A bit about me

I’m Michael Steinhofer, and I’m a graphics professional

I’ve never been very good at writing about myself. But, you came to my website, so you may as well find out a little about me.

I started this journey back in 1994 when I decided to take an Advertising Art class in my junior year of high school. I’ll spare you the details of that time, as it was a long time ago, but that class was the main reason I decided go to FIT which led me to pursue a career in Graphic Design.

I currently work mainly in publishing but have done advertising, corporate identities, direct mail, annual reports and things of the like. I’m an excellent production artist capable of high end photo retouching and compositing.

I design and produce books for English Language Teaching (ELT) at Oxford University Press. The work involves conceptualizing the product, designing and laying it out, and doing all the production work on it to make it print ready. Also, I have to create artwork, select illustrators appropriate for the market and select and retouch photos for the books as well. I also art direct photo shoots on occasion. I manage multiple projects at a time and coordinate with in-house design and editorial staff as well as out of house packagers frequently. In the time I have been at Oxford, I have grown into a Design Project Management position. The amount of hands on designing I do there is limited these days. But, I often make time to create product where I can.

So far, my career has been mainly print focused. I began branching out into digital publishing basically the day Adobe released their Digital Publishing Suite. While I have not yet produced a final product with DPS, I am very familiar with the tools used to create them.

I have a passion for continuing to develop my technical skills. I am an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop. I have an expertise in InDesign and Illustrator and am more than proficient in Acrobat, too. Since DPS arrived, I began learning html and css also so that I can expand on what the native DPS tools offer. And that has led to some web design projects for Oxford as well. I have worked in Dreamweaver. But, honestly, once I became familiar with how to code, it’s just easier to use a code editor like Sublime Text.

I have a working knowledge of Premiere Pro and After Effects, though I wouldn’t consider myself well versed in motion graphics. I really just enjoy learning software.

I also really enjoy photography. If I were to classify myself as to what type of photographer I am, I would have to say a landscape photographer. But I also enjoy street photography and portraiture. And, in my photography, I do all of my post work in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Well, there you have it. That’s me in a nutshell. Thanks for stopping by!