About the Corner Guru...

My career path began as an obituary writer in my hometown paper.

Journalism (10 years of reporting, editing, and earning a B.A.) demanded content creation and publishing skills as well as an understanding of how to communicate to people through written and illustrative media. I had a knack for writing good stories. I loved the work, and the tools of language and illustration.

The computer age was just taking off. Getting my first articles into print involved typing it on an IBM Selectric with a special OCR font ball. The pages, once edited, went to the typesetter — a real person who fed it to our big clunky blue computers.

Those very noisy machines translated my articles into streams of hole-punched tape which were hand fed, in turn, to converted typesetting machines that produced column-width strips of photographic paper with the text burned into one side and sticky wax applied to the other.

In layout alley, more people (whose jobs now are faded to virtual) leaned over light tables and used sharp tools to place the articles and a variety of other objects (lines, screened images, ads) on a sheet of graph paper, creating a life-size original of the page.

I found all of that — reporting, writing, illustrating, layout — to be beyond fun. The printers would take over from there, first making a full-sized negative of the hand-crafted page in a room that looked like it could be the inside of an old Polaroid camera. In a different part of the room, they would lay the negative over a flexible metal plate covered with special plastic, shine a bright light on it and wash away the unexposed plastic to produce a printing plate.

It's been a long time since I've seen the backstage of a newspaper; I imagine that it has changed radically, and know that far fewer individuals and steps are involved in getting the words from the writer's fingers onto the press.

In the '90s, I became a technical writer, producing user manuals and online help, and used my skills to tease out and plainly present the things the company's software users needed to know.

While I was documenting medical software, databases, and network modeling applications, my publishing medium moved from paper to in-application help to Web-based delivery. I quickly mastered each new tool, and discovered that I enjoyed sharing my knowledge with co-workers.

In the '00s, I worked at a large format print shop and a print-on-demand Web-based publisher. I began teaching people how to create their own Web sites, use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and take better pictures with their digital cameras. I designed brochures, CD packages, a few books, and submitted files to Web-based POD publishers as well as local printshops.

I began doing business as the Corner Guru.

Now I help people with...

• On-site training of individuals or small groups
• Written procedures for rarely done or complex tasks
• Technical and other illustrations
• Web creation and maintenance
• Content for online and on paper.

As a contract teacher, I hold classes at...

• Durham Technical Community College
• The ArtsCenter (Carrboro, NC)
• A site determined by Orange Literacy (NC)

My classes include...

• Adobe Illustrator
• Web Design and HTML/CSS Coding
• Writing for the Web
• English as a Second Language

... and this list is subject to change without notice! I'm adding JavaScript to my own skill set — I'll let you know when I'm confident enough to share the knowledge.

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