I couldn't have imagined 47 years ago when I stepped into a graphic design studio for the first time at the age of sixteen, how I would be pulled into that world and remain transfixed for close to five decades. My career as a graphic designer, art director and creative director would introduce me to an amazing group of creative people, build lifelong friendships and become a driving force in my life.

 

My first job in design came in 1973 when I was a junior in high school. I was hired as a keyliner for Pippel-Patterson Printing Company in Grand Haven, Michigan, two towns over from where I lived in Nunica. I got the job as part of a vocational training program at Spring Lake High School. A request went out to schools in the area for girls with good grades who were taking both art and drafting classes. I was summoned into the guidance office to see if I would be interested in a job doing what was called at the time, “commercial art”. I was the only girl in the area who met all the criteria, so I was offered the job and figured I'd give it a try. I never found out why the girl part was important but convinced myself at the time that girls were somehow better equipped than boys for the work. 

 

I was only 15 when I got the job, so I had to wait several weeks until my 16th birthday to legally start working. On a typical day, I attended a few morning classes and then met with my remaining teachers to get assignments before driving to my job around 11:00 in the morning. I worked until 6:00 or 7:00 and did my homework after that. I loved the independence I had with this new job.

 

As a keyliner, I would assist designers by pasting-up their artwork on boards to be made into metal plates for printing. The work was very meticulous and detailed, often requiring individual words and letters to be cut apart and pasted into place piece by piece. I mastered the art of drawing thin lines using India ink suspended between two prongs of a ruling pen that I adjusted by hand to various widths determined by sight. I prepared and cut “friskets” – fine tissue paper glued down with a thin coating of rubber cement used to mask areas of photos when retouching with an airbrush. I operated typesetting machines and process cameras. I had an innate talent for the work and soon began designing the look of brochures, letterheads, catalogs, maps and books on my own.

 

After a few months, the creative director called me into his office and closed the door. I was certain I had done something wrong and was being let go. Instead, he cleared his throat and confessed to feeling guilty about paying me the minimum wage of $1.60 an hour. He told me my work was excellent and I was doing as much as any of the adult designers. He doubled my wages. Around the office, I was known as "super-kid".

 

I stayed at the printing company for 3 years. In 1976, a year after graduating from high school, I enrolled in the graphic design program at Kendall College of Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

 

With limited resources, I moved into the YWCA Women’s Residence, which housed mostly women who were homeless, abused, recovering from addiction, or refugees from the Vietnam War. A few months after moving in and carving out a studio space in the basement of the old Heritage Hill mansion, I became the weekend manager. The job required me to be physically on the property 24 hours a day from sundown Friday to sunup Monday.

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During my time there, I had abusive husbands escorted off the property by police, confiscated alcohol, cleaned up vomit, broke up fights, and coaxed women who didn’t speak English into storing their fresh eggs in the refrigerator instead of under their beds. I was paid with a free room and $19 a week. I was nineteen years old.

 

Because I already had professional experience in graphic design, fellow art students often came to me for help with their assignments. The head managers of the YWCA loaned me tables and chairs so I could host work sessions in the basement. On some nights, as many as ten students would be hunched over folding tables working on projects. In addition to my own work, I walked around coaching them, offering advice and ideas.

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After my first year at Kendall, I earned the highest GPA at the time for a first-year student and received a small scholarship. That money, along with a couple of part-time jobs, allowed me to move out of the Y and begin my second year of art school. Over time, the effort required to balance work, bills, and the demands of the design program became unsustainable. After my third semester, I made the difficult decision to leave school and return to my old job at the printing company.

 

Small-town life wasn’t what I wanted, so in 1978, at the age of twenty-one, I sold everything I owned and moved to Denver in a Dodge van with $200 in my pocket. I landed a job at Great American Printing Company and began tapping into the opportunities a big city offered. Over the next several years, I changed jobs roughly every twelve months, holding graphic designer or art director positions at the Children’s Museum of Denver, Young & Rubicam, Brock and Associates Advertising, and the Adolph Coors Company, where I became the youngest supervisor in the Promotional Advertising Department.

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At twenty-five, I partnered with copywriter Jim Proimos to form Harms Jonas & Proimos Advertising. Shortly after, I won my first Addy Award in Denver—Best of Show for a Children’s Museum of Denver poster I designed and illustrated.

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Harms Jonas & Proimos lasted only a year, but through that experience I fell in love with advertising. I went on to work at agencies in Cleveland, Saint Louis, Miami, and Nashville.

 

As an a art director, I had the great fortune to partner with extraordinarily talented writers to develop and produce concepts that launched into the world as print ads, billboards, television commercials, brochures, websites, and experiences. Producing that work allowed me to collaborate with creative people across the country and beyond, including world-class photographers, illustrators, directors, animators, composers, printers, retouchers and web developers.

 

I loved the fast-paced agency environment and the challenge of working as a team to win over clients and consumers. Over the years, I worked side by side with hundreds of talented designers, art directors, creative directors, writers, project managers, producers, account executives, and media directors. I also had the privilege of managing creative teams and mentoring younger designers.

 

Along the way, I was promoted to vice president four times and won a handful of prestigious awards, occasionally placing me on the fringes of notoriety within the industry.

 

In my mid-forties, I helped form another ad agency, DH&Q Tombras, with three incredibly smart partners—Gill Duff, Steve Quarles, and Charlie Tombras. We worked hard, had a lot of fun, and produced award-winning work. But despite the eighty-hour weeks I put in, the agency never took off the way we had hoped. I burned out and left the advertising business entirely for a year.

 

Advertising can be brutal for perfectionists with a strong work ethic like mine. Ultimately, the experience helped me gain perspective on what I wanted out of life. A creative director I once worked with summed it up well when he joked, “Nothing refreshes like a total nervous breakdown.”  

 

I thought I had left the business for good, but soon realized that design and art direction were still in my blood. The pull of the work was strong, and I returned for nearly twenty more years. I mostly freelanced but also held full-time positions at two Nashville agencies: The Buntin Group and Lewis Communications.

 

It’s hard to express what my career as a graphic designer, art director, and creative director has meant to me. Saying it gave me purpose doesn’t begin to capture how deeply it enriched my life and shaped my identity.

 

Over the years, I moved between companies more than twenty times, but I really had only one job: helping tell my clients’ brand stories through design and visual communication. In July 2020, I retired from “commercial art” to begin a new chapter as an artist working for myself. I don’t know where this next phase will lead, but I hope it brings the same satisfaction of doing work I love and continuing to tell stories through visual language that is distinctly mine.