somewhere between 250 and 300 creative projects of every shape and size each year. A 50 or 60 hour work week is not unusual, and in many cases, at the end of each week I can be found at my keyboard doing personal projects. Fun designs. Maybe I saw a colour scheme on a Bulgarian magazine cover that made me think, huh, I can do something with those colours. Or, a menu layout from a Latvian bakery that made me think of a late 50s / early 60s airline ad, or world’s fair promotion, that got me excited about a unique typeface treatment to try for an indigenous music festival.

A fluid, random, non-linear approach to ingesting visual media. Opening myself up to different cultures, different eras, and different eras of different cultures, to inform (in whole, or in part) the creative direction. I try to be as porous as possible. The core of my creative engine is as much about input as it is output.