Good Day. I walked out of DevStudios this February, and I want to set the feeling down before it fades. I finished at the top of my class, and I am the one student of the six offered an internship, which is how a young man from a concrete crew finds himself about to design a Grand Prix.
Two years ago I was a concrete finisher, earning eighteen dollars an hour with my journeyman laborer's hands. I was good at it, and I told myself I would never get my certificate, because I did not want to become a lifer. What pulled at me was the high end, aesthetic side of the work, the design of it, except that on a crew a young man's job is to do, not to think. So in the fall of 2004 I left, and I put my own money, real money earned in the cold, into becoming someone whose entire job is to think.
I interviewed at every school I could find. DevStudios was the most expensive on my list and, strangely, the shortest, a two-year diploma compressed into five relentless months through their REV12 program. The moment I shook Grant Curry's hand I knew it was the place. That kind of acceleration is exactly how I am built. I left high school with a hundred and forty-five credits when a hundred will graduate you. I do not know how to attend something at half effort.
So I more or less lived there. DevStudios was one of the only schools with twenty-four hour access to the faculty, and I used every hour of it. There is a cot in that building that came to know me well. I would be at my desk by five in the morning, three hours of work already behind me by the time the others arrived at eight. I earned a great many perfect marks, and a few impossible ones above a hundred percent, not because I am gifted, but because I simply would not leave.
The thing that changed me was code. Kingston Fung taught us Flash and ActionScript, and the first time I made something move because I had told it to, in language, something opened in me that has not closed since. I came in believing design was print and polish. I am leaving knowing it is also logic and motion and systems, and that the web is about to become a real place to do the work.
I will be honest about one thing I carry. I hold a diploma, not a degree, no master's, no long letters after my name, and I know there are rooms where that will be counted against me. I have simply decided not to accept that arithmetic. Experience and relentless due diligence can stand in for years of training, and I intend to prove it on the work itself rather than on a transcript. I would rather be measured by what I can build than by how long I sat to learn it.
I believe design is the language through which I will change the things around me. Good design quietly solves a great many bad problems, and I want to spend my life solving them. That is not a small ambition for a former concrete finisher with a five-month diploma, and I am aware of that, and I am walking toward it on purpose.
The internship is at Windship Aviation, and the work, of all things, is a Grand Prix. I have no idea yet what it will ask of me. I only know that I walked out of that school certain of one thing. I am exactly where I am meant to be, and I am only just beginning.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · February 2005