I build brands.Then I built one of my own.

The Gerber Signmaker 1 was one of the first computerized signmaking systems. Mance saw what it could become, bought one, and he and Donna put it to work from a van, driving around Austin asking business owners if they needed signs. There was no real monitor. Lettering went through a tiny display, and every typeface lived on its own physical cartridge. It looked less like a design studio and more like someone was trying to run a business with a Super Nintendo.

They named the business Signs Now. After moving to Colorado, they opened three retail shops around Denver and put signmaking where ordinary business owners could walk in, see the work being made, and order it at the counter.

The smell of vinyl is my childhood.

I was born on Friday, August 8, 1986. By Monday, I was in one of their shops.

Donna was the glue. She was a full-time mom raising both of us while running two businesses, managing the shops, employees, customers, payroll, and everything in between. She made the whole thing work and always made sure her people were paid first. She taught me the rule I still apply to signs, websites, content, and entire customer experiences: if it does not communicate at a glance, it does not work.

At home, Mance had a full machine shop in our basement. He designed precision air rifles for field-target competition, including developing the Beeman/FWB P70 FT. There were vinyl cutters at work, mills and metal at home, and almost always something being figured out by making it.

The front room was covered in logos. Behind a glass divider sat the production table, rolls of vinyl, and the people turning ideas into signs, windows, and lettered vehicles. Along the back wall, letters grew from one inch to twenty-four. A customer could stand at the counter and see exactly how large a message needed to be from that distance. It was typography, scale, and readability without the presentation.

The shops attracted artists, designers, screen printers, graffiti writers, and wonderfully strange creative people. A lot of them understood letterforms at city scale, then carried that eye into fine art and design. Brandon B., one of the artists who worked with my mom, taught me production skills and something bigger: how to see. Afternoons with him meant art, politics, Radio 1190, strange ideas, and artists like Banksy long before that name escaped the art world. He showed me that art could matter without acting precious about itself.

My childhood picture books were CorelDRAW clip-art catalogs, Pantone guides, and CMYK swatches. I learned to weed vinyl, burn through transfer tape, mark surfaces with Stabilo pencils, and handle an X-Acto knife much earlier than anyone would recommend. By high school, I was lettering vehicles, making banners, cutting yard signs, and doing whatever the shop needed.

Before the bicycle club, I managed a metaphysical shop and later one of Denver's early dispensaries. I built websites, newsletters, and MySpace pages before “social media manager” sounded like a real job. The tools changed. The shop lesson did not.