When I tell people I work at a graphic design firm, they usually assume I must be a graphic designer. But I'm not. I'm the copywriter, proofreader and office manager at Signal Design Incorporated. I'm in charge of the words in all the stuff Signal produces, and we have a very talented team of professional designers who take care of the visuals. What I usually don't tell anyone, though, is that once upon a time I wanted to be a graphic designer.

But instead, when it came time for college, I decided that writing was my thing. I majored in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with plans of being a professional writer. For my first few years out of college, I wasn't too successful at that goal. (See my bio for the whole sad story.) Stuck in a dead-end job as a bookstore manager, I desperately wanted get myself back on track by becoming an editor or something in the world of publishing. My friend Shea Tisdale told me the graphic design firm where he worked had a need for a freelance proofreader on some projects. Thus was I first introduced to Signal Design.

I imagined I'd just pick up a reference for my résumé there before moving on to my "real" job somewhere else, but Signal itself ended up being my real job. After that fateful choice between writing and graphic design I had made in high school, I thought never the twain would meet. I had taken a semester of drawing classes at UNC, and I designed a T-shirt for my dorm, but since college I have only rarely done any artwork. But somehow, without really trying, I became a writer in the graphic design business. It was destiny.

Things seemed to click between me and Signal right from the start. The owners were really great people, I could tell at once. President Rick Haynes and his partners Dave Grinnell and John Gibson ran a small business that was cool and laid-back but highly professional. Signal had started in 1992, and when I came along in the fall of 1995 the company was going through some growing pains.

Rick was personally handling all the bookkeeping, payroll, payables and receivables, and he was having to work late at home to get it all done. He was thinking of hiring someone to do the books and answer the phones, but didn't really want to make it a full-time position. Signal also needed copywriting occasionally, but relied on freelancers instead of considering a staff writer. Plus there was always proofreading that needed to be done, which Rick and Dave mostly handled, although they had their hands full already. And to be honest, no one at Signal was a master of spelling or grammar. But again, they didn't have the resources to hire a proofreader.

Then I appeared on the scene, this writer-type guy whom everybody got along with reasonably well, and the idea germinated that they could take all these little jobs that Signal needed help with -- proofreading, copywriting, bookkeeping, answering the phones -- and meld them together into one job that I could capably fill. It was a perfect match. The only hurdle was that Rick Haynes is highly fiscally conservative in his business decisions. In other words, he's a penny-pinching bastard, God bless him. I had to court him and cajole him and beg and plead for several months, and finally he gave in and hired me. I don't think he's regretted that decision too much.

There are tons of reasons why Signal Design has been such a cool place to work. My bosses are good, honest guys who will never purposely do anyone wrong. They're not just my employers, they're my friends. It's a small company with no giant bureaucracy and no corporate home office dictating policy. The designers and I work together as an efficient and effective team. We use Macintoshes. We call our clients by their first names. We have a casual dress code. We produce creative, aesthetically pleasing work. We've got a second studio located in Wilmington, so we occasionally get to go down to the beach and do some stone-cold chillin'. There's generally very little bullshit to put up with. I often ask myself: how many people can genuinely say so many good things about the place where they work?

I've learned a lot of stuff about the design industry, which has its own language of jargon like FPO, DPI, CMYK, linos, comps, color breaks, bluelines, matchprint proofs, electronic mechanical files, turnkey jobs, kerning, leading, snipes, starbursts and Greeked copy ("lorem ipsum dolor" is actually Latin gibberish, but if you tell the designers that, they'll just look at you funny). You don't call your Macintosh your "computer" in a design shop -- you call it your "machine," which I've always thought made for an appealing factory-worker metaphor. Signal also employs some unique in-house terminology coined by Rick and Dave. For instance, a "wormburner" is a fast-turn job with an immediate deadline (borrowed from a golf term for a low-flying drive, evidently), and payday is charmingly referred to as "time for the eagle to shit."

I've also learned to respect the designers a lot. They're under pressure to produce creative work on demand, juggling a full load of different clients and timelines at any given time, and they deliver. Aside from the question of my talent, I don't think I have the temperament to be a graphic designer. I'm too damn egotistical and jealous to watch other designers' work get chosen instead of mine, and to put up with clients making crazy arbitrary changes to what I've designed. It's a good thing I'm the lone copywriter at Signal, wielding supreme dictatorial power over words and punctuation all by myself, or else there'd be daily fistfights. But the designers I've known are true professionals, having the selflessness and class to work with each other and the customers with only periodical furious eruptions. My hat's off to those guys and gals.

And if your company needs a logo, some printed materials or a web site design, I know just the place that'll help you send the right signals. Tell 'em Lard Biscuit Enterprises sent ya.