Founder of ideaguystudios & Speedstyle Labs Inc.

There’s some common threads that run through every chapter of my working career—one thread is creativity, there's another thread of curiosity, and then there's the final thread of “show me once and let me figure this out myself.”

My creative career started in school with a gallery in junior high, and a part-time paste-up artist job throughout high school. At the end of high school I took a summer job that turned into an unfinished apprenticeship. I had an industrial accident that had me out for a year, and I airbrushed and sold T-shirts to businesses. A year later I'm working as a paste-up artist for a Calgary print shop, learning the print trade from a grimy beginning. I got my first big exposure for a Calgary Stampeders poster that would appear on the back of Coca-Cola trucks that season. That same year I worked in a sign shop and received an exceptional albeit brief experience in the display sign business. This plucked many creative strings. 

Print. Layouts. Logos. Flyers for nightclubs. Postcards for businesses that don’t exist anymore. My career slowly evolved to working in pre-press, just as computers would start to change how anything was printed. 

I evolved to working in an advertising agency owned by a grocery chain, and this industry was just seeing massive change from the switch to digital images. That one shift in how the work was done eliminated a few teams of people. 

In 1997 I built websites when it meant slicing up images and hand-coding HTML. I learned by doing, and doing, and doing some more.

Then came the shift to tech. Apple gave me a wild and wonderful ride—from retail floor to educational consulting, and  got a deep understanding on how to thrive on change and not fear it. I spent nearly 15 years helping teachers, school districts, and enterprise teams learn to think differently with the tools in their hands. I integrated systems that made chaos manageable. I had the honour of teaching others how to navigate change, and quietly helped people discover how capable they were.

But under all of that—there was always a creative engine still running. Ideas didn’t stop. Stories didn’t stop. I started noticing that all the skills I had gathered—design, storytelling, photography, tech, teaching—were trying to form something new.

So now, they have.