Thirty years
of making the
real thing.

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 when 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 standing relationships with printers, paper representatives, photo studios and production partners in and around Kansas City. Arranging the visits this course calls for is a phone call, not a search.

Two professional projects, one printed program and one full exhibition with catalog, website, social, signage and wayfinding, is a description of work I have shipped. I led the concept, layout, merchandising and graphic program for Hallmark's Signature concept store in Santa Monica, where the product, the printed 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 kill it. 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 kill it, which is exactly the condition this course puts students in.

Like a studio with a client, because it is one. Real deadlines tied to the printer's calendar, a named decision maker for every deliverable, and a written scope the class signs in week two. Students learn that exhibition design is ninety percent sequencing and ten percent typography, and that a catalog going to press does not care how anyone feels on Tuesday.

Range and the ability to mentor one student at a time. Graphic design, typography, illustration, print, packaging, experiential, 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 their own direction.

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 transformation program with dated gates. I teach scope as a design decision, not as paperwork.

A working network of printers, fabricators, photographers, illustrators, paper reps and studio owners in Kansas City and beyond, built over thirty years and genuinely open to students.

Complex typographic systems across media is the 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 lived on both sides of that balance. Premium stationery work demanded millimeter level refinement, correct optical alignment, foil registration and letter fit. Trend and expressive work demanded mark making, hand lettering and a willingness to break the grid in public. Students need both, and they need to know which one a given problem is asking for.

I have written the brand standards, not only worked inside them. Pattern libraries, logo usage, tone limits, the do and the 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.

A course without inherited baggage is an opportunity, and I would build it with the department chair rather than around them. I am comfortable writing project sheets, sourcing specimens and structuring critique from scratch, and equally comfortable being told the department wants it to go a different direction.

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 Type + Image is really about.

Not because the fit is weaker. It is ranked fifth because the other four courses draw on more of what is unusual about my background. If the department needs this section covered, I would take it happily, and sophomores are frankly the year where a professional practitioner can change the most trajectories.

I would want to see the fall term work before week one so the spring builds on what students already own rather than restarting them.