CREATIVE GENUS – My Career Path From Crayons to Kerning

My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Berg, taught me that I was an artist.

Okay, sure, teachers—at least the good ones—do that all the time; every kid should feel special. But with Miss Berg it was different. When I produced one of my little masterpieces—usually rather dense compositions of geometric shapes and patterns using those luscious, off-color crayons like blue-green, mahogany and Indian red—she would not just encourage me, she’d point to my work as an example for other kids whose design muse evidently wasn’t speaking to them.

            

I guess that’s all it takes to plant the seeds of a human being’s self-actualization. Sure enough, even though I’d done nothing consciously to hone that dull blade of creativity, by the time I got to college, it just seemed obvious that I’d major in Art. (For some odd reason, my boys military high school had offered no art program. The powers that be must have considered art unmanly—so we had mandatory football instead. Seriously.)

PHYSICS, SCHMYSICS
As college graduation—and the Vietnam War—loomed, I had to figure out a way to continue my education and thus earn a deferment from the draft. It had to be a field that would not only put to use my nascent artistic talents, but lead to an honorable, paying career. So I headed to architecture school.

The creative aspects of architecture tapped into that designer mentality first encouraged by Miss Berg. It seemed a perfectly logical branching out from just two-dimensional shape and crayon-rendered color to three dimensions. Turns out I was pretty good at visualizing space, stacking it, dividing it and making those divisions flow one to the next.

I also loved the creative process: analyzing the requirements of a project, sketching concepts, giving and getting feedback from classmates and faculty “crits,” drafting, modeling… I even enjoyed the bleary-eyed rigor of all-nighters spent in the studio, exchanging ideas and encouragement with my fellow designers.

Unfortunately, along with the third dimension, architecture demanded that I not only design buildings, but make sure they’d stand up when built. And for that, the barely-passing physics and calculus grades I’d eked out in college proved lacking. So I had to take both courses all over again and be ready to apply that knowledge to the second-year architecture class that came closest to engineering: Building Technology.

          

Building Technology confirmed my love of designing habitable spaces, but sort of backwards. It raised the question that would, in the end, drive me out of architecture as a career: Why the hell can’t I simply design beautiful structures and let someone else— namely an engineer— make sure they won’t collapse under their own weight?

GOODBYE, THIRD DIMENSION  
One of our class projects—this being the height of the early-70s social awareness movement—was setting up a community design center in the heart of St. Paul’s historically-Black Selby-Dale neighborhood. Though, obviously, the focus of our little shop was supposed to be architectural services and advice, a few of our clients brought graphic design challenges along with their architecture ones.

I found myself drawn to those projects: logos, letterheads, brochures, signage. I enjoyed the work and met with some success.

Examples of 70's-style graphic design

It was at this time—struggling through the third year of my five-year bachelor-of-architecture program—that I noticed a job posting on the school’s bulletin board. The Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC) was looking for a graphic designer. I was ready for a course adjustment, and the required skills seemed to match my abilities. So I interviewed, was hired and quit architecture school.

I was thrilled to have a real job, getting paid quite well to do something I enjoyed—and no physics required. I designed bus schedules, signage, a comprehensive map of the Twin Cities transit system, and even some advertising materials. As I’d hoped, I was able to apply much of what I’d learned in architecture school about the design process to my work with graphics.

(Much later, when asked by a prospective client how I got from architecture school to graphic design, I explained I’d simply abandoned the third dimension.)

      
THE NEW ENGLAND YEARS
Once that door was open to a career in graphic design, I ventured through it and never looked back. The MTC job— and marriage— led to a move to New England, and other opportunities: as an art teacher, as an ad rep and layout artist for a Vermont newspaper, as a designer with an ad agency in New Hampshire, and then as a free lancer.

        

The free lance thing really appealed to me. This despite the constant pressure of meeting client expectations and wondering where my next gig would come from. And it led to my including copy writing among my services. (Clients were paying me a lot of money to design beautiful layouts, but the copy they were handing me was quite poor—embarrassing really. I knew I could do better.)

With a young family to support, I was barely scratching out a living. And, as beautiful as those Southern Vermont environs were, my spirit just felt out of sync with them. So, when an opportunity came up to work for a top-notch New-York-based fundraising consulting firm—in their Minnesota office, no less—I jumped at the chance, and we moved to Minneapolis.

FIRST SHINGLE
For an interim job it turned out to be by far my most challenging and rewarding work to date. Armed with my still-evolving copy-writing skills and some good instincts for this type of work, I designed, wrote and produced high-end print materials to support multi-million-dollar capital and endowment fundraising campaigns—for the likes of the Cleveland Zoo, the Kansas City Philharmonic, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New York City Ballet company.

With that experience—and with those glitzy pieces done for impressive clients in my portfolio—I was able to return to free-lance work, continuing with the emphasis on fundraising.

I hung out my first shingle in 1980. At first, Willius Marketing Communications shared office/studio space in downtown Minneapolis with a small advertising agency. For the next 30 years, now in my own office/studio space, I proceeded to build a respectable client list of my own, comprising businesses, most of the private schools in the Twin Cities Metro (and a few beyond), several entities at the University of Minnesota, and a wide range of other non-profits.

            

           

      

REWARDS
Though I created many gorgeous brochures and coordinated suites of print materials, my favorite projects involved designing corporate and organizational identities—logos, slogans and the like. That, it seemed to me, was pure design and word-smithing—creativity distilled to its essence.

        

There was a very fulfilling back story to many of these assignments. In the course of researching a client, the tale they had to tell, and their positioning in their marketplace, I had to look for those characteristics—usually abstract features like character, spirit or some unique personal or historical narrative—which truly set them apart.

Occasionally, one of these efforts would result in the organization’s very first serious consideration of what and who it was. As a result, some developed statements of mission and values for the first time.

I continued on this professional path for the next three decades, earning a solid, though mostly low-profile, reputation in my field. I won some recognition, including awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Center for the Advancement and Support of Education and a couple of paper manufacturers, and inclusion in two “best of” design compendiums.

The greatest rewards of my career, though, were the long-lasting relationships forged with clients—the best kind. And, of course, the work, the deep satisfaction of creating something beautiful and compelling, something that helped people and organizations I believed in to be successful.

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So, Miss Berg, even though you’ve quite likely passed on to the great classroom in the sky, I want to thank you. You, along with my parents and a few others who could see my potential, set me on a path I’d follow happily for the rest of my life.

You caused me to see myself as you did when I was ten. And how very fortunate that I still do.