Thirty-three years ago I opened Adobe Illustrator for the first time at University of Georgia’s graphic design department’s Macintosh computer lab. We were tasked with designing our logo in Professor Ronald Arnholm’s Typography course. I designed my Vinson logo — seen above in my website’s masthead — in ten minutes. I saw it in my mind and then began typing in v-i-n on top and s-o-n on the bottom. What I loved was the immediate nod to the yin and yang with the dot over the lowercase letter i and the inner dot of the letter o. I was naturally drawn to the Futura font family for its sans serif, geometric qualities. It was the first font choice I made. Futura was designed by Paul Renner in 1927. It was released by Bauersche Gießerei foundry in Germany, founded in 1837. My logo has two dots and seven pieces, Futura was born in 1927, and The Bat-Man arrived in Detective Comics issue number 27. That’s my lucky number. My universal number is 3. 3 to the 3rd power is 27. Call it fate, I guess, or just three cool synchronicities.
“Professor Arnholm stopped by to check in on my logo’s progress. Quite calmly he leaned in and observed my work. He paused and then said, “that mark will last a long time.” Longevity is one of the primary goals of graphic design communication. It’s also the toughest one to accomplish.
I love that Futura was released in 1927. As most of my colleagues know is that twenty-seven is my lucky number. It’s also the Detective Comics issue number that introduced us to ‘The Bat-Man’ in 1939. You could say that DC is in my blood. Heck, my boss at TWC’s last name was Booth…get it? Phone booth…Superman?
My teammates at The Weather Channel gifted me a special Superman poster scribbled in silver with best wishes when I left to join Artifact Design. My daughter calls me Batman. Edgar Allan Poe and I are birthday twins, and his creation of the Detective genre directly influenced Batman.
In order to get buy in from The Weather Channel Engineering Department I knew I needed to not speak, but understand their language. When we, as artists, used the twc Quantel PaintBoxes we didn’t have to really understand anything about the minutae of broadcast terminology such as fields, 3:2 pulldown, etc.
Luckily a little startup came along called Toolfarm in San Francisco at just the right moment in 1999. They sold After Effects plug-ins and desktop creative software for Macintosh like Commotion. They were our one stop shop for everything we needed to transition from two Quantel PaintBoxes and two Discreet Flints to our own desktop workstations.
However, TWC Engineering got involved and we ended up building out the hardware with a local Atlanta reseller, Video Central. They provided two Blue and White PowerMac G3s each equipped with a Targa 2000 SDX video I/O card, a 144GB Rorke Data striped array, and ICE accelerator cards for After Effects. The systems always ran far too hot with those two double layered PCI cards so we had to keep the side doors open in order not to overheat. Also the video arrays were highly unstable which was more than likely an issue with the ATTO cards.
One little set of VHS tapes caught my eye, ‘Masters of Visual Effects’ training videos with industry pros like Ron Brinkman who literally wrote the book on digital compositing, and co-founded Nothing Real that brought us the compositing and effects software Shake. Once I studied up on the terminology and put it into action I caught the eye of the Engineering department head who appeared pleased.
My plan had worked, and eventually I found a way to unite multiple departments at TWC, including our Design Group, Facilities, Engineering, and even as far up the food chain as the VP of Production. Our little art department had grown, and our skillsets along with it. I was my Design Director’s right hand man and leader of the Plugged-In workgroup. We researched and evaluated all software and hardware for each year’s capital and monthly expenditures.”
As students we got to ride the first wave of what would soon become the desktop revolution takeover in the world of print. But these were just the first few baby steps. Keep in mind that this was back in the early to mid-90s when Photoshop didn’t even have layers yet. They weren’t introduced until version 3. I only used 2% of Illustrator’s capabilities primarily to design iconography and logotypes. I began with napkin sketches and then hopped into Illustrator laying down basic shapes. Then I would test drive different fonts looking for just the right personality for the mark’s identity. Next I would outline the fonts and take them into the sculpting phase with the pen tool. I used Pathfinder extensively for cleanup.
