My father ran construction sites in New York City. General superintendent for general contractors: Bovis, Gotham, Engel Burman. Skyscraper-scale job sites where fifty trades were working their piece at the same time, electricians and plumbers and ironworkers and glaziers, and every one of them was good at what they did but none of them were responsible for how it all came together. My father was.

I grew up on those sites, and before I knew anything about design or code or information architecture, I understood something about structure: it’s either right or it’s not, and you can always tell, and the difference is usually in the details and the planning.

Getting direction

I was at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn with no plan and a sketchbook. Judith Wilde was teaching there, and she looked at what I was doing and pointed me toward graphic design. She rearranged my schedule, put me in specific classes, and spent two years showing me where to aim. Then she introduced me to her husband Richard Wilde at the School of Visual Arts.

Richard set my schedule for my first year at SVA while I got my feet under me, and then I started to find direction from that first batch of teachers and could choose my own. James Victore, Kevin O’Callaghan, faculty who all reinforced the same thing: thinking before making. Victore I got close to. I spent time at his studio in Beacon working with him directly, and what I got from him was to be bravely and fiercely myself. That sounds simple. It took years to actually do.

I was traditionally and analog trained. I spent my time at SVA making physical things out of design: books, posters, screenprints. Bold stuff, functional stuff, things you could hold in your hands that also had real structure underneath them.

Color separation

After SVA I went into publishing. A short stint at Random House, then Sterling Publishing doing catalogs: hundreds of pages of titles, prices, category breaks, seasonal lists. I didn’t know the thing I was doing was called information architecture. I just knew that a catalog has to be navigated, not read, and that the structure of how you move through hundreds of pages of content is the whole problem.

Then I left publishing and got the job at USA Tees in Brooklyn, doing art department and production: color separation, technique, prepress. After that, Atlas Embroidery in Fort Lauderdale.

Screenprinting is where the way I think really locked in. Separation means you never work on the image, you work on a channel. One color at a time, decomposing a whole into discrete layers that reconstruct it when they register. You’re making decisions about how colors interact when they overprint, opacity and trapping and bleed, and none of that is visible yet. The whole composition exists only in your head while you’re building a single plate.

When I got into code I saw the same thing. HTML is the bones, JavaScript is the muscles, CSS is the outfit. Separation of concerns. It’s not one to one with screenprinting but the abstraction is the same, and that’s how I’ve worked ever since. Every SCSS cascade, every function chain, every stage in a multi-agent workflow. You’re working on a channel and the whole only exists when the layers register.

Twelve years

I was back in New York, and I had a project support position at Metis Associates. When that ended, my friend Bryan, who I knew through the music scene we both hung out in, found out I was looking for work and asked what I did. I told him, not knowing he was a software engineer. He asked for my resume and gave it to his boss, and I got a meeting the next week. I think they heard “web guy” and figured I’d be useful.

That was Cluen Corporation. I became the Principal Architect on the Encore platform, an enterprise recruiting engine. Twelve years. Long enough to see three major technology shifts come and go, and long enough to learn that the hard part of building something is keeping it alive while everything around it changes.

I made the case for moving the platform to the browser when desktop was still the default, and then I built it: modular JS framework, full SCSS design system, information architecture for a platform that serves large organizations doing high-volume recruiting. The platform never stopped running while I rebuilt the layer it ran on. And honestly a lot of my job after that is fighting past decisions, lazily copy-pasted code blocks, and other developers not respecting the structure and design system. The initial build is not the real work. The maintenance is.

Why I built this

I grew up around people who built things with their hands and thought carefully about how they did it, and I think that combination is the thing I keep coming back to. Doing sophisticated work without performing sophistication. Titles like “multidisciplinary maker” and “creative systems thinker” sound pretentious to me. I’d rather show the work and let it speak.

For the first time, I think in my life, I’m just doing the work that feels correct without trying to figure out a business model first. I’ve been waiting for a seat at a table that I don’t need to be at. I can build my own table, so that’s what this is. And the blog is what I’m learning along the way.