It wasn’t until my first year at Memphis College of Art that I realized I hadn’t been drawing my dad’s race cars, but I had been (re)designing them — exploring compositions with the numerals 7 and 6 and sponsor logos galore wrapping around the the dented metallic frame organically warping and compressing with each Friday night event.

In 1991 I earned my BFA alongside an obsessively driven and competitive band of studio mates. After a year of working at a local ad agency I predictably abandoned advertising and I fell in love with editorial design and took a job at a national publishing company that was the first to deliver completely digital design and prepress services. Other jobs merged career and relevancy, e.g. posters and website for The Jazz foundation of Memphis and creative direction of 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 deep family ties to the city but long saw myself as working best from within an atmosphere were everything was fair game for inspiration, and the inspiration was limitless. The buzzword was “new media” and I came face to face with the CEO of every major corporation, hesitant but wide-eyed, ready to cash in. But after leaving an impressive but bloated agency, I and six partners found the internet to be a tool for serving as much as selling.

Taking my career to the level of a calling, I still find the challenges of modernity a novel pursuit. Design is created and given away, communication is disseminated, our work is absorbed and if successful enmeshed in humanity. It is sacrificial. I am a designer, but first and foremost I am a public servant.

Frankendesign is a 15-year and ongoing collaboration of graphic designers Michael Forsythe and David Thompson.

Although content on this web site may be disproportionally not about graphic design, it is about the dissemination of information, a sine qua non of graphic design.

‘Frankendesign’ is a common term used to describe the dysfunctional array of aesthetics being broadcast to a public indifferent to where the information originates and how it is delivered. Furthermore, most frankendesign is created by this very public, unknowingly promoting the abuse of misinformation and misrepresentation by gleaning the junkyards of discarded graphic design absent of context and void of purpose.

Partly in jest, we adorn this moniker as we feed the gutless industry which subjugates itself to its own demise. On the other hand, the individual efforts as well as collaborations of Frankendesign serve as a collective creative outlet for the experimental as well as the proven techniques and aesthetics of our industry—an industry which does little to embrace the educational essence of communication and the inherent humanity in art. Within our own industry, we create frankendesign.