My First Environmental Design Project Was Paid in Groceries

Before I had a design degree. Before I had a portfolio. Before I even knew "environmental design" was a real discipline with a real name — I was laminating menu panels on my own wide-format printer and taping them to a plexiglass window above a deli counter.

This was around 2007. The client was a small neighborhood corner store called 8 Brothers Grocery. The brief, such as it was, came from me — I looked at what they had taped up and said something like:

"I cannot allow you guys to represent our neighborhood with this marker drawn paper taped up to this window. If I have to stand here to order food, I feel real bummed looking at it, when I can do something. Can I please give you a new one?"

Here's what the menu looked like before I touched it.

BEFORE PHOTO — handwritten signs taped above the deli case

Torn paper. Marker. Prices crossed out and rewritten by hand. Signs literally taped to the glass. Sale stickers pasted anywhere. An item called "PROBOLOGE CHEESE" that I'm fairly sure was supposed to say provolone. It worked, in the sense that people could technically read it and order food. But it wasn't doing the store any favors.

I didn't just see a menu that needed new fonts. I saw a whole environment — a physical space people walked into every day, looked up at, and made a decision in. So instead of treating it like "make the menu pretty," I treated it like an environmental design problem.

ARTWORK — the finished "8 Brothers Grocery" system, breakfast/hot sandwiches/cold sandwiches/lunch meat panels]

I designed a full large-format panel system. Then — because there was no production team, no printer on staff, no installer coming through — I took it all the way to the finish line myself. I printed every panel on my own wide-format printer. Laminated each one by hand. Arranged and mounted them myself, right there above the case.

I wasn't paid with a design fee. I was paid in groceries.

For years after that, every time I walked in to shop, someone behind the counter would announce it to the whole store: "Hey everyone, you see that menu back there? This is who made it."

Here's the part I think about the most, all these years later: that menu stayed up for years. It didn't get replaced because the design failed or looked dated. It got replaced because the store changed hands and the new owners changed their prices. The design didn't fail — it simply outlived the business that commissioned it.

That project taught me something before I had the language for it: design doesn't end when the file exports. The deliverable wasn't a PDF. It was a physical thing people looked at, ordered from, and lived alongside every single day. Scale, viewing distance, materials, durability, mounting, lighting, how someone actually stands and reads it while waiting in line — none of that is optional information. It's the whole job.

That mindset never left. It just got bigger rooms to work in — storefront windows for Long & Foster, trade show environmental graphics, a citywide bus campaign for DC's Department of Parks & Recreation. Different scale, same question every time: how does someone actually move through this space, and what do they experience along the way?

I don't put "environmental design" on my resume because it's a trendy keyword. I put it there because I've been doing it since before I had a degree — printing oversized graphics on my own printer, laminating them by hand, installing them myself, and watching them hold up for years.

Design isn't finished when the artwork gets approved. It's finished when people experience it. And if you've done it right, they'll keep experiencing it for a long time after you've moved on to the next thing.