Origin Story

Another post in which I use this platform to be "a big ole mush" (Ma Kent voice)

I wouldn’t be a graphic designer if it was not for an accountant with a hobby. Life is weird.

In his younger years, my father liked to draw and take photographs. He shot with a Canon AE-1 and, on at least one occasion, drew a portrait of my mother when they dated as teenagers. Perhaps I owe my very existence to this hobby, not just my career.

I’m not sure if a career in the arts was ever a consideration for my father, serious or not, but born to a teacher and electrician in 1957, he joined his engineer siblings in choosing a respectable, well-paying profession. When my parents got married, they didn’t have much—$1,500 in savings, and $1,500 in debt, the story goes—but my dad doggedly pursued his career in accounting and became the CFO of a mid-sized binding company in Metro Detroit.

As long as I can remember, there have been cameras in our house. One time, on vacation, my dad let me pocket the family point-and-shoot in my basketball shorts and hop down a short ledge to take a picture. The camera fell out of my shorts and broke. It’s a wonder he ever let me use his stuff ever again.¹

Where there was photography, there was also photo editing software. While he would eventually move on to the Creative Suite versions of Adobe Photoshop, then Lightroom, the software installed on our dining room PC when I was old enough to care was Adobe Photoshop Elements 5—a version of the software designed for casual users.² This is where my journey with graphic design would begin.

The copies of Photoshop Elements my dad still has in my parents’ basement—next to his CD-ROMs of TurboTax dating back to 2006.

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Even so, I may have never opened the software if it was not for basketball. I did not inherit the love of this sport from my family; I don’t remember how or when I started loving basketball, but it must have been because of my grade school friends Tim, Tommy, and Kanon. Peer pressure isn’t always a bad thing. These boys—and the 2004 Detroit Pistons championship—solidified a lifelong love affair with the game.

So it was there, in those aughts, armed with my father’s copy of Photoshop Elements and my love of basketball, where I found myself part of a budding community of nba.com forum users creating skinny, horizontal graphics featuring all of our favorite players for the signatures of forum posts—AKA “sigs.” In retrospect, it was a beautiful, nerdy time filled with making and improving. I’m not even sure if I would have even called it graphic design then, or really known what that was. There are some graphics I made that, to this day, I’m not completely sure how I made them—or if I could even do so today. And I never will know: at one point, I deleted the Photoshop files because of how much space they occupied. I wish I hadn’t.

A small selection of sigs—both good and bad—that I made as a teenager.

My hobby, derived from my father’s, led to my taking a “graphic design” class at my high school.³ I took Web Design and Yearbook. My mother hated that I was placed into what she viewed as a worthless class, but yearbook proved to be a valuable place to practice my skills and was prescient of my future career in book design. I took it again the following year with her blessing. I went to college, took the prerequisite design classes, and got into the graphic design program.⁴ I started working at my university’s newspaper thanks to a fellow designer recruiting me from our printmaking class. I didn’t design newspapers for long, but doing so has had a major impact on my life and career.

Newspaper layout design guided me toward book design, but I don’t know if I would have ever wanted to or thought to do so in the first place without the influence of my mother. As I’ve written before, she bought me Cover by Peter Mendelsund in 2014, a book that unlocked the idea of designing book covers for me. But I wouldn’t want to design them if I didn’t love them, and I don’t know if I would love books so much if it was not for my mother. She read to my sisters and I, the usual youthful affair, and things like Little House on the Prairie. She took me to the library and indulged my obsession with the Jedi Apprentice and Eragon books. Even in the disaffected, fallow-reading years, there was always an eclectic mix of books on my bed’s headboard bookshelf. Books were and are a major part of my life because of my mom. Now, we read them together.

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It is both gratifying and unnerving to examine the impact of my parents upon what I do. A career is not the sum of a person, but I have a difficult time imagining my life without the manipulation of images and text.

While I was expected to do reasonably well in school, there were never firm expectations to become an engineer, accountant, doctor, or any other sort of “respectable” profession. They supported my decision to study graphic design, though I suspect this may have been purely out of relief—mom likes to joke that she thought I would “major in girlfriend and minor in basketball.” Even still, their influence on my chosen path is profound in hindsight.

I’m never sure if this sort of navel gazing is healthy, or worthwhile—especially at this stage of the “career” I keep yammering on about—but I can’t help it. Overthinking and reflection is as much a part of me as my love of books and identity as a designer. It gets stronger as I age, have children, and watch them grow. Who am I? How did I get here? Who will they become, and how will I influence that? Do they see me read enough? Will they know how much I love design? Do I let them watch too much TV? How much will my anxiety impact their lives? Behind these questions is the fear that I will fuck them up. And I will, I know. Every parent does somehow. I just hope it’s not too much. I just hope they find something they love to do as much as I love what I do—whether or not it has anything to do with me.

So mom, when you get around to reading this, and dad, when mom shows you this: thanks. For being my parents. But also, for being yourselves.

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—Nathaniel

1. And he did. In 2015, he also let me take his Nikon DSLR with me to Italy. I did not break it, but I did fall in love with photography.

2. Or 4, or 6. My dad still has copies of these versions in their basement—sitting next to his CD-ROMs of TurboTax dating back to 2006—but not 5.

3. I put this in quotes because it was taught by a sculptor and we only ever used Photoshop and never touched logo design or text layout.

4. I also owe my mom for this—she made me register for classes on the earliest possible date, allowing me to get in to said prerequisite classes and build the portfolio that earned me admission to the program on the first try. Many friends took two tries.