<aside> 🖐️ We’ll be starting out on Zoom! Such is life. You can access the meeting room here.
</aside>
A little bit about me
A little bit about you
Break
Our goals for the course
Everything is a web page
I apologize in advance.
My name is Michael Fehrenbach. I use he/him pronouns. Please call me Michael!
I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, where I also went to school. I miss it (the Northwest) all the time.
I moved to New York about 13 years ago for work, then lived in London for a spell, came back here, and now am always one-more-bad-winter away from finally heading off to California.
When I’m not working at a computer, you can generally find me with a camera in my hand, on a bicycle (not at the same time), or sitting in the dark of a movie theater (well, pre-pandemic).
As a kid, I was always drawing. When I was maybe four, my parents bought us a computer. (This was in the late 80s, mind you. It had a command line.) We’ll call that the start—and since I’ve always been somewhere between creative and technical.
In college, I studied a bunch of things—but then found out you could study design and made that one of them.
When I started working, like everyone else I knew at the time, I was trying to be a print designer. But I sort of immediately fell into digital work, as often I was the most technical one around.
So I worked for a little while in advertising, then a digital agency, then freelancing with Big Dumb Companies. Eventually I started an on-again-off-again relationship with The Museum of Modern Art—where I worked for the better part of the past ten years.
It’s there that I really became a designer and a developer, working on countless versions/parts of moma.org, digital signage, kiosks, in-gallery displays, etc.
Why am I telling you all this? There are a lot of paths one can take in this field, and some don’t even exist yet when you set out on them. This was mine.
…so please bear with me! I am going to try my best.
And to some extent, I’d like to sound this out with you all as we go along. I think the form of our course can, and will, evolve over the semester. Tell me what is working, and what is not.
This is me as my most-used emoji.