Happy Birthday Rad!

Today is Rad’s birthday, or as I nicknamed him, the Radman. He’s a pretty cool dude who lives in the Phoenix area with his wife Kim and son Owen. We also got to attend his wedding in 2002. Nothing makes you long for Winter to hurry up and end quickly than being in the Arizona desert in November. I’m sure the guests from the Midwest were even more reluctant to return to the cold and wet weather of Central Illinois. 
 
I’ve lost track how long Rad has been there. I know it’s at least a decade because he sent this awesome postcard he made about his move. He’s standing out in the desert, near one of Phoenix’s geological landmarks. I need to find it in my storage since I can’t remember if it’s Camelback Mountain or somewhere. 
 
July is a very fitting month for Rad too. Both of the friends I made and kept from Dynamic Graphics have July birthdays, like me. Rad and Christina. But this is all about Rad today. 
 
We originally met through our mutual friend Steve Bryant back in my GDW days. I think we hit it off because I always looked forward to his visits to Bloomington-Normal (he lived in nearby Peoria). Obviously he was into the same geeky things we liked, comics especially and he could draw, just like Steve. One time Rad was even nice enough to draw a Star Wars character for my local gaming store’s newsletter. He also got my foot in the door for a job at DG in 1993. I’m still trying to repay that favor. 
 
When we worked together at DG, I saw the coolest demonstration of his artistic and Mac talent with Adobe Illustrator. Rad was the lead person on the Designer’s Club line of clip art, exclusively vectored files made in Illustrator yet could be opened with Aldus FreeHand or CorelDraw. He could quickly tweak the images so software could take advantage of the layer features, thus an incentive for DG’s customers to subscribe to the digital formats over print. One piece in the print edition was a robot sitting behind a desk by Mitch O’Connell, pretty nice but limited. The Radman used a combination of Adobe Streamline and Illustrator to make the desk and robot separate items. Thus the customer could remove the desk or use it alone. What was cooler was Rad’s skill at drawing the parts of the robot obscured by the desk in the print version. 
 
You can see more of his awesome talent at his own site. Be sure to wish him happy birthday too.