Happy birthday, Michael Dabrowa
Here’s wishing the happiest of VizEds birthdays today to my good friend Michael Dabrowa of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Michael and I go back a long, long ways. When he graduated from the Savannah College of Art & Design in 1990, he came to work for me at The Herald in Rock Hill, S.C. Whenever I see awesome work Michael has done or hear about awards that he’s won, I like to brag that I’m the guy who taught Mikey to use a Macintosh. Before he came to Rock Hill, he had only used Amiga computers!
I can kid, but Michael really took The Herald by storm. He was — and is — a brilliant illustrator and very easy to work with. He’s also amazingly fast. Which comes in handy when an editor suddenly demands last-minute changes to a big project.
I remember telling Mike once that he’d collect so many tearsheets that in just two years, he could move on to nearly any paper he liked. Damned if he didn’t move on, almost exactly two years later. I suspect he was marking a calendar he had hidden somewhere: “Ah, finally, it’s been two years. I can leave this bastard…”
Michael moved to The Daily Press of Newport News, Va. — ironically, just across the water from Norfolk — where he cleaned The Pilot’s clock several years in the Virginia Press Association contest graphics categories. He eventually found himself running the place. In the late 1990s, he became graphics editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He ran the department there for something like eight years.
These days, Michael is working with the news design team, leading by example as he builds alternative story forms and packages. Who better than an experienced graphics guy to build ASFs? His recent work is some of the best of his career, in my opinion:
See more, of course, in his NewsPageDesigner portfolio.
Mikey shares a birthday with Nick Mrozowski of The Virginian-Pilot, actors Clark Gable, Bill Mumy, Sherilyn Fenn and Pauly Shore, musicians Rick James, Lisa Marie Presley and OutKast’s Big Boi, director John Ford and former Russian leader Boris Yeltsin.
Plus, today is Serpent Day. Seriously.
Best wishes for a happy birthday, Michael, my friend. Thanks for all you’ve meant to me over the years. You’re a great pal. Please give my best to Pam and Libby!
