Growing up, my parents owned a sign company. I was always interested in the functionality of art. With signs, it was the ability to get the information out in an aesthetically pleasing way. There were so many examples, driving down any road in Indiana, of “unreadable” signs. The ability to incorporate art into usable information seemed to be a challenge to many.
I went to college with the goal of helping my parents advance their sign business, but during my college years my parents decided to close down the sign company. I still went on to graduate with my bachelor’s degree in Computer Graphic Technology. My focus was in multimedia and page layout design. I learned the ins and outs of Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and many other programs. Of course we were not allowed to use any programs such as Dreamweaver because they “would never create good code.” It was notepad for all of our HTML. I learned a lot from the program but upon graduating, I realized that they never taught us how to actually publish a website online and there wasn’t a focus on search engine optimization at all.
I took a few years off from computer graphics after graduating, but everything I did always lead me back to designing websites. I finally gave in and in 2010 started Roarke Ventures. Roarke Ventures has helped many small businesses with their design and marketing needs. It is something that I truly enjoy doing and am thankful that I have the opportunity to do so.