I recently retired after a long career as a designer in the tech industry, and I’m grateful to have had professional opportunities that aligned with my creative ambitions for practically my entire adult life. But still, especially during my last couple years in the workforce, I wished for more time and freedom to design and make things that reflected my somewhat sprawling aesthetic and far too many interests. I was apprehensive up front about taking this next step, because I didn’t have a formal plan for exactly what I wanted to do in retirement, but I also realized it would require a leap of faith and trust that my subsequent journey would gradually reveal itself over time.

I don’t do much social media, in fact I started ditching my accounts on most platforms a couple years ago. However, I do love communicating with words and pictures (mostly pictures!), so I decided that perhaps an old-school blog might be just my speed for documenting my post-work life. I love that my blog belongs to me and me alone, and I can embellish it however I choose – and if no one ever looks at it, and it amounts to little more than a personal visual journal that happens to be online, that’s fine! So here we are.

For the time being, I’m sort of playing catch-up and tackling some of the rainy-day creative projects that filled my personal OneNote pages for years, but I never had the time for – so early on it might be pretty heavy on the design and illustration side. But I do anticipate branching out to share some cultural adventures, and just to reflect occasionally, old man style. Even after these first few months, I’m discovering some new avenues I didn’t anticipate, so perhaps my leap of faith is starting to pay early dividends. Thanks for looking. 

PS: comments are disabled throughout, but you can reach me at mike(at)tintoyrobots.com