Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Stow.
Chris, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in Roswell, GA. A typical suburban kid obsessed with music and skateboarding. Blink 182 and Jackass. Basically an early 2000’s pop-punk starter pack. I was horrible at skateboarding but I bring it up in relation to how I got started in design because I’d end up spending more time staring at the latest CSS catalog than actually skating. Skateboarding was in the middle of a resurgence and the deck graphics companies like Element, Habitat, and Alien Workshop were putting out were amazing. Particularly the clean, thick linework Don Pendleton became famous for. Those days sparked my interest in art and design but it wasn’t until later that I really started to take it seriously.
Skateboarding gave way to learning the guitar and at 14 I began playing in bands. That quickly became my main focus. Through music, opportunities would occasionally pop up for me to create flyers, stickers, buttons, and covers. Most of that was created using some weird hybrid of scanning hand-drawn graphics into the computer and using powerpoint to lay everything out. Definitely not ideal but it’s all I knew how to do.
Band life continued through high school and college. There came a point in college that the amount of effort I really wanted to put into playing music would have made it difficult to get a degree. Not impossible but more difficult than I was comfortable with at the time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I felt the pressure to have some kind of degree. In the end, I still wound up going to 3 different universities, switching majors almost every year, and spending six years flip-flopping back and forth before graduating.
Even after graduating I still didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to do. It’s not a unique situation but at the time I felt like I was at a standstill. I was interested in the creative design world but I didn’t know the right steps to work my way there. A friend helped me land a marketing internship at a digital agency which turned into a full-time gig. I got interested in web design and quickly worked my way into a role as a UX/UI designer. During my internship, I was also interning at a design studio doing more graphic design related work.
For the past five years, I’ve focused on both digital product and graphic design. About a year and a half ago I joined the creative team at Public School working on a ton of different projects. Everything from large scale experience design to branding. I love the variety. It forces me to keep learning which in turn helps me experiment on new ideas.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
My biggest struggle or I guess regret, was not starting sooner. It was about six years ago that I decided to finally watch some Lynda tutorials and learn my way around Adobe products. I had messed around with photoshop when I was younger, but I never really had an idea of what I was doing or how things worked. Eventually, the idea of masks and layers just clicked and from then on its been an everyday thing.
Chris Stow – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
My work tends to fall into one of two different buckets. There’s my work on the agency side and there’s my personal/commission based work.
Working for an agency like Public School allows me to work in a way that’s completely different than my personal work. We work with some big brands and there’s numerous equally big opportunities to make a splash. I love it because we’re in a position to really push creative strategy and pitch the kind of work we’re really passionate about. The variety of talent there is huge.
My work outside of Public School is what’s generally displayed on Instagram and what I guess I’m becoming more known for in a social sense. My style is constantly evolving but I’ve been having fun lately exploring new textures and experimenting with more abstract shapes and layouts. I like trying to blend this rough, often torn, look with something crisp and polished. I think it’s the organized chaos that I’m attracted to.
My wife and I have an amazing eight month old at home, so any free time I have at the end of the day after a good dose of family time is spent creating in some fashion. Whatever the objective is in the moment. If I’m working on more of an art-focused piece I try and be pretty loose about what the end goal is at times. It helps ideas go down different paths without the need to steer back towards a specific set of rules. If I’m working off a brief, I like to map out where I instinctually will go and look for new ways to get to the same idea.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Practically speaking I’d define success as accomplishing what you’ve set out to achieve. In reality, it’s more of an emotion. Do you feel successful at the moment? Do you feel successful when you looked at yourself five years ago? It’s a great feeling to look back and think – wow I’ve actually accomplished a lot. Whatever those goals may be. As long as I can look back and have that feeling, I’d say I’m successful.
Contact Info:
- Website: thecollectiveecho.com
- Email: chris@thecollectiveecho.com
- Instagram: cstow
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