I worked my way through college as a graphic designer. So by the time I graduated, I was already an experienced designer, and was teaching graphic design at San Jose City College.

I hired into Lockheed in 1980 with 12 years of graphic design experience, 7 years of teaching (parttime) at SJCC, and a degree from SJSU. I worked for Lockheed for 13 years as a technical illustrator, the first six years on the drafting table, and the last seven years on a VAX workstation.

After I was layed off from Lockheed in 1993 (along with 20,000 others) I did some Adobe Illustrator contracting for NASA until I located a permanent job.

My next fulltime job was for a completely different industry - SEGA of America. I was hired by a guy who had been an art director for Disney Studios. He was essentially looking for people who could draw. All of the work was finishing 2D 8-bit games. At that time, the industry was frantically going from 2D to 3D.

I soon realized that SEGA was not a good fit for me, and went back to contract illustration. I worked for several companies during the mid 90's, until something called "the web" appeared.

Contract illustration was not exciting, but it paid the bills, and I got lots of practice in Adobe Illustrator. Westinghouse was working on the Trident missile program, so I did tons of isometric projections of cylinders.

Loral was involved in building huge microwave radio telescopes. I didn't much understand the technology, but it seemed important. And again I got to draw in Illustrator, which I liked very much.

Westinghouse was bought by Northrup Grummann in 1996, so I was doing technical illustration for both of these giant defense contractors.

All of the Adobe Illustrator work I did for the defense industry was put to good use at Oracle, where I drew over 200 AI illustrations for the release of Oracle8.

While I was finishing the AI work for Oracle8, I became aware of the excitement about the internet. All of the job descriptions for graphic designer had the acronym, "HTML" prominent in the requirements. I was determined not to be left out, so I enrolled in HTML class.

Back at Oracle in 1999, just before the millenium, I was helping a marketing group make the arduous but essential move from print to web. I also got my first experience with Dreamweaver.

When my contract was up at Oracle, I found a small software company called Creatus that need a new website. They hired me to do their frontend designing, and then replaced me by merging with a small local design firm.

After Creatus replaced me by merging with a small local design firm, I found another software company called Gobosh that needed a webdesigner. They were doing great until the dotcom crash. The jobs would not come back for several years.

In 2003, almost exactly 10 years to the day after I was layed off, I worked for Lockheed again as a contract webdesigner. I converted two Powerpoint presentations to HTML.

Intransa was a small software/hardware company that needed a contract webdesigner. I also did tradeshow graphics, print brochures, and Flash marketing pieces for them.

Since webdesign jobs were still scarce in 2005, I went back to teaching for a few months. The pay was lousy, but I had fun as a digital media instructor.

In the fall of 2005, Intuit hired me for a short-term contract to design Intuit product pages for several retail sites, like BestBuy and Staples.

After the Intuit project was finished, I got a contract with FileMaker to build and fix webpages under the Support tag. I did both table and tableless page design.

After the FileMaker project was finished, I got a short contract with Apple to build and fix webpages under the Support tag. I also wrote content.

After Apple, I got a short-term contract at Stanford, building 100 pages from scratch. The content management system was Teamsite.

After Stanford, I got a short contract at McAffee, repairing pages, and applying the new css style. I also designed their holiday banner.

McAfee only lasted two months, but by then the jobs seemed to come out of the woodwork. I landed a webdesign contract with cpa2biz, the online store of the AICPA.

Printroom hired me to help with the redesign of their website for photographers. I did mostly HTML and Flash work.

VIMO needed email ads designed in Photoshop and coded into HTML tables. You can see them in my portfolio.

Danal, a Korean company, hired me to help with their US site. I created several gui's for their mobile billing service.

I am currently at Symantec helping in the build of the MySymantec part of the corporate site.