I graduated from Highland Highschool near Riverside Iowa in 1987. After graduation I moved to Cedar Rapids and studied law enforcement for two years. I quit school and began working full time at a movie theater as an assistant manager.
While in Cedar Rapids I met Kelly and she later gave birth to my 1st daughter Andie.
At the same time that the 1st Gulf War started and my father was serving overseas my mom got very sick and was later diagnosed with cancer. I moved back home and begam working at the local Hy-Vee grocery store. I worked the graveyard shift and It did not take long to realize that I needed to do something else, something that would incorporate my desire to create and design.
I applied and was accepted at The Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD). I moved to Columbus Ohio and have been here since. I studied and later graduated from CCAD in 1995 with a BFA in Advertising Design.
I have worked for a small digital printing company, Kinkos twice, and even as a web designer, back when web design was still a limited field.
I probably found my best fit with Learning Design Associates, where I began as a Production Manager in charge of producing educational textbooks using Quark. I managed a small group of production specialist and did a large part of the production itself. When LDA closed in 2003 I was acting as the Digital Services Manager overseeing three great managers and their departments; Production, Word Processing and Art. During those five years at LDA I learned a lot about educational publishing and Quark.
While working at LDA I also started teaching as an adjunct at CCAD. I taught and am now teaching again an Introduction to Electronic Illustration course covering Illustrator, Photoshop and Painter.
I met my wife Bridgette in 1998 and we were married in 2000.
Shortly after LDA's closing in 2003, Bridgette and I had our 1st Daughter, Amaya. My wife and I decided that it would be best if I stayed at home and focused on raising our daughter while she continued to work full time. This allowed me to also work more on my freelance and hobbies. We now have two daughters, Myka was born in 2006.
During my other jobs and currently I have maintained a certain number of freelance clients and continue to grow as a designer and illustrator. I am certain that even without clients I would continue to try and learn as many applications and approaches to design and illustration as possible. I am always most happy when learning a new skill.
Most recently most of my free time (very little with two girls running around) has been devoted to creating virtual tokens for Virtual Table Top gaming. A couple fellow gamers and I started Four Ugly Monsters in December of 2005 as an online meeting place for gamers and as a virtual business where we sell our works.
You can see some of the tokens at fouruglymonsters.com or my site for token work here.
I can be contacted at devinnight@att.net