Here at NEMAC, I make up the entirety of our design department. I’m art director, branding intern, web design specialist, print guru, and logo designer, all rolled into one package. My background is in interactive design and illustration, so I’m a bit of an outsider among our roster of scientists.

That means I’m one of you who answered A to that first question, and I’m mixed in with a bunch of B’s who make up our team. (Excepting, of course, our humanities-backgrounded editor,

One of the first assumptions we all have to tackle is realizing that not everyone has the same point of view.

I remember vividly, in my first year here, I proposed a color scheme for four categories of an index we created to map out challenges in the 27 counties of Western North Carolina. One category was the human environment, and a colleague innocently suggested using the color red. My brain immediately conjured up images of the Red Cross logo, hospitals, budgets “in the red,” alarm, Red 40, “seeing red,” politics, and so on. Red may be one of the most human colors, but it rarely implies something good happening. I gently suggested a plum purple instead, and we went from there. But that instant was when I realized how differently we approached the same subject matter, and how my skills could find a productive niche. (I know, I know — purple can have hang-ups that are just as tricky, but at least enraged bulls don’t get baited with it.)

Coming from an aesthetic background, I’m used to picking color combinations that suit an emotional need rather than a purely informational one. Sometimes you want the muted elegance of grays and a brave splash of bright robin’s egg blue, or the vibrant urgency of red blazing against dark midnight purple, or the by-now commonplace movie poster scheme of teal and orange.