I help people go from where they are to where they want to be.

We lived in Thailand for eight years doing mission work, and at one point we opened a pizza restaurant. We needed a logo, menus, and marketing materials. Nobody else on the team wanted to make them, so I did. I had more fun than I expected. T-shirts came next, then friends asking me to design things for them, and then my cousin asked me to rebrand her business. She paid me. It was the first time anyone had, and I was hooked.

That turned into Seed Designs, the studio I ran for nine years, working with 43 clients. Then I went in-house as Art Director at Stryve Foods, where I designed packaging and marketing for 56 products. Now I run Krāv, an online learning platform for skydivers, and I do most of its design and marketing myself.

I’ve also taught more than 10,000 people to fly at iFly San Antonio. Everyone who gets in the tunnel can already do something, even if it’s just holding a position in the wind, and my job is to see where they are and help them move forward from there. Nobody learns the same way, so I keep changing how I explain things until it clicks for the person in front of me. Before it meant a teacher, a coach was a carriage, something that got people from where they were to where they wanted to be. That’s how I think about design too. A brand comes to me with something already working, and I help take its visual identity from where it is to where it needs to be, for the people it’s trying to reach.

Thai is one of my favorite things to come out of those years. It’s tonal, so the right word in the wrong tone means something else entirely, and it has words for ideas English doesn’t have. Learning them changed how I look at things, and that’s what I like about design too: a simple graphic can give someone a new way to see something.

I do my best work with one clear goal at a time. Tell me what we’re making, who it’s for, and what success looks like, and I’ll put my head down until it’s done. I’m especially good at taking something that already exists, like a draft, a brand, or a campaign, and making it better.