Thirty Years at Full Speed

I started in graphic design on a 286 computer with 4 megabytes of RAM, running MS-DOS. Before that — and honestly, alongside it for a while — everything was physical.

You set type on a machine. You made paste-ups on a board. Scanners were just starting to show up, and they were slow, expensive, and not particularly good. When you needed a photograph, you loaded film, bracketed your exposures because you wouldn't see the results for days, and hoped.

That 286 was a revelation and a frustration at the same time. Four megs of RAM meant you could run one program — barely. You learned to save constantly, because a crash wasn't a matter of if, it was when. But even with those limitations, I could see where this was headed. The computer wasn't faster than doing paste-ups by hand — not yet — but it was going to be. And I wanted to be ready when it was.

Hoped.

That was the word that defined creative work for a long time. You hoped the client liked the concept. You hoped the printer got the colors right. You hoped the film came back clean. There was no Command-Z. There was no "let me just try a different version real quick." Every version cost time. Real time. Hours. Sometimes days. I built my career in that world. My company started with me, a Mac, and the understanding that good design solves problems. That hasn't changed. What's changed is the speed at which you can solve them.

Back then, a logo project took weeks. Not because the design itself took weeks — I might have the concept nailed in an afternoon — but because everything around the design took weeks. Researching the competition meant going to the library or driving around town looking at what other businesses were doing. Presenting concepts meant printing comps, mounting them on boards, and driving to the client's office. Revisions meant going back to the studio, making changes, printing again, mounting again, driving again.

The gap between idea and execution wasn't just wide. It was built into every single step of the process.

And that was just design. Photography was its own world of waiting. I started shooting on film — 35mm, medium format, large format depending on the job. Every frame cost money. Processing cost money. And time. You couldn't see what you had until the film came back. If you were shooting a luxury property and the light wasn't right, you didn't know until the next day. You went back. You reshot. You waited again.

I'm not complaining about it. That world taught me things that still matter — discipline, planning, the ability to get it right in fewer takes because every take was expensive. Those lessons live in my work today. But I'm not going to pretend that world was better. It was slower. And slower meant that good ideas died more often, because by the time you got through the gap between concept and execution, the moment had passed, the budget was gone, or the client had moved on. The question I kept asking myself, even back then, was simple: how do I close this gap?

I didn't have that language for it yet. I wasn't thinking about "folding time." I was just thinking about how to work faster without working worse. How to get from the idea in my head to the thing in my hands without all the dead time in between.

That question has driven every decision I've made in thirty years. And it turns out, technology has been answering it in bigger and bigger ways.