About Us

Fat Dog Creatives is a full-service design studio…of one. With direct and unfettered access to your designer, you can contact me immediately when you have a need or concern–no middle-person or gatekeeper. While I work collaboratively with marketing teams and associations throughout the US remotely, I also work with businesses local to the Tacoma and Olympia areas. I move around the country, so my next or previous (Austin, San Antonio, and Washington, DC) local area may indeed be near you!

Most of my clients are associations, insurance companies, financial services firms, construction and development companies, and retailers that desire an experienced, educated professional who knows and understand their industries. While I hold a BA and MA in communications and speak on communications and design-related topics, I use my experience working for companies within these industries to evaluate the business climate and clients’ needs and synthesize significant amounts of content into smaller, digestible messages both graphically and in writing.

Much of the work I do is logo design (some branding) and convention/conference exhibition graphics. However, I also design marketing collateral, web sites, and other publications. Print is my passion, but web design is where it all started in the mid 1990s. (Actually, the programming foundation started in the early 1990s on an Apple IIE in high school learning BASIC.)

One of my earliest memories of childhood is of lying on my stomach on the living room floor with a fat pencil in my hand and a Big Chief tablet. That giant pad of paper–how I loved it! Not yet able to write all that well, I remember drawing…a lot. I was probably four years old.

In second grade we had a self-portrait project. So into it, I included all the details from the shirt I wore the first day of the project. I earned first place, which was just a congratulatory first position on the wall of portraits. (That alone was enough for me since I otherwise was always last. My last name started with W, and we always had to line up by last name in alphabetical order. Ugh!) Pretty much everything was right…except for the nose. I worked and reworked that thing to get it right and still had a Petunia Pig nose. That darn nose!

That summer (’83) was when I came up with my million-dollar idea. Too bad my mom didn’t save it, or we’d all be rich by now. On a long summer drive from Texas to visit family in Colorado, I had a pencil and notepad to keep myself occupied. My first newspaper. Since. I wasn’t much of a writer then, I put in my paper what I had seen in other papers, namely the Centerville News. Of course, I had to include a wedding announcement…Roy and Ann Droid. I wrote some story headlines and used squiggly lines for the article texts (my early version or Lorem ipsum). Car ads were a must too. One car ad was for the Long Family car. The car we were traveling in was not fun or big enough for everyone to stretch out. So, the Long Family car was pretty much a limousine. Another ad was a feature that came with the Long Family car. This feature transformed the lengthy car into a short, compact car that could fit in any parking space with ease (apparently, this was a concern of my 9-year old self). You could simply squeeze the Long Family car into a smaller car I cleverly called the Squeezador! You may know this car by its current name, the Smart car. Yes, my drawings of the Squeezador were EXACTLY like the Smart car!

I received my undergraduate degree in communications from Sam Houston State University (a student and big fan of Dr. Terry Thibodeaux and Dr. Mary Evelyn Collins) in Huntsville, TX. After a decade of building my career, I returned to academia and earned my graduate degree in communications from the University of the Incarnate Word (a dedicated student of Dr. Greenberg, Dr. Liu, and Dr. Perry, who pushed me beyond just getting top marks) in San Antonio, TX. I value my time and education at both institutions and look forward to thanking them all again in person one day.

My graduate research work focused on branding and color theory, which has served me well. Much of my blog articles are about the two topics.

I wanted something that conveys I’m happy, professional, easy to work with, have a sense of humor, and possess a network of other professionals to execute any creative need a business might have. Because it’s not always just me working on a project, I didn’t want to use my name.

My favorite activity is playing games. I love trivia, charades, Pictionary, etc. I also am in love with my dogs. One of my dogs was with me for 17 years–through boyfriends, college, marriage, etc. How could I combine that to come up with a great name?

A Show That Influenced More Than Just Hairstyles
I thought of one of my favorite episodes of “Friends,” where Monica and Rachael were playing trivia with Chandler and Joey for the girls’ apartment. In that episode, it was revealed that Monica’s nickname was “Big Fat Goalie.” Well, I loved how quickly that name rolled off the tongue. Big Fat Dog Design didn’t quite encompass everything since it overlooks my photography and the networking aspect of what I do. When I replaced “design” with “creatives” the name, Big Fat Dog Creatives, was too long. So, it became Fat Dog Creatives.

The dog graphic was a no-brainer. I used a combination of my two dogs. One was very fat (Zacky), and the other had some cute large patches of color (Shiner).

That’s my name story.