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Since the time I took up studying graphic arts, at sixteen, I was very lucky with teachers. In the high school Visual Communication program, our great instructor and illustrator showed us the work of Burn Hogarth and CF Payne. CF was the last of the great traditional illustrators still getting covers on Time and the like. Years later I got to meet him through a talk he gave at one of the classes I was taking. He told a small group of us, that one day he told his wife, if you take me away from my work I will go, but I will hate you for it. If you allow me to perfect my skill it will work out for both of us. She agreed, apparently he pretty much lived at his drafting table in the basement. That was perhaps the most brutally honest thing an educator ever said, I really took it to heart somehow.

Anyway back to being sixteen, and starting out. My aunt and godmother, hearing of my interest, and herself being a professional typesetter, gave me a copy of Armin Hoffman's Design Manual, and an ancient drafting table to set it on. I became an advocate of Swiss Modernism. It was a great style for handling commercial jobs quickly and effectively, looking good the whole time.

When I was studying design at the College for Creative Studies we had to study deconstructivsm, which at the was breaking all the rules of modernism, Emigré and rougher. I became a deconstrivist. David Carson came and gave us a workshop, at which I asked him some stupid fan boy questions. His first book said something about painting with letters.

Afterward I got married and burnt out on corporate design jobs where committees had too many panelists that wanted a piece of a project. I turned to bar-tending and took a lot of photographs.

But before that I took some classes in the LYIT animation department. An great proffesor on the faculty at that time was a deconstructivist typographer who had been an actual student of Armin Hoffman. Apparently Armin was quite gruff as a teacher.