Better Together

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Image by Weber Photography  Hand drawn type by Mike

Today I, Mike, step into a sacred space. I have been a part of this blog since the first post, and have had my mark on almost every post, but for some reason I am nervous to step out from behind the camera and man up to the draft board.

When we were traveling across Europe, Megan and I decided that we would wake up every morning and create as we were inspired and we would blog it. So I shot, she did type, I critiqued, and she posted. From the amazing comments we read this was really inspiring to many of you as it was to me.

Four years ago, Megan and I graduated from college with degrees, debt, and no job offers. After a couple hundred no’s, I begged my way into my first advertising agency job as a junior designer. At the same time, Megan was able to maintain enough of her college freelance clients to begin her business. However on November 15, 2009 she posted her first post “Blogger”. Where she decided that between design projects she would post about “life, design, food, travel, and anything else that may surface”  Her first couple posts were a little rough, as mine will probably be, but she stuck with it. After a while, her posts were getting better and better. She started to get a following and it became apparent that this was not a passing idea. So we decided from that moment we would do whatever it took to keep the blog active as a source of creative inspiration. So she kept on posting.

As she kept the blog going I moved on to work at two more agencies. I made some money, won some awards, and had a title. I accomplished the things design school tells you you should do. However the longer I worked for these things, and worked for someone else, the farther I felt from the freshman art school student I was nine years ago. I remember my favorite and hardest week of design school staying up for 48 hours straight to hand sketched 1000 logos because I couldn’t do it enough. I did it because I wanted to, not because I was paid to do it.

In the time Megan and I have been married, we have been told countless times that since we are both designers we should just work together. We typically respond by saying it’s for the sake of our marriage that we didn’t work together. But the truth is we fell in love while working together on design projects in college. As much as we tried to ignore it we really do work best when we are working together. It wasn’t until we were walking the streets of Paris, camera in one hand and sketch book in the other that I realized I had lost that freshman design student spirit. After sitting in a rainy cafe in the Bastille with Megan and Jonathan Grant sketching and drinking espresso for three hours that we decided I needed to take a wild measure and join the blog and join the design studio.

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So what will you see from me? Really I don’t have a plan, only a direction. I want to bring a masculine voice and more men’s fashion into this space. I want to write more about how we started our design studio and the lessons we have learned along the way. I want to write about what is inspiring me. I am a lover of fine spirits and wild adventures. I’m not in the kitchen much but I do have a couple just 5’s that might make their way onto the blog. You can expect misspellings, run on sentences, literal humor and a reference to my love of my home state of Texas whenever possible. I won’t be as soft as Megan, but I promise to be as real as she has been.

More than anything you will be inspired in a whole new way. My biggest hope is to rediscover the freethinking art school freshmen in myself and to bring more of that creativity to this space.

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