Basil's ImageAbout Basil

Adventurer,
technologist,
raconteur,
opportunist,
... creative guy for hire.

Remember the Art Teacher's pet? The kid that always had ribbons on his artwork in the school showcase? That was me.

Remember the guy that took his study halls in the band room to practice with his lab band buddies? That was me to.

Did you ever encounter an eight year old "Revell Master Modeler?” A ten year old kid obsessed with the accuracy of his HO train layout scenery? A thirteen year old 35mm photo enthusiast?

Art and music have always come relatively easy to me. I've always been a sensuous person, preferring to trust my senses over my intellect. Once during a private oil painting lesson, I ask my instructor if what I was doing was "right." Mrs, Hoover, my instructor, laughed at the notion of a "mistake," and told me that with regard to visual art, if it looks and feels good it is good. Since that day, almost forty years ago, I've always trusted that advice. It has to feel right.

Almost paradoxically, I was also very good at science scoring in the top one percent of all high school students in national achievement tests. The ability to visualize and conceptualize the unseen made science seem very logical; electrons, atoms, molecules, planetary motion, it all just seemed to fit together.

But when it came time for college, ironically, I didn't choose art, science, or music. I instead choose marketing, believing that a business background would be a better foundation for earning a living than art theory or music. I was never very good at mathematics, so I believed a technical degree in science or physics was unachievable.

When I graduated from Penn State in 1981, the country was in the depths of a severe economic recession. There were no decent business jobs to be found anywhere in western Pennsylvania; so I fell back on art and music again, opening a small dance club in the tiny rural town of Brandy Camp, PA.

During the next two years I had the time of my life. The night club was a lot of fun and very popular. But I sold my soul to build it and was therefore severely undercapitalized right out of the gate. My debt service was killing me and after a while I began to look for other opportunities.

In 1983, I sold it and moved to Erie to sell cars at the largest Chrysler dealership in Western PA. Across from the mega car dealership was a Radio Shack Computer Store. On my lunch hours, I would routinely walk over to play with the TRS 80 computers on display in the showroom. Over the next few months, I became increasingly infatuated with the amazing, new micro computer technology. So when an opportunity to work selling computers at the new Computerland store presented itself, I jumped at it.

Working at Computerland was a real education. The computer store provided me with access to many different hardware and software platforms to learn and play with. With my art background, I naturally gravitated toward graphics applications and immersed myself in every draw and paint program available.

The Computerland store sold PCs running MS DOS and the CP/M operating systems; our main competitor across town, Micromart, sold Apple. In those days we discounted the importance of the Apple machines as toys. After all, we were selling “IBM compatible” machines. But secretly, I always liked Apple. I would often sneak over to our competitor’s store and play with the cool demos running on the Apple IIs.

One day in the Spring of 1984, I wandered into Micromart and was surprised to see a crowd of people standing around a small table in the center of the store. Curious, I wander over to see what all the fuss was about. There in the center of the table was a new Macintosh 128K computer and an Imagewriter printer. All the “geeks” standing around the table were trying to make sense of the new graphical user interface (GUI) that drove the tiny machine. What was going on inside that tiny box? It had pull down menus, an “undo” command, pictures representing your files, and a mouse. Physically dragging a file with mouse to the trash can was truly an amazing experience to those of us accustom to remembering and typing longs lines of DOS code - then holding our breath to see what would happen. I think everyone present that day secretly sensed this represented something very important.

Shortly after that I bought my first Mac and graphic art has been a large part of my life ever sense. At first it was MacDraw and MacPaint, then Photoshop 1.0, then Ready, Set, Go (the first page layout program), then Aldus Freehand and Pagemaker, Then Adobe Illustrator and finally Indesign.

Then came Netscape Navigator and the World Wide Web - Wow! The idea that you could post articles and images for everyone in the world to see for free was truly astounding. I immersed myself in a web site authoring program called GoLive Cyber Studio which was later purchased by Adobe and labeled simply “GoLive.” Later there was Director, and now Flash and Dreamweaver.

My marketing degree was proving to be quite valuable as I began to secured work creating corporate collateral materials and web sites. Understand marketing communications and marketing concepts gave me an advantage over rival artists because I spoke and understood the language of business.

After “knocking around” for a few years as a freelance graphic “hit man,” I landed a contract with a subsidiary of Philips Electronics called Assembleon building interactive manufacturing line presentations. Six months into the project, Philips offered me a full time position and I spent the next eight years rising in their marketing department.

Working for Philips was a lot of fun and afforded me opportunities to travel internationally and build my skill set to include video production, video editing and 3D modeling capabilities.

I left full time employment with Philips in 2007 to re-establish my freelance career. While I still consider Philips a valued client, I’ve also added other many other clients to my roster.

With the decline of print advertising, I seem to spend more and more of my time building web sites, Flash plug-ins, email blasts, and working with online tools. There is no doubt that a convergence is taking place and very soon everyone will carry a multi-media device on his person that will afford high speed access to every form of communication. But no matter which direction technology takes, beautiful art and simple, compelling, story telling will always be a necessary component for effective marketing communications. The future looks bright indeed.

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