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My career path began as a newspaper reporter in my hometown paper.
Journalism (10 years and a B.A.) provided great content creation and publishing skills, as well as an understanding of how to communicate to people through written and illustrative media.
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.
That was handed off to another group of real people who made a negative of it in a room that looked like it could be the inside of an old Poloroid camera, which they then printed to a metal plate layered with special plastic.
After a final chemical bath, the plate went on the press.
It's been a long time since I've seen the backstage of a newspaper; I imagine that it has changed radically, that far fewer individuals and steps are involved in getting the words from the writer's fingers onto the press. I helped a little, bringing computers to the newsroom during my first job as an editor.
In the '90s, I became a technical writer -- 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 online, 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, and a few books, and submitted the files to local printshops and Web-based POD publishers.
I began doing business as the Corner Guru, and I help people with...
As a contract teacher, I hold classes at...
My classes include...