A Walk To Remember

Walk Design is the alter ego of Matt Walker, a graphic designer with over 12 years of experience as a professional designer in web, logo and print design. Matt specializes in designing web sites and logos for Professional Sports Athletes in North America.

Matt is the son of former Homicide Detective Bob Walker and his wife Christine. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Bob and Christine moved to Mahopac (about 50 miles north of New York City) a year before Matt was born. From a very early age Matt had a passion for drawing sports personalities and uniforms and drawing logos for local New York sports teams. When Matt’s dreams of being the next Dennis Byrd failed (right around senior year in high school), Matt quickly realized that art was probably his only real option to get into college with. He chose the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City to persue an Illustration degree. It was there where Matt’s classmate Mike Sanfiorenzo pointed out that Illustration was a dying medium and they better learn the computer pretty darn quick. The next semester Matt changed majors to Advertising Design where he quickly learned the more commercial principles of graphic design. At this time Matt was also very involved in student government at the school and was the FITSA Student Body President as well as a member of the Board of trustees. The combination of educational politics as well as the commercialistic principals would build a strong foundation that he would draw from for years to come.

Yoe!

Matt’s very first professional job out of school was a designer for Yoe! Studio in Peekskill, NY. Although the job didn’t pay well at all, it was a really exciting opportunity for a young designer to carve their teeth on some of the hottest properties of the time with clients such as Cartoon Network, Goosebumps, Big Boy, Nickelodeon, Bazooka Joe, Hasbro Interactive and many more. The work was hard and the hours were long, but to be the lead designer on products of that magnitude at that age was truly unimaginable to him. His very first project still ranks as one of his favorites as he created his award winning Zamboni logo on one of his first days of work.

Eventually though Matt felt he needed to leave Yoe! and expand his horizons as well as learn some more foundational skills in Print design to further his career, this led him to East West Creative in New York City. East West proved to be a to plight agency doing mostly print work for all of Kraft’s products such as Cool Whip, Jell-O, Johnson & Johnson, Keebler, Kraft Foods, Oreo, and Post Cereals. It was at East West that Matt combined the creative skills he learned at Yoe! with more technical knowledge and agency savvy. He also met Chris Kammerer, who to this day Matt considers to be his mentor in the business principles of design.

However, his stay at East West was cut short when Matt got an offer from Buddy Foy to start an internet company with his fiancé and another business associate Dean DerGarabedian in Buddy’s apartment living room in Wallington, NJ. The company was called Cyberretail and they were going to be one of the first companies to really take on e-commerce in the fashion world. It was a really interesting and scary proposition for Matt since he was a relative novice to Internet design, but it was 1998 and the field was so open and new that after speaking with his father, they decided that he would be foolish not to take on this new world and learn everything he could. He was also encouraged by the idea that even though to this point he was a print designer, there really wasn’t any design on the Internet to speak of, so he had a slight leg up on everyone else.

Cyberretail however was a real challenge. It was one of the hardest endeavors that Matt would ever pursue. The 4 of them would work morning, noon and night and weekends to do anything they could to survive. It was filled with really big highs and really low lows. It was literally the best of times and the worst of times all rolled into one. Matt will probably never learn so much in such a small period of time as he did at Cyberretail. The Internet was so new that everyone was making mistakes and failing, but as a collective group the amount of knowledge that was acquired from all of those hardships would prove to be invaluable. In time, the group of 4 would swell to well over 30 and Matt went from being a designer to a Creative Director with a staff of 5 people. Ultimately though the company could not reach the IPO that they all sweated and worked so hard for. And although the group bled and sweat with each other for so long, the pressure and the stress proved to be too much to overcome. Matt was feeling that he had taken everything he could from his experience, but he wanted to learn more. He wanted to be more. The Internet was still in its infancy, but he already had a few years of experience under his belt. So as usually was the case in Matt’s life, when the time came to grow and improve he packed his bags and went back into Manhattan.

