About

I am a Freelance Graphic Designer with 30 years of experience specialized in presentation design and onsite live event work. I live in Sterling, MA with my husband and my cat.

I went to Fitchburg State College and majored in Communications/Media, specialized in Graphic Design. My senior year internship was at Cornerstone Associates in the Fall of 1989, helping the art department to make slides on the Autographix workstation and transcribing audio files using the Mac IIc. I still work with the people that I met there.

After graduation, I was hired by Cornerstone Associates and started making slides and multi image presentations on the Autographix workstation. Autographix was a dos-based slide graphics workstation for output to film. Each slide was an individual file, and there was a tablet instead of a mouse. If a company logo was needed for the slides, it had to be traced on the tablet by plotting points and bending the line by typing in the angle. To get a photo onto the slide with computer generated type involved putting placement boxes next to the bullets, then shooting the slide. The photo was shot onto a slide via Forox camera, then layered with the computer generated type slide in to the mask. It was a long process! Also I ran the camera that shot the slide files. That was dos based also, and I got to be quite an expert at dos command language.

I then took a job at Autographix, answering client calls to the help desk after a major revision to the software. It was still dos based and one slide per file, but it had photoshop type capabilities and the artist could make computer generated backgrounds and gradients! A big leap forward! This was a temporary position and towards the end of my contract there changes in the industry were starting to happen and the slide business was becoming obsolete.

I moved on to freelancing in 1993 at Banyan Networks in Westborough, MA and local Boston production companies JMP (Jack Morton) and Envision, among others. Apple desktops were now being used for presentation creation and I bought my first computer, an Apple Centris 650 with a 14 inch monitor for $4000. Aldus Persuasion was the professional’s choice for slide layout. It could output .pict files, which could be brought into Macromedia Director and cut up to animate the graphics. Another long process and not easy to edit since none of the type is live. Photoshop was Mac only in this era and didn’t have layers. Everything had to be saved in channels and as separate files. External hard drives were expensive so some things weren’t backed up. Computers had tiny hard drives too. I look back at this era and I’m amazed we were able to produce some of the shows without it all crashing and burning. There wasn’t email or internet so working from hand drawn storyboards that arrived via fax was the height of technology. When the first zip drive came out it was a revelation! I bought that first model with some 100 megabyte zip disks. The drive was small and light, but the transformer brick power plug that came with it weighed about 10 pounds.

Aldus was bought by Adobe and eventually they stopped updating it, as PowerPoint was taking over. Once Windows 95 added an onscreen font smoother and added animations in the late 90s, most clients used MS Office on a PC so the presentation industry followed. PowerPoint on a Mac did not have anywhere near the amount of capabilities that the PC version had, so I started using mainly PCs once Adobe released a PC version of Photoshop. There were still a few holdouts using Macs with PPT and Director, but that labor intensive work went away as clients got used to editing right up until they went onstage.

more to come…