Hi, I’m Brenda Lewis. I’m a self-taught graphic designer and typographer. I did my first design project when I worked as a secretary at a college* in Detroit. Those were the days of literal “cut and paste.” I worked for almost 15 years using a typewriter, hard-copy clip art and transfer lettering. My design jobs ranged from business cards to 50+-page journals. Typesetting was the first part of my work that got computerized. I still had to cut and paste the type and art, but at least I now had professionally set type. My first WYSIWYG experience was on a Commodore 64 using a program called GeoPublish. It looked and worked very much like Adobe—then Aldus—PageMaker. It even worked with PostScript fonts. Even though I only had a dot-matrix printer, I could upload my GeoPublish files to a service bureau in Milwaukee via Q-Link, an online service for Commodore users and a forerunner of AOL. They output the files on their expensive 300 dpi PostScript laser printer and FedEx-ed the whole package back to me. I got a lot of “I didn’t know you had a Mac” comments in those days. I still don’t have a Mac. Today my platform/operating system of choice is PC/Windows. My primary software is Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe InDesign. Of course, these things are only important to potential clients who don’t recognize that the hardware and software are only tools. If your designer doesn’t have the talent and experience, the tools don’t matter. I measure my success by the comments and repeat work from satisfied clients. I’ve also won some awards and my design work has been featured in Technique and Corel Magazine. *That college is also the place where I learned to run an offset printing press. I won’t say you can’t be a good designer without having printing experience, but you can’t be an effective designer without some knowledge of the commercial printing process. There are many designers who create beautiful on-screen artwork that is useless to their clients because these “works of art” can never be printed.
