Growing up, my dad worked in graphic design and my mom in advertising. My parents always encouraged my siblings and I to be as creative as possible, and when I was young and bored my dad would give me old copies of Juxtapoz and Communication Arts to read. Good design was something that was always pointed out to me, even in passing. My family would go out to dinner and my dad would pick up a menu and start talking to me about the colors and type. As I got older, good design became something I wanted to create. When I was in high school, I interned with our digital communications department and started doing designs for school events. When I started freshman year at Syracuse, it stood out as the obvious choice for me to be able to turn my passion into a career. For me, good design is about making a message easy to understand and pleasing to the eye. No matter how many things I can learn how to do on Illustrator or Photoshop, it boils down to one question: can a viewer comprehend what I’m saying? That’s what is so intriguing and exciting to me about design – taking every wild idea that might pop into my head and putting it in line with one key idea, and making it look good while it does its job.
