Brandt Hoekenga - HOEKENGA DESIGN

My design career began when I enrolled in The University of California, Davis. While majoring in Environmental Design I worked at the California Aggie Newspaper as a Graphic Artist before being promoted to Art Director. I was responsible for all visual aspects of the newspaper including the weekly Arts and Entertainment cover as well as managing all of the illustrators. My final year at the Aggie I also wrote and illustrated a comic strip called 'Such Is Life' three days a week. My experience at the Aggie was a great way to apply the design concepts I was learning every day in the classroom to on the job situations.

In conjunction with my class work and work experience at the Aggie, I had an internship at a small film company, Ravenlock Media. My duties included web design, movie poster creation and production design.

As I finished up my courses at UC Davis I worked for Prima Publishing in Rocklin, California. As a Design Assistant I created back-of-book ads, made corrections to text and prepared graphic-intensive video game strategy guides for print. This somewhat tedious work taught me more about printing, file formats and other pre-press techniques than any class could ever teach me. Nothing replaces hands on experience.

After graduation from UC Davis in late 1998, I moved to Tahoe, California, where I taught skiing for the winter while maintaining freelance work for Prima Publishing. After the snow melted I headed home to Sonoma County and continued to freelance while I looked for a full-time position.

In 1999 I started at De Loach Vineyards in Santa Rosa, California. My initial position included Public Relations duties as well as web and print design. De Loach used a design studio for the majority of their POS and packaging, but each project I watched go out the door, I took home and did a version on my own time. Eventually, more and more design work stayed in house. By the end of my three years at De Loach Vineyards I was the Director of Creative Services with a staff of three people. All creative came through my office and I made the decision whether to produce it myself, outsource it, or give it to one of my capable staff.

Finally, in October of 2002 I decided the time was right to launch Hoekenga Design full-time. I left my position at De Loach Vineyards and have continued to develop my list of clients.