I stepped into design backwards, I suppose; but it never made less than sense for me. As a student, I studied art, I studied film, I studied jazz, I studied English literature. I got a degree in fiction writing and a teaching credential; before I studied graphic design at UCLA I'd worked as a pianist, a valet, an English teacher, a receptionist, a special effects artist for feature films, a film festival programmer and…as a graphic designer. Believe it or not, I started designing professionally right out of college, working for a non–profit dance company and finding my training through the generosity of a roundelay of professionals and semi-professionals which passed into and out of that company's doors. From photographers I learned retouching, from graphic designers donating their time I learned programs and started to use them to make a part of my living. If it all sounds too flighty, I should point out that many of these pursuits I took on concurrently, and stayed with my various employers, sometimes two at a time, for years on end. Even so, my past efforts don't look like any conventional idea of a consistent pursuit.
Why collect so many jagged dashes at different careers? The M.O. of the working professional has so often been to pick a single direction and move towards it with singular focus. And yet, I grew up wanting to take in every interest which captivated my attention, and bend it into concert with every other. It's like grabbing snatches of so many rhythms and melodies, and pressing them together until they sound like music. It's not that I was never driven to succeed; most likely it's that, growing up amongst generations of public school teachers and college professors, I came through with a very different idea of what success should mean. In my mind success has always been measured by intrinsic rewards, and things have always been worth doing if they seemed worth doing. Opportunities for personal growth; chances to thread one interest into a weave of many others in the future. It's a philosophy that's led me in many different directions, to find pursuits that might be rewarding simply from their pursuit, and to acquire skills that had no immediate, extrinsic application, but which might be useful at some unspecified, later date. The goal in pursuing such disparate interests might be something like the way my grandfather, an English professor and author of several collegiate textbooks on writing, would take his interest in writing nonsense verse, his obsession with making lists, his passion for collecting folk art and handmade children's toys from cultures all over the world and his drive to paint (albeit to paint in his own, iconoclastic way), and, putting them all together at his fingertips, author and illustrate children's literature, nonsense verse and poetry; and in fact, maybe I was searching for something that would allow me to put my own disparate interests together in a productive pattern, just the way he did.
You can imagine, though, that when you're running even a business based on creativity, and you're hiring personnel, a resume like mine might inspire no great confidence. It must be tempting to pitch it into the round file without trying to parse it all out. Regina Rubino, though, seemed intrigued, and when she interviewed me for work with IMAGE: Global Vision she seemed to want to get to the bottom of it all; to figure out who this person in front of her was (rather than whether I'd done this thing or that thing to check off a list of qualifications), and to gauge whether or not he had the energy, the special tone that is I:GV, and the kind of dedicated work ethic the company requires to succeed. And I:GV is a very unique company, even amongst design firms. Here is a place where individual designers and small groups of designers build gigantic, comprehensive brand narratives, often over the space of years of concentrated investigation and innovative exploration. Here is a place where divergent and disparate ideas are brought to converge together in visual and sensory presentation—a place where visions and dreams for many people are built by a small force of dedicated creative talents, and guided by Regina's own creative energy and her special mixture of searching intellect and emotion.
Since I've been at IMAGE: Global Vision I've tackled challenges of increasing depth and complexity; the demands on my creativity and my sense of organization have been constant. And I find I've been able to apply more and more of my range of experience to the various projects I've been assigned--not only laying out posters and packages, but scanning through clip after clip to find just the right slithering snake footage for a Year of the Snake video (the snake had to be moving, but not sinister in its bent), or writing music for instructional videos on assembling designer walkers. And what I have found is that those experiences resonate with others, and form a kind of harmony of design; one I want to hear years into the future.
~ Alan Lawrence
