Kris DeGraeve
Education
I attended the University of Northern Iowa on a full tuition scholarship, awarded based on my art portfolio. I majored in Fine Art with an emphasis on Graphic Design, but I had enough advanced placement credits when I started that I was able to take classes in a wide variety of fields including computer drafting, industrial technology, fashion design, performing arts, and dance, in addition to a wide variety of non-design art classes.
Jewelry Design
After graduation, I spent some time designing and making my own jewelry line, which was available through my website, wholesale, and craft markets. I made use of a laser cutter for a lot of my work. During this time I focused on teaching myself web design, so that I could run my own website, and I worked extensively with vector based design, because that’s what laser cutters can cut.
Freelance Creative Work
I’ve worked in a variety of fields through freelance and contract work. I created websites for a variety of clients (mostly ecommerce), made paper props for stop motion animation commercials for Brach’s Candy and the Indiana Lottery, and I wrote articles online and for print that were featured in H&M Lifestyle, BoingBoing.net, Make: Magazine, Craftgawker, Stylegawker, and Instructables. I’ve won or been runner-up in about 14 contests on Instructables, based on my ability to write tutorials on food, craft, technology, and woodworking. I also worked as a project manager for a company that provides interactive touchscreen maps for confrences and trade shows. On Pinterest, pins from projects I’ve written reach an average of 946,705 people per month.
Glitch & Generative Art
When I was attending university, I focused my major on Graphic Design because I was expecting to learn about using computers to create art. Unfortunately, my timing was wrong, because I was there while the design department was having an internal struggle for control, with the ‘old guard’ arguing that if you let students use computers they would never learn the craft, while more forward thinking professors argued that computers were a necessary part of a real education. The upside is that I can create design by hand better than anyone in this century needs to, but the downside is that when I graduated, I hadn’t spent enough time with computers to understand that they really were my medium of choice.
After graduation I taught myself enough web design to be able to build functional websites, but it wasn’t until later, when I was engaged on Instructables and wanted to be able to program Arduino and Rapsberry Pi, that I realized how interesting creative code could be. So, as always, I continued to teach myself ways to code what I wanted to see in the world, building up dozens of programs, many of which are focused on using the data built into photos and videos to manipulate imagery, without even requiring a user interface. You can see lots of this kind of work by going to the home page.


