Sometimes an artist will first pick up a pencil or a brush. A writer may still favor their first IBM Selectric (that’s a typewriter for anyone born after 1984). Whatever the medium, the creative forces inside will find a way out to let the artist fully express themselves. For me, it was a Macintosh SE with a 20mb hard drive. The digital revolution let me create and express marketing ideas and concepts like never before. I sucked up Photoshop and design books like a dry sponge. And the fact that I could write and create the graphics at the same time, going through endless revisions until, like most creatives, you just know that it’s done.

I am and will always be a creative marketing guru – whether I am mentoring younger designers on projects or leaving the spreadsheet behind for awhile and jumping back into the fray. The creative process is one kind of high and the other comes from seeing that spreadsheet continue to spike upward, knowing that what you’ve created makes a difference. And a profit.