Mark has been a professional Graphic Designer since 1994, when he left the Design program at Eastern Michigan University to join the corporate design office of United Technologies Automotive. While there, he progressed from Junior to Senior designer before leaving to pursue another opportunity in the rapidly growing Internet industry.

In 1996, Mark joined CICNet as their staff designer, working on marketing materials for the company and designing web sites for their customers. But fate would play a cruel trick on him, as CICNet was understaffed. It was quickly determined that Mark had a certain facility with Internet servers and had somehow managed to learn Unix systems administration by osmosis. This led to a lot less design and a lot more systems work, much to his chagrin.

In 1997, CICNet was sold, and Mark left to join the webhosting group at ANS Communications, the original NSFNet-founded Internet backbone provider. By this time all pretense of design had been dropped from his title, and he settled in for a career as a hard-core Internet geek. Between 1997 and 2002, ANS Communications was sold to WorldCom (yes, that WorldCom) and was (at different points) left alone, merged with Compuserve to form WorldCom Advanced Networks and merged into UUNet. While the corporate situations were in flux, Mark remained steady, and was promoted from webhosting engineer to senior webhosting engineer to manager of webhosting engineering. That was until 2000, when webhosting was moved to the UUNet offices in Virginia and Mark transfered to Unix operations group as a senior engineer. By this time, as you can imagine, he was quite disillusioned, but stuck it out because that's the kind of guy he is.

Throughout these career changes, Mark continued to do freelance graphic design as a way to maintain sanity. In early 2002, during another of WorldCom's giant layoffs, Mark's opportunity for freedom presented itself, and he jumped in with both feet, starting Purple Toupee Design Works and returning to the work he loves.

Mark can be reached at 616/335-3486 or 616/893-5437 (cell phone), and his email address is disco@purpletoupee.com