Dan Cady Creative Vision Behind Hotwheels.com!

"Ever since I could pick up a pencil, I've drawn," says FIDM Graphics Design grad Dan Cady, New Media Designer for Mattel.com and the creative vision behind the Hotwheels.com website. "I drew pictures from magazines, and people from my favorite bands." Music was a big force in his life, and singing with bands and making band flyers occupied the Long Beach, California native's high school years.

Dan was attending the local community college there, en route to becoming an art teacher, when his girlfriend at the time began considering applying to FIDM for Fashion Design. In the midst of encouraging her to make her dream happen, he developed an interest in FIDM himself! He came to campus for an interview on a whim, and was asked to complete the Graphic Design Entrance Project of three visual pieces. "When I brought those back, they were pretty impressed," he remembers. His Admissions Advisor helped him with the Admissions process, and he was soon ready to start classes. "They bent over backwards to work through any obstacles from financing to scheduling," says Dan, who put himself through FIDM by working two jobs.

After graduating FIDM, Dan's first job was with Belkin Components, the largest computer peripherals manufacturer in the US. "I was a Multi-Media Artist for them, which was very cool. It was unheard of for a company to have in-house multi-media [at that time]. I was three steps ahead of the game!" After a couple of years there, he began freelancing. He's proud of the fact that he's done "everything from a magazine layout to logo development to package design, flash presentations, Internet games, and video production."

As a freelancer, he hooked up with an agency that represents creative talent, and a chance meeting at their company party led to an offer from Mattel. He was charged by their Hot Wheels division with redesigning and developing the Hotwheels.com website from the logo out!

What Dan does at Mattel goes way beyond sitting in meetings and laboring in front of a hot computer. "My job is to effectively communicate," he says. "Communication is the core of being a creative. Ultimately, I develop the most visually sound interpretation of people's ideas." After he gets the project from the Hot Wheels Marketing department, he says, "My job is to break it down to the core verb, what does this thing do and how does it do it, and translate that to an interactive medium effectively and engagingly."

For inspiration, Dan turns to his peers. He listens to music, goes to museums, and reads design magazines "religiously." The design instinct is never absent. "I never turn it off," he says. "I always seem to be thinking forward about the next project, or creating the best visual metaphor, sketching on napkins, or looking at other people's work critically and wondering how that idea evolved or if I would have executed it [that way]." He advises aspiring designers to "be creative, self-edit, and don't be afraid to be wrong."

FIDM students have the opportunity to network with Dan and learn from his experience in the Graphic Design industry on the school's yearly Career Connections day, when students get to speak with alumni in different careers. "I love to do those alumni days!" exclaims Dan. "It's nice to look back at where you've come from (even if it's not that long ago), see the faces of kids faced with similar challenges ahead to the ones you've already met, and offer them a little beacon of light that, 'Hey, I made it--so can you!'" FIDM's tradition of networking has made a difference in Dan's life as well. "FIDM has been great in connecting me with some key people in my life," he says, citing two former classmates in particular as well as his logo design instructor, Joey Rey. "I consider him one of my closest friends and he's definitely been a great mentor."

For the present, Dan is sticking with the successful design career that FIDM helped him realize. "I want to create the coolest online experience, based on the product put in front of me," he says about designing for the web. He confesses, however, "I have a lot of unexplored ambitions. Who knows, I've been talking a lot lately about opening a bookstore!".