eOgraphy

I was born “Thomas M. Wrenn Jr.” in Worcester, Massachusetts September 10, 1972 to parents, and local teachers, Thomas and Patricia Wrenn. Rooted in central Massachusetts all of my childhood and teenage years, I attended Worcester Central Catholic and on to Holy Name High School. In my sophomore year, I transferred and graduated from Doherty Memorial High School. At DMHS was where I developed my eye for art and design, and soon became involved in their Graphic Design program (1987-1990). I followed through with my passion for the graphic arts and later went on to obtain an Associate’s of Arts Degree from Becker Collage. A program rich in every aspect of the field, advertising, marketing, computer graphics, photography and desktop publishing. A hard find for such a new and changing field in 1990. During this term at Becker Collage, I served my internship at Light Mechanics in Worcester. A state of the art digital and traditional photography and video company. Their major client at the time was CVS. This was where I developed my eye for true commercial design and the development of it from concept to completion.

I pride myself in creating well informed entrepreneurs out of my clients.

Witnessing everything from the scheduling of the photo shoots, to the ad slicks and separations, and then going to press. Jeff, the lead creative knew every aspect. His philosophy was to know all areas of the process in order to be incredibly effective as a true creative. Upon graduation, I had decided to pursue the art of commercial graphic design, and enroll in the BFA program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. At the time, one of seven Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) Degree programs in the country.

A memorable moment was when I was standing on my porch during Home Coming 1994, and a friend/alumni who was in town from Boston says to me “Tommy, do yourself a favor, learn HTML, if you don’t your an idiot.” I took his advice.

While at UMASS Amherst, I was accepted to a summer abroad program sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum. The program was located at the La Napoule Art Foundation in La Napoule France, just out side of Cannes. I studied the relationship of images with text and the differences between European design and traditional American commercial graphic design. My internship at UMASS was an experience in itself as well, working for the University Gallery. Highlights were hanging artwork and meeting Chuck Close in person, as well as working directly with George Trakkas on one of his works, a sculptor and local to Amherst, who had a profound influence on my philosophy of art and design. I graduated in May 1996. After UMASS, I settled in at Corporate Graphics in Westborough, Massachusetts during 1996/97. I was in charge of the large format printing department and E6 processing for slide presentations. Also photo retouching and light graphics were also my duties. The team at Corporate Graphics was extremely professional for such a small organization, always demanding your best, no matter what the task. Perfection was the only option. This was also where I meet one of the most influential figures in my career, CG’s Creative Director John Christy. Who would later bring me to the Autoweb Interactive team in Santa Clara, California.

After a year at Corporate Graphics, I ventured out to California, Los Angeles to be exact, and worked for the company Sunrider International as a graphic designer for just under a year. There I worked on packaging and labeling, corporate newsletters and collateral, ads, photo shoots (large format 4×5), and illustration. LA was a great experience, it just wasn’t for me, I’m an east-coaster. Although, I remember when they kicked us all out of work one day because they needed to film the NASA scene for “Armageddon“, they filmed it right outside my office. That was pretty cool.

Deciding that LA wasn’t the place to be, I relocated back to Worcester and took a job at Advertising Associates. There I learned the ropes in advertising on a local level. Working with some of Worcesters top companies, I needed to get into the swing of weekly ads and campaign, as well as fitting other print collateral projects into the mix. Producing plates and running the linotype were part of my daily duties. I spent 1999 here, until early 2000. One day, I received a call from a former colleague,  who was currently assembling a team in Santa Clara for a company called Autoweb. A contract to perm, job opportunity was available and needed to be filled. For the second time I was off to California to see what it had to offer, although this time it was Northern California, in the heart of the internet mecca Silicon Valley.

I jumped at the chance and for the next few years was involved with one of the largest websites of its time, with unprecedented traffic and “firsts” in the industry, I was quickly promoted to Art Director. Project duties at Autoweb were overseeing banner ad development, general style guide creation and enforcement, creative brainstorming for business development department, user interface design and testing and so on. Just around the same time, in 2001 the tech bubble was loosing air and company’s were slowly merging and/or going out of business. Autoweb was eventually sold to Autobytel for 15 million. Shortly there after, offers were made to relocate down south to Orange County, to the Autobytel Headquarters. Not quite ready to leave Silicon Valley, I relocated to Los Gatos, where I freelanced for the next year and a half, working on everything from real estate management to brand development and start-up.

In early 2003, I relocated back to Boston, having successfully held down a good group of clients in California, I slowly started to build a client base on the east coast where I contracted and freelanced for the next few years. Eventually I formed a design group that was called ImageBoston. A scalable creative entity that could produce everything from television ad campaign to corporate web design. I was the creative lead at ImageBoston from 2005 to 2008.

At the beginning of 2009, I was working exclusively as TommyWrenn.com, a Consultant and Creative Manager for North East Area business. To date, I have worked with over 50 companies one-on-one, managing a wide range of projects. My latest, NARSAD, an independent, well funded non-profit organization just outside New York City, in Great Neck, Long Island. This “research and rescue” project was as intricate as it was detailed. The next nine months I spent hundreds of man hours and tens of thousands of dollars to salvage a website build from a large worldwide advertising agency, whom clearly bit off more than they could chew. With their project lagging for two and a half years, NARSAD decided they needed to shift gears, how, they didn’t know. At the time I was working for a non-profit scientific research organization called SchzopreniaForum.org. Their CEO referred me to NARSAD’s Acting VP and the rest was history. I started with recreating the original request, while bringing the attributes they needed updated to the foreground, since being in production for two plus years, updates were necessary indeed.

Together, with a team of developers I had selected, Alec Graziano from Imaginus Web Development, Rob Lee of Silver East Designs and Jason Darrow from SchizophreniaForum.org, I worked one-on-one with NARSAD’s internal eBoard to resurrect their project, and complete the original request with style. A fully functioning Content Management System integrated into Drupal. All content from their original Atomz Database also had to be merged into their new database. While simultaneously rebuilding their site architecture page by page with the Content Architect and developers, within three months of production kick-off we had live product, and shortly there after we had site launch. Since then, the team I had set in motion, is still in place.

Today, I am working with some truly diverse clients, from fine jewelry to physical therapy and back to medical device engineering. The market is a much different place, so I pride myself in creating well informed entrepreneurs out of my clients. Not cornering them, but giving them full control over their businesses, creative concepts and collateral. I can promise you that the experience you get from me and my professional network of designers, developers and marketing gurus will be congruent to the experience you will get from a large ad agency, if not better, because we provide one-on-one service. Try getting that from a big agency.

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See you online and Thanks for visiting!

Tommy Wrenn