About
Ahoy hoy,
My name is Tom Karels thank you for making it to my website.
Family Influences
Design has influenced me and my family for generations. My great uncle designed the 1st resin TVs for Zenith. My mom was one of the first drafts women for UOP (she drew oil rigs back in the 70’s). So design was a natural fit for me from the get go.
What’s a Saluki?
I actually started my college education thinking that I was going to go into dental technology. For those of you don’t know what that is, its making fake teeth (weird right?), crowns, bridges and dentures. Finding that the tooth biz was not as creative as previously thought, I decided to take a few prerequisites in design.
I studied design at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a Saluki is our mascot. Carbondale is an amazing little town embedded in the Shawnee National Forest. If you haven’t been before, I highly suggest you go. If and when you do, make sure to check out the spillway, wine trails and Winston’s Bagel.
In 2003, I received a bachelors of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Communication Design and a minor in art history. Since then I have been living and working in the greater Chicagoland area. I currently live in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, about 4 blocks from Wrigley Field… this is the year!
The Pegasus
I currently work for Reader’s Digest Magazine. RD owns a handful of different companies such as Taste of Home, All Recipes, Time Life, etc. I maintain the ecommerce websites for Taste of Home, Country Store Catalog and Readers Digest.
Cooking for Two
Since I spend a lot of time working on websites that focus on food and cooking, I’ve decided it would be fun to teach myself how to cook. It’s been going pretty well thus far. I have to be honest though, I’ve had some help, my lovely and talented fiancee Maddy King.
Maddy and I are currently planning to get married in October 2011. We plan on having a karaoke wedding… just kidding, I tried for it and she wasn’t having it.
This site will be dedicated to my life, design and random sites I find that are intereting. Feel free to comment, interact and share.