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Biography
michael forsythe memphis tennessee
[Resumé abridged] [Full PDF resumé will be available again once it's updated]
Sitting in my dad's Union76 gas and service station, I would draw his race car (number 76) parked in the farthest stall. This was 1973, and I was in kindergarten. Being an artist at age 5 is cute, but at age 15 it became the antithesis of high school football running back soon to be cop or banker and community patriot. The last straw for my dad came when he grounded me for almost an entire year after I quit the Vikings football team to devote more time to the art club. At that time I knew there was no turning back. It wasn't until my first year at Memphis College of Art that I realized I hadn't been drawing my dads race cars, but I had been (re)designing them — exploring compostions with the numerals 7 and 6 and sponsor logos galore.
After finally graduating with an odd bunch of experimental mayhem stirring designers involved in one of the first professionally functional design studios active within the University of Memphis, I fell into an in-house freelance arrangement with a local advertising agency. A year later I fell in love with editorial design and took a job at a national publishing company. Three years into the job, with a push to deliver publishing through new media, I gladly took on the role of internet/interactive design director. Still restless, i took odd jobs on the side that allowed me to move my design away from status quo as well as closer to clients relevant to my lifestyle and interests, e.g. The Jazz foundation of Memphis and the publication Number: An Independent Quarterly of the Visual Arts, to name a few.
Looking to take the next logical step following the leap from artist in town of 13,000 to designer in city of 700,000, I sought work in Chicago, city of 6,000,000. I not only had rich family ties to the city, but long saw myself as working best from within an atmoshpere were everything was fair game for inspiration, and the inspiration was limitless. Taking a job with a new media company in the fast Chicago marketplace gave me more insight into the biz than I felt I could absorb at first. And my strong feelings about design and my rebellious urge to revolutionize the art of public perception continued pushing me away from the plastic status quo of professional graphic design — though my cravings for knowledge of its dark secrets grew insatiable.
I keep a laboratory (frankendesign) stocked with the many remnants of design too much alive for the rhetorically mundane; here I breathe new life. I've always chased greener pastures, and luckily frankendesign just happens to be on the other side of a short fence for me. I allowed my alternate breathing patterns to give life to corporate work that went beyond what was thought technologically impossible, not only by the market, but by me. Still, many corporations were not only shy of the obvious but refused to embrace the inherent risk in change and growth, so that a project like samsclub.com becomes a weak shadow of its original concept. Other clients were as apprehensive but still found merit in the promise of a wired future, as seen in the new northerntrust.com. Clients who acknowledge an emerging synthesis of design and technology allow innovations through projects such as Microsoft Encarta promotions. And some find the most efficient way to provide a service is not to give the expected but to expose what is necessary. Those clients embrace a mutual learning experience involving audience, client, and designer, as exemplified in Europe's andbook.com, and American Airlines' aa.com.
The true education of the industry takes form in projects that seemlessly blend the surreal of the digital with the hyperreal of the brick and mortar. The event xhibition: transition was a hightlight of activity in my days of slaving to the Nasdaq. A project corporately sponsored but built on individual time and interest, it relied on the principles of growth, change, and potential. It was the first small plank of a bridged over threshold into a new state of being and understanding. End
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