Once I got out of college there was another desktop revolution coming hard and fast. Compositing and visual effects, video and film, would be forever changed moving the primary tools from $100,000+ black box Quantel and SGI workstations to small, adept Rebel Mac units popping up everywhere. After spending three years with our shared PaintBox and Discreet Logic Flint I made the first call of many to Toolfarm in San Francisco. We blazed the trail even ahead of our own engineers knowing full well that the future was moving in a seismic shift to off-the-shelf solutions loaded up on modest Macintoshes. We modeled our own band of rebels based on Industrial Light and Magic’s own creative desktop gear.
In order to get our engineers on board with our radical plans my first step was solving the import and export of Digi-Beta footage to and from the Macs. We also needed true engineer-grade monitoring. It didn’t take long to find the solution. One afternoon, after wrapping up a session on the Flint for a brand redesign with Pittard Sullivan, I called Grant Petty at Digital Voodoo in Victoria, Australia. I inquired about his D1 Desktop for After Effects running on Apple’s Macintoshes. We chatted it up for half an hour. Luckily I didn’t get the phone bill. :) A year or two passed when Grant left the company he founded to start Blackmagic Design that has redefined the entire broadcast and post production industry. I used their DeckLink hardware for video monitoring and input in my homegrown studio. I was also one of their first customer features on their website.
When we built the first two Mac-daddy workstations that cost in total far less than the PaintBox or Flint, we equipped them with hardware acceleration PCI boards to speed up rendering in After Effects and Commotion. The company was called ICE, and I was their poster child in a half dozen magazines and a featured artist on their demo reel. I remember the day they sent me a rather pricey gift for my contributions to their marketing campaigns. A huge box arrived early one day with my name on it. I excitedly opened it up revealing my own ICE card and all of the ICE software. My boss had no problem with me taking their gift home to my studio. As time went on it became quite clear that eventually all twelve broadcast designers needed access to the same powerful hardware and software gear. Then something happened out of left field. I was invited to have breakfast with the folks at ICE.
I was being actively recruited by the folks at Integrated Computing Engines (ICE) to join their team as a traveling demo artist. I couldn’t resist the opportunity that not only doubled my salary at The Weather Channel, but gave me freedom to continue running my own creative studio. Next I was approached by Digital Voodoo who inquired if I would be interested in being their worldwide support specialist. It was a part time gig for just a few hours a week so I signed on for eighteen months. I helped out primarily for phone support and also assisted at trade shows. I met my future business partner, Chris, at Outpost Pictures when he called the support number one afternoon and I answered. He said it was pretty clear that he knew a bit more than I did. Funny guy.
A few years passed and before I knew it I was consulting for Toolfarm while running my own animation and design home studio. They connected me with numerous vendors and clients including Zax Dow, Mike Skibra, Ted and Shemane Nugent, the kind folks at RealViz and Adobe. I ended up going on the road with both RealViz once at the University of Seattle, WA and Adobe numerous times at NAB, Siggraph, and at Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia, where I was a student from 1991–1993 for all of my foundation courses. After my showing off my reel and running through the After Effects presentation I met two professors that gave me quite a compliment. They asked if I would like to become a professor at SCAD. I don’t have a Masters degree, but they said no worries, and that I could get it while a was teaching.
I ended up turning down SCAD, but I did make quite a few connections in Atlanta with folks like Sterling Ledet who gave me numerous opportunities to teach After Effects, DVD Studio Pro, and Final Cut Pro to classes ranging from 3–5 and up to a dozen students at a time as was the case for CNN’s creative group. I enjoyed teaching so much that I built out customized training courses for folks at Georgia Pacific Television, the video production team at Philips Arena, New England Sports Network, The Weather Channel, The Weather Channel Latin America, and the wife of Ted Nugent, among others.
Adobe’s ecosystem was always at the heart of everything I taught. However, when Apple bought a video editing program from MacroMedia that became Final Cut Pro, all bets were off with Premiere. Due to a highly restrained workflow and instabilities we switches to Final Cut Pro 1.2.5 just about a month after we had first implemented those two Blue and White PowerMac G3s.