Design management career. I never envisioned those three words together until I hit 40 years old. It happened by chance and circumstance.

My first passion was words. As a teenager, I was reading Kafka, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Zola. I wanted to be a novelist.

Or so I thought. In hindsight, I simply always loved making stuff, whatever that may be--free-writing with my babysitter, photocopying a zine, hacking my Apple IIe, shooting abstract photos, designing an album cover for a progressive rock boy band, or staging off-the-wall straight-edge violin-plus-poetry performance art, influenced by the works of Laurie Anderson and John Cale.

In college, I studied literature, but my bias for making over reading and doing over thinking led me to become Editor in Chief of the student newspaper in my junior year. I took the job more seriously than my studies. Accustomed to excellent grades, I barely squeezed out an American D (a German 4) in a literature class I loved with my favorite professor, in order to put the bulk of my energy into my obsession of publishing provocative ideas, building a team, and growing the scope, quality, and impact of our publication, the Earlham Word.

The formative transformation, though, came next. I realized that what I found most fun was layout. So in my senior year I focused on redesigning the paper, curating artwork, and laying out the articles (I also swung back to a work-life balance that I look back to as ideal today--achieving good grades, political activism, and meaningful friendships).

This self-taught design work and my acquired skills in Quark XPress landed me a job after graduation at Seattle Weekly. I became a designer.