Portfolio : About

Most people call me Mark. My full name is from an old Hindu text. And I am a Canadian, living in California. It’s an interesting story.

I’ve been working in advertising, and design for almost 20 years. During that time I've been called an Art Director, Visual Designer, Interactive Art Director, Brand Designer, and UI/UX Designer. I’ve been designing websites since high school, occasionally coding them too.

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Why “Sorta great” and not “super great”?

I can promise sorta great work every time. I’m humble enough to admit that I don’t hit it out of the park 100% on every project. But that doesn't stop me from always swinging for the fences. In my view, sorta great is beyond good, it's kind of awesome.

Said better by Christoph Niemann:

Even in the absence of talent and inspiration, you can —through sheer practice — become so good at art that you reliably deliver very good work.

Now great work — that’s something else.

For great work you also need a lot of skill and craft. But you need something else that you can’t control. [Luck with a cherry on top.]

Once you accept this, your life actually becomes a lot easier.

(If you are a client, please remember: All you can ask from an artist is very good work. Great work is not really plannable.)

Here are some headshots from Stable Diffusion trained on my face. Want to make some free portraits too? Here's a tutorial.

Ten things

I love street art and graphics. I recommend looking up the documentary Beautiful Losers.
I’m enjoying building responsive components in Figma. Auto layout and variants are very powerful.
I am exploring page animation in Webflow. It’s great that there is a visual tool like Webflow that makes code accessible to more people.
Currently, I’m taking Product Design and Roblox Studio classes through Udemy. I also have a year+ streak on Duolingo.
I love connecting with people to talk art or design. Want to chat or looking for some feedback on a project? Feel free to reach out.

The first computer I used was an Apple Lisa II.
I have fond memories of using Kidpix as a kid on the family Performa. Gotta love that fractal tree brush.
I made my first website in 1996. It's still online, but runs on Wordpress. Originally, I learned to code from using the ‘view source’ menu in Netscape Navigator and typing in BBEdit.
Back in the day, I was a pro with actionscript and Flash animation.
I have worked at over two dozen ad agencies, design firms, and tech companies, in freelance and full-time roles. It’s very humbling coming into a place as a freelancer and leaving when a contract ends.