The son of an electronics engineer(father) and an artist(mother), Joshua began his interest in computers when he represented his school at a state wide computer knowledge challenge in 1989. Using his MS-DOS prompt to create green on black ASCII art before it capped at 5 lines, he knew he wanted to combine his creativity and passion for art with his interest in technology and computers.
In the early 1990's he was paid $20 to do his very first logo - for a motorcycle club, and found an internship as a junior designer and assistant for a small technology company LinkUp. A few years later, in 1996, he cut his teeth as a graphic designer for an apparel company, Top Stitch, and as the industry began to transition from mechanically based output to computer generated graphics, Joshua was there to witness and partake in the transformation.
In 1997 Joshua began attended Oklahoma State University and received an offer to work for the technology department, helping to create some of the first versions of OSU's website and subsets and received awards for helping to create some of the first online classes, then called "Distance Learning". Before graduating in 2000 with the schools first accredited degree in Multimedia Design (which he helped create the curriculum for while attending), Joshua had already been presented with multiple opportunities for employment.
In 1999, just prior to graduation, Joshua accepted an offer from Dallas, TX based Vectrix.com and was able to finish his degree remotely - the first student of his campus to do so. Vectrix was a web services company start-up, and as Joshua had already spent years designing and creating Flash websites, he was employed to do so for a number of large companies including Motorola, Flooze and Elf-Bowling. He also assisted in creating the identity and first version of Cinemark's Fandango website for online movie ticketing.
A year later he was recruited by one of the most prestigious design firms in the southwest, Hybrid (previously Sweiter Design) to join their team as the Senior Interactive Designer. While working for Hybrid, Joshua was able to gain an enormous amount of experience in corporate branding working under a Creative Director from Landor & Associates who had worked on developing the FedEx logo and many other identities and another Senior Creative Director who spent almost a decade at Nike Design. He worked on a wide variety of clients including, American Airlines, Blockbuster, Dassault Falcon, D/G Worldwide, Folgers, FOX Sports, Fujitsu, Morningstar Foods, Pampers, SunSoy and Southwest Airlines.
In November of 2001, Joshua co-founded AbstractDevice, an interactive web design agency. He was recognized by numerous publications in over 70 countries for creating the world first stereoscopic 3-D Flash website, and offered to send company branded 3-d glasses to anyone for free. During his time with AbstractDevice Joshua lead teams of designers & developers to work on a wide variety of clientele ranging from local mom-and-pop storefronts to Fortune 100 companies like EDS, Hampton Inns, Hyatt Hotels, Nokia, PepsiCo (Aquifina, Mountain Dew Code Red, Pepsi, Sierra Mist) and Sony.
After building AbstractDevice for two years, he sold his portion of the company to an investor from Houston to pursue an offer from the Dallas based advertising powerhouse RappCollins Worldwide (An Omnicom Company), to lead then SBC's (AT&T) interactive marketing & advertising design and copywriting teams. During his time working at RappCollins he assisted in the company dividing in to two corporations, and was part of the new company JavelinDirect. At JavenlinDirect he lead a large team of designs, copywriters and front-end technical employees, and as Javelin's client base expanded along with SBC (AT&T), they added DishNetwork, and a handful of smaller ad campaigns with Walt Disney, USAA, and several major league sports teams.
In 2005 Hotels.com (then under InterActiveCorp) recruited Joshua to head up a complete rebranding of the online travel giant. Joshua lead the user experience design team and front-end developers. During his tenure, Hotels.com merged with Expedia.com which allowed the opportunity to use some of the worlds first eye-tracking software to research user behavior and combined with additional laboratory testing innovate and prove out a number of best practices and usability solutions that were adopted by the travel industry and are still in use today. His innovations helped result in a nearly 300% increase in daily revenue from online bookings. Joshua worked on a variety of cross promotional campaigns between Expedia.com, Hotwire.com and TripAdvisor.com as well as incorporated user generated hotel feedback directly into hotels.com. He also helped lead the creation of several international version of hotels.com as well as a great number of sub-branded sites that used an affiliate platform that Joshua helped to architect and design.
After two years in the travel industry, Joshua decided to expand his creative mind in a number of settings. He started a branding and user experience consultancy to help other companies with the insights he had gained. Joshua spent time investing in real estate, remodeling modern residential and commercial properties for resale. Additional he was also able to spend time focusing on creating and showing contemporary fine art across the country from New York to L.A. He has had a large number of both group and solo shows, received many accolades, including a multitude of publication reviews as well as receiving the prestigious "Dallas Nine" award, which had not been awarded since the late 1930s.
In 2008 Joshua received an offer from start-up Big Jump Media, which owned the two largest Christian websites in the world (one a video file sharing site, the other a monitored social network), to lead the strategy, architecture, design, copy & email marketing teams. During his time he was able to spend an enormous amount of time studying user behavior while creating a social network for Christians, developing vertical email strategies sending 15 to 20 million emails monthly to increase daily traffic and he was instrumental in getting the company purchased by Salem Communication in 2010.
Joshua had been consulting with a new start-up company called Rethink Books since 2009, and officially joined the team once he had successfully helped transition the Big Jump Media web properties. Rethink Books is creating a socially based, device agnostic, reading platform for ebooks, which allows users to follow one another, create online book clubs, adding photos, video and commentary inline to any long form content and giving the ability to share to their social networks. Joshua has been key in helping to architect, design and strategize how the software platform will be used by both publishers, online retailers, universities and many others. Additionally, Joshua has helped lead a secondary product, AuthorPages, which allows users to create media rich experience on Facebook. During his time with Rethink Books, Joshua has worked with some of the largest publisher and authors in the industry.
In 2011, Joshua is serving as the Vice President for Rethink Books, and has also been involved with several other business startups, recently forming a small consulting company as an umbrella for his entrepreneurial endeavors. He is part owner of an security products distribution company, and is also working on a new platform for the private Jet charter industry. Joshua also creates contemporary fine art and shows it nationally.
