Random facts that you probably didn’t know about me

I tried to sum­ma­rize myself in 160 char­ac­ters or less for my twit­ter bio, it’s real­ly kind of hard, so here it goes: Ran­dom mean­der­ings of a smart alecky design­er, brand devel­op­er, dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tor, cre­ative-big idea gen­er­a­tor, horse mom. Go Brew­ers! Wan­na col­lab­o­rate? That was hard. It keeps evolv­ing. Peo­ple are amazed by what I can do and how cre­ative I am. I always have mul­ti­ple projects going and can make just about any­thing look great.

I would have to say that I attribute those abil­i­ties to the fact that I grew up as a Wis­con­sin farm girl. When you are the only per­son your age for miles, you real­ly need to be cre­ative to enter­tain your­self. Also when you grow up on a farm, you have a lot more respon­si­bil­i­ties than oth­er kids. The mul­ti­task­ing just comes nat­u­ral­ly to me. How many oth­er graph­ic design­ers can say that they used to “pull” (deliv­er) calves or help the vet stitch up cows as a kid? Yep, I’ve done both. Just don’t ask me to feed those calves… a trait that I car­ry through today, as my hus­band does all the cook­ing in our house.

I have a Mor­gan Horse named Will, and after 9 years, I’m still afraid to ride him. Yeah that guy. And I will some­day soon, I swear.

I threw myself the most hand­made, diy, pin­ter­est wor­thy, enter­tain­ment-packed wed­ding. And when I meet peo­ple that I have nev­er met, they ask “so you are Mar­la, the one with the wed­ding”.   Well enough about me, let’s talk expe­ri­ence. I offi­cial­ly start my design career with a job at Lands’ End in their Busi­ness Out­fit­ters divi­sion. I became an embroi­dery design­er learn­ing a spe­cial­ty trade of pro­gram­ming the stitch­es of logos applied to appar­el by using a CAD sys­tem. Giv­en my knack for brand­ing, I moved into the role of a logo design­er with­in that same divi­sion. I would design orig­i­nal logos for cus­tomers and alter exist­ing logos to work for embroi­dery. Mean­ing that I’ve designed thou­sands of orig­i­nal logos in my life. The cat­a­log world called and I then became an elec­tron­ic pub­lish­ing assis­tant, under the guid­ance of art direc­tors and copy­writ­ers I did pro­duc­tion work with a num­ber of Lands’ End cat­a­logs. After a move in focus I then joined the Inte­grat­ed Cre­ative Devel­op­ment team with Lands’ End, where I assist­ed cre­ative direc­tors in the brand­ing of Lands’ End, visu­al mer­chan­dis­ing of Lands’ End in Sears, Adver­tis­ing, Pub­lic Rela­tions and any­thing else that had the Lands’ End logo on it that was­n’t a cat­a­log. This job real­ly pre­pared me for a career in graph­ic design, the work was tough, dead­lines were tougher, but it was one of the best learn­ing expe­ri­ences that any graph­ic design­er could ask for learn­ing from some of the top cre­ative direc­tors to ever work for the com­pa­ny. I then took my tal­ents out on the road, work­ing for Star­dust Cor­po­ra­tion and bring­ing all cre­ative in-house which was pre­vi­ous­ly han­dled by an agency. I was able to build the com­pa­ny’s brand and pro­vide cre­ative that sold plen­ty of t‑shirts to whole­sale cus­tomers. My next oppor­tu­ni­ty was also a great expe­ri­ence when I was back with a bunch of for­mer Lands’ Enders who allowed me to be a part of launch­ing the busi­ness for Fair Indi­go, once again I was work­ing in the brand­ing of any­thing with the com­pa­ny logo on it that was­n’t a cat­a­log. So I was cre­at­ing store sign­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tions pieces, look­books, adver­tis­ing, and even but­tons and labels for appar­el. I then worked with Wal­nut Hol­low design­ing all their busi­ness col­lat­er­al, and help­ing to devel­op new prod­ucts , tradeshow mate­ri­als, and build­ing their first e‑commerce web­site.  I have now entered the field of pub­lic ser­vice. Cre­at­ing  oppor­tu­ni­ties for Wis­con­sin cit­i­zens while sup­port­ing the Wis­con­sin Idea. Work­ing to devel­op pro­grams with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Exten­sion; Con­tin­u­ing Edu­ca­tion, Out­reach & E‑Learning. Along the way, I even­tu­al­ly start­ed doing some side work with a friend who I worked with at Lands’ End and along side of with Fair Indi­go and now I do design work for Max Comm PR — which has been a great trip back to work­ing in fash­ion on many com­mu­ni­ca­tions projects.

You can down­load my résumé [PDF] or vis­it my LinkedIn pro­file to find out a lit­tle more about my pro­fes­sion­al background.

My approach to my work is sim­ple, you need to work smarter not hard­er (although you will find that I’m a hard work­er). I like to lay a foun­da­tion upon which I build upon. I do a lot of research into process improve­ment and cre­ativ­i­ty. So much that I have been on many process improve­ment com­mit­tees through my pro­fes­sion­al career. I have a lot of resources to share and I’m work­ing on build­ing my design­er resources page as a part of this web­site. I am also the one that is explor­ing, find­ing the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy and work­ing to imple­ment it into designs to keep my work in the most cur­rent style.

As a for­mer train­er in the graph­ic arts indus­try com­bined with a role in con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion and out­reach I am the for­mer Edu­ca­tion Chair and cur­rent Sec­re­tary for Design Madi­son. Bring­ing the knowl­edge that I have earned to bring it through to local design­ers and stu­dents pro­vid­ing out­reach oppor­tu­ni­ties, pro­mot­ing life­long learn­ing, keep­ing con­nect­ed and bring­ing aware­ness to the world that there are some real­ly great design­ers in Madi­son Wis­con­sin. I’m excit­ed as we are get­ting ready to plan our sec­ond design con­fer­ence for lat­er this year.

With a love of all things design­ery, I serve on the advi­so­ry board for the Wright Design Series. Help­ing to select speak­ers in the field of design to speak at Madis­on’s Monona Terrace.

Expe­ri­enced with both in-house and agency inte­grat­ed cre­ative mar­ket­ing for pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tor. High­ly expe­ri­enced in print and online media, art direc­tion, copy­writ­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, pho­to direc­tion, pho­to styling, pho­to prop­ping, illus­tra­tion, ani­ma­tion, social media, prob­lem solv­ing, project man­age­ment, cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion, and always get­ting into the newest of media. With a client base con­sist­ing of polit­i­cal cam­paigns, education/public sec­tor, adver­tis­ing agen­cies, tech­nol­o­gy, health­care, man­u­fac­tur­ing, fash­ion, pho­tog­ra­phers, and musi­cians. Car­ry­ing and man­ag­ing projects from con­cept to com­ple­tion. Focused on cre­at­ing projects that best fit my clients needs, that are on time, under bud­get, that are done with the high­est degree of qual­i­ty and have opti­mal return on invest­ment. And I just got a GoPro Hero 3+ and a DSLR so watch out world, I’m Shoot­ing video.

Speak­ing of shoot­ing video, the fol­low­ing is a quick video that I put togeth­er recap­ping my fam­i­ly’s Christ­mas this year. Music by my great friend Freedy John­ston, I’m encour­ag­ing you to go out and buy his music — you will love him.

Christ­mas with the Garth­wait­es from Mar­la Nor­ton on Vimeo.

I also try to #brand­chat on Wednes­days… check them out… Tweets about “#BRAND­chat”