Its any Saturday morning, 1968. I've just planted myself in front of the TV armed with a spoon and a mixing bowl full of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch. My mother is going ballistic on me, doing that Italian "biting the finger thing" and telling me to shut the TV off and get outside on such a nice day. I ignore her as I anxiously count the minutes down til my favorite cartoon in the whole world comes on. I stick the vinyl Magic Screen onto the TV set and fumble for my crayons as the opening theme music for "The Adventures of Winky Dink" blares away. I follow Winky Dink's instructions to draw a rocket ship on the screen to aid him and his dog Woofer to save the stars from the evil Harem Scarem. Little do I realize how much I am honing my artistic and interactive skills, readying my sugar-buzzed mind for the distant career ahead. My name is Pat Walsh and I'm a graphic designer to be.

Although the advent of computer-aided graphic design was years away, I knew I loved this medium. Interacting with animation on a screen just seemed so natural and entertaining to me, I knew I would eventually make it pay for me sooner or later. It turned out to be much later than I would've liked.

I had the talent in my blood. My grandfather was a phenomenal artist, whose main income was hand painting movie titles for the big studios like Paramount, etc. I would watch him for hours in his studio, amazed by his patience and precision. I pursued art all the way up through high school, and decided to follow the lead of my classmates and apply to Cooper Union. For anyone who has not tried to get into Cooper Union, the general point to this wandering is NOBODY GETS INTO COOPER UNION. Pablo Picasso would've been turned down at the first screening. Upon receipt of my rejection letter, I made the idiotic assumption that maybe this profession wasn't for me. I spent the next several years in a hazy fog of college business classes, mind-numbing financial jobs and aimless career decisions. The LORD had a plan for me, but He was going to put me through the ringer first. My one saving grace was the band I sang and played guitar in. I was given carte blanche to design and illustrate all the flyers, t-shirts and posters I could dream up, and thats exactly what I did. It was a great outlet that is hard to come by in the pressurized commercial art field. One late night jabbering with old friends, I heard the news of a kid I knew from my old neighborhhod that was going to school for computer graphics. I recalled that this kid wasn't amazingly talented or anything, and finally it hit me. What was I doing counting beans for a living while this kid was learning how to do what I should've been doing all along!

That September, I enrolled at Bergen Community College, but this time, college was going to be different. I was paying for the classes now. This was serious. I graduated three years later with a 3.975 GPA in Commercial Graphic Design with a concentration in Computer Graphics. I became obsessed by the web and taught myself HTML, Flash and some Javascript. Two months after graduation, The Lord blessed me with a job at an ad agency and within the first year, I helped launch their web-design department. I've gotten tons of freelance work since then and I love every minute of it. It is truly a blessing from God to be able to earn a living doing what you love to do, and I won't live long enough to give Him enough thanks to allow me to make that claim.