Who is behind Colleen Eakins Design?

### About Colleen Eakins Colleen Eakins is a senior level graphic designer, art director and marketing enthusiast. Her path to the field of graphic design had an interesting start in that, until her senior year of high school, she wanted to be a scientist. Specifically, a chemist. She was a crafty and artistic child growing up, but never thought one could actually make a living with artistic pursuits. The age old ‘starving artist’ label is what came to mind. She knew that she wanted a career in a field she was interested in so that work would never feel like work and that’s how science entered the picture. When her head wasn’t buried in a book or a sketch pad, she was conducting science ‘experiments’ with household items, which led to her winning at selected science fairs in her community. During her senior year of high school, a college recruiter visited her school to promote a new multi-media program they had just started. She was intrigued by the program but of the three disciplines (audio/visual; animation; graphic design), she was only interested in the graphic design portion. It combined two things she loved – computers and art. After some research, she learned that graphic design was offered at some colleges as a stand-alone discipline and a degreed program. She had also learned through her research that the chemistry degree track at most colleges required an automatic minor in math…which was not her favorite subject. *Graphic design for the win!* She furthered her education after landing her first graphic designer role, by pursuing a MBA with a concentration in Marketing. She chose marketing because she realized that what she did as a designer was to support marketing efforts and she was also tired of being introduced as an afterthought as ‘just a designer’ in business meetings with vendors. Colleen feels that the additional marketing knowledge base helps to round her out as a designer and she approaches her design from this perspective.

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