Immediately after leaving Cyberretail Matt quickly learned that the Internet boom was in full swing. He quickly signed on to be a Senior Art Director with Fry Multimedia in the South Street Seaport. It was a super cool office with all of the swanky schwag and perks you would assume a cool guy office would have. It also had all of the best clients. In Matt’s time there he would get to design from scratch or redesign sites for some of the top companies in the world like Coach, Cornell University, Godiva Chocolatier, Growing Family, New York Mercantile Exchange, Ragú, The Sporting News, Waterworks, Waterford, and Wishbone. It was a great time and a great time to be in the web. The perks were plenty and being an entrepreneurial spirit like Matt was a great thing to be. But (as you are kind of getting the rhythm of the story by now) like all good things, the golden age of the Internet had to end. Even though he survived over seven rounds of layoffs, Matt’s time at Fry came to an end. Towards the end it got pretty ugly. There was a lot of finger pointing and politics. Life wasn’t as happy when you have an endless checking account that dries up and people start wondering if it was all some fad that would never come back again. Matt was out of a job, had an engagement ring that was only half paid for and not too many options.

The Nutmeg State It Is

Matt worked a lot of freelance work to make ends meet after Fry. It was tough times for a while. But one day he actually had a choice between two jobs. One in Long Island for a small website firm or one as the head of three websites for the Casual Corner in Enfield, CT. Ultimately the decision was fairly easy. Although Matt had a lot of friends and family in Long Island, the opportunity was just better in CT. Being engaged and looking to start a family coupled with the opportunity to take his fairly substantial ecommerce background to an internal firm seemed like the natural fit. He had never worked in a true corporate setting before, but compare to the Long Island Expressway it seemed like a cakewalk. However, the corporate setting was a lot tougher than he realized. A lot of the technology he took for granted, as the norm coming from super cool guy design world hadn’t even made itself up to the Connecticut-Massachusetts border yet. Most people were still waiting to upgrade to Windows 98 and it was already 2003 (which for a Mac user is pure sacrilege).

It was a more daunting task than it really appeared. It taught Matt a few life lessons he will always carry with him. First, just because something doesn’t look designed well doesn’t mean it was by accident. In many cases it was chosen to look that way over much better alternatives. Second, always do heavy research into the company you are joining technical departments. They are probably the biggest hurdles in the modem corporate world and if you work on the Internet they can make or break you. And in the case of Casual Corner, that and few hundred other poorly conceived decisions on their part broke them. In the winter of 2005 they went out of business. It wasn’t really a big shock to anyone. The writing was on the wall for years. The company was just going through the motions until the end.

The great part for Matt was that as the company was coming to a close, his freelance business was picking up! Through a great contact with his cousin Mike at Major League Baseball, Matt got hooked up with Albert Pujols of the Cardinals and their family charity. Matt was able to design a site for Albert that got the attention of the athletic community. It was with that site that Matt got a call from Kathy Jacobson to help out on a site for Barry Zito’s Strikeouts for Troops. With the company workload screeching to a halt, it allowed Matt time to hone his craft. By the time the company was closing it’s doors Matt had a formidable collection of sports sites, which got him his shot at the company he always hoped he would work for when he moved to Connecticut… ESPN.

The World Wide Leader and More

With nothing more than either blind luck or divine intervention Matt was able to land a job at ESPN as the Fantasy Sports Designer only 2 weeks after the Casual Corner closed it’s doors. For a man with 2 infants at home (at that point, we now are blessed with three kids) it was one of the most fortunate things that could ever have happened. The Fantasy opportunity was also right up Matt’s alley. The opportunity was wide open and it allowed Matt to work on logos, User interface design, game design, etc. In the time that Matt has been at ESPN he has overseen a complete overhaul of the entire Fantasy product. The work has ranged from a complete logo overhaul, to a complete overhaul of all of the games under the umbrella. Fantasy Sports continues to be one of the largest growing departments in all of ESPN and Matt has been the designer at the helm of it.

At the same time Matt's freelance career was really picking up. With the core business Matt created before he got to ESPN, he was able to expand that to a include a sizeable list of professional athletes mostly from baseball but more coming from football as well.