Dustin Larimer

This is long overdue.  Now, I’ve had portfolio sites in the past, but never one designed with the scope or intention of communicating so much information.  I’ve learned so much over the last few years, and am grateful to have met so many wonderful people who challenged me to “put up or shut up” as a creative professional.  It’s been one hell of a trip, and now I feel like I have a responsibility to start disseminating some of my ideas back into the collective conversation of the interweb.

The last two years just sort of disappeared and I’m sure some of you think I just sort of disappeared too.  The last time I made any effort to share my adventures I had just signed onto a year long contract job with some unknown company in Texas.  The freedoms of freelancing, however great, weren’t paying the bills or feeding the tum tum.  The situation was calling for a change and I decided to go for it.  Three weeks later I packed up my car and blazed a trail south towards San Antonio.

Three, two, one ...

My life pretty much disintegrated on impact.  I was starting from scratch all alone in a dirty little town 900 miles from home, friendless and bored, living in a Studio 6 and petitioning God daily to stop trying to cook the very brains out of my head that somehow got me into the inferno that is San Antonio.  I admit I thought about bailing more than once.  But I didn’t bail.  I made it work, and before long that dirty little outpost opened up and showed me a sort of timeless, rugged character that I didn’t believe a city was capable of revealing.

I fell in love with San Antonio and the amazing friends that it gave me.  Six months into my contract USAA decided to make an honest woman out of me and I joined the company as a full time employee.  I was fortunate enough to spend my time in the Enterprise Hub, where I was responsible for architecting and leading the UI development of mobile.usaa.com, which has since been written up by Business Week and Little Springs Design.  We even got a little love from Cameron Moll, which was pretty exciting (browser find “usaa”).  If you’re savvy with the Firefox useragent hack, try hitting the site with half a dozen different mobile device useragent strings and see what happens.

I had a lot of fun at USAA, and learned more in the last year than in the four years prior.  I had a hard time leaving a place where my efforts created actual human value.  We weren’t selling shoes or cars or dining room sets or similarly worthless crap.  We were building simple tools that let people manage their lives.  Have you ever tried hitting your bank’s site with a satellite web connection shared by a few thousand sailors in the middle of the Pacific?  Two packets up, two packets down.  After we launched mobile.usaa.com, deployed military personnel could track their finances and pay their bills in record time from all around the globe.  Awesome.  I’ll be sharing more snippets from my year at USAA in future posts.

Cue the exit track

I’m sitting in a nearly empty apartment as I type this.  On Friday I’ll load my belongings into a UPack shipping container bound for Savannah, Georgia.  My awesome girlfriend and I will depart the following Monday.  Leaving won’t be easy, but in the words of the immortal Matthew Wilder, “Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride, nobody gonna slow me down.  Oh, no.  I got to keep’a moovin’.”

Fast forward a week.  I’m now sitting in a nearly empty apartment in Savannah, Georgia, after a 1,200 mile roadtrip.  The move left us exhausted and scatter-brained, but we made it.  On March 23^rd I will begin a graduate program in Design Management at SCAD.  I couldn’t be more ecstatic to have this opportunity, or to have been accepted in the first place, and the exit from cubicle land will continue to be a much appreciated change of pace.

So, what now?

I have a lot of personal projects and adventures in the queue, like wandering around Europe, learning to sail and starting a web business, just to name a few.  2009 is shaping up to be a great year, and I intend to document my progress in both life and profession right here.  Grab the RSS feed and keep in touch.