Designer, App Developer, Conference Creator, and Author

Excerpt from Storyteller Profile: Dave Mason – Designer, App Developer, Conference Creator, and Author.

Who is Dave Mason?

Dave Mason is a man of very many hats (helmets might also be appropriate, depending on what he’s working on at the moment). He is the founding partner and Principal at Multiple Inc., a Chicago-based strategic design firm that harnesses the power of visual storytelling to help its client drive change by designing and advancing brands, services, and products. He is also an avid sports lover – a former high school football and youth hockey coach and current hockey dad who took his passion for the game and transformed it into PowerPlayer, a feedback platform he created to help athletes progress by making their holistic stories accessible. And, last but not least, he is a newly minted author who used his “free time” to pen a novel.

A natural creator, Dave is relentless in his pursuit of transforming his passions into projects and his ideas into tangible realities. And in doing so, he helps craft stories that have an impact – for his clients, the athletes who use his platform, or the people who read his book.

Check out our conversation with Dave below:

TMC: We’ve got Dave Mason here. I would like to summarize what he does, but he does so many things that it might be better left for him to do. So, Dave, I feel like it wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that you do literally a little bit of everything. You founded and currently run a very successful graphic design business in Chicago, you’ve been involved in apps and tech, including your newest venture, PowerPlayer, and as if that wasn’t enough, you recently wrote a book. If you had to title yourself, what would that be?

DM: Ask me the tough question right off the bat! I’m a designer. That’s how I describe myself. I started out in business as a graphic designer but, quickly, you realize that the words you choose are a design process as well. The way you present anything - or yourself – is part of a design process. So, I don’t have an all-encompassing word to describe myself. I just tell people I’m a designer by training and by experience, but it has led to other things.

That’s a good creative and all-encompassing term. And, so, how did you get into design? How did you know it was a passion for you? What pushed you to pursue in the capacity that you did?

Well, my father was an aeronautical engineer. So, I was around a guy who – I knew he could draw – but he did technical drawings, and I was always kind of intrigued by that as a kid. And I always tried to figure out what the hell he did for a living and, I don’t know if he told me this or I made it up, but I seem to remember that he told me one day, “Well, I just sort of draw things on paper, and then other people build them.” And so, in my mind, I was like, “Huh… so, you can do that and get other people to do the hard part? That sounds like a way to make a living!” So, I was around design, in a sense, for my whole life, growing up.

And, one thing that I point to, was having an older brother who was a music nut. And, we would sit on the floor of our shared bedroom, and we had our little record player, and he would play the latest Jethro Tull or whatever we were into, and he was grooving on the music, and I was grooving on the album covers. I liked the music too, don’t get me wrong, but I was just fascinated by the design of the covers. So, when I think back, he ended up having a career in music, and I had a career in graphic design, and it all sort of started from our bedroom floor.