Our Story
A carefully-crafted business plan, highly-educated partners and deep-pocketed investors…
While that may be the way the story begins for many businesses, it is not how I got my start. The story of how leftlane designs came to be is as unique as leftlane’s reputation for creative designs.
My name is Shawn Hesketh, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed and excelled at drawing. At the age of 12, I entered my first art contest and won the grand prize at the state level in Tennessee for calligraphy. In high school, my favorite class was Architectural Drafting, and for a brief season, I entertained the idea of becoming an architect. Being the oldest of seven children in a middle-class, single-income home meant that there wasn’t exactly a college fund from which to further my education, so in 1988, I left high school to pursue a career doing what I enjoyed best… drawing and designing.
Always a highly motivated self-learner, I drove to the bookstore of the nearest university with an art program, purchased every book in the curriculum, and went home to begin studying graphic design. I was fascinated to discover the fundamental principles of design, found a wealth of inspiration in Gestalt theory and the infamous “rule of thirds”, and expanded my toolbox with a host of new tools, including typography, grids, and the psychology of color—an education which I continue to this day.
At age 18, I registered my business under the name, Access Communications. My earliest projects included simple logos and t-shirt designs for friends and pretty much anyone who would hire me. I quickly began to appreciate the meaning of the cliche, “feast to famine,” so I took an evening job working in the prepress department at a nearby print shop.
Little did I know that this move would become more strategic than I ever anticipated.
While working for the printing company, I had the opportunity to meet and work with designers from the most prestigious design firms in Houston, handling their art boards, cutting Rubylith overlays by hand and performing complex color separations on monolithic cameras. Over the next seven years, I gained a thorough education in printing processes and the steps necessary to translate a great design into a truly memorable final product.
Meanwhile, my own business continued to grow, as I pursued increasingly challenging freelance opportunities and landed projects for larger companies. But the greatest transition was taking place on a macro scale, as the entire design world underwent an overnight transformation—the “desktop revolution” was underway.
In those early days, there were very few tools available for desktop layout and publishing. The most popular combination at the time was Aldus Pagemaker (which would later be purchased by Adobe), running on a Mac. Never afraid to embrace a new skill set, my first foray into digital publishing was a mammoth product catalog for one of the world’s largest industrial supply companies. It weighed in at nearly 400 pages when complete, and that single project gave me an intense “baptism by fire” into desktop publishing.
Because of my experience with Apple Macintosh computers, I was recruited by a rival printing company to design, build and supervise their prepress department, and we became one of the first all-digital printing shops in Houston. Over the next few years, I clocked literally thousands of hours with Adobe Photoshop and QuarkXPress, as we produced award-winning magazines and publications for Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and many other notable clients.
By 1993, my voracious appetite for exploring new communication tools had led me to a new challenge. The Internet had just begun to become popular as a source for news and other information. Within the year, I had taught myself HTML and began designing some of the first websites for my own Clients. Due to the rapid growth of this blossoming industry, my clientele grew quickly. Within just a few years, my core business had shifted from print design to web design, and the clients continued to come.
In 1995, I married a sexy schoolteacher and musician named Kay, and with her emotional support, I finally quit my day job at the printing company. We changed the name of my design business to leftlane designs and I began pursuing more challenging design projects.
Through a stroke of networking luck, I met a young woman named Susan McCoy, who eagerly hired me to handle all the print design work at the marketing firm where she was employed: Haynes Media & Marketing. Those were exciting days, and I enjoyed every minute I spent working with their team. They provided me with a steady stream of business that afforded me the opportunity to work with many clients I would have otherwise not met.
Over the years, I’ve been tremendously blessed with opportunities to work on exciting projects, but more importantly, to build long-term relationships with clients who have become our friends.
I continue to educate myself, dedicating no less than eight hours a week to reading and studying the latest techniques, tools and trends in the graphic design industry. But what I enjoy more than anything is helping folks to discover what makes them unique, and helping them to tell their story through one-of-a-kind logos, websites and marketing materials.
Kay and I are also passionate about investing in the next generation, having started one of the largest art contests in the state of Texas for high school students from all across Houston. In the past seven years, we’ve awarded more than $750,000 to high school artists, thanks to some very generous folks at Administaff, as well as many other area businesses. We are committed to providing opportunities for young artists that I did not have—namely the opportunity to study art after high school.
We are carefully considering the addition of an internship program, so that we can hire young designers, mentor them in the business, and help them learn the value of conducting business with integrity, consistency and with an emphasis on building long-term relationships. If we’re successful, we will make a positive investment in the lives of many young people, helping them become a different breed of designer… one who is both creative and reliable, sees both micro and macro, uses both right and left brain thinking, and who leads by serving others first.
What makes us unique is that we work very hard to be the most reliable members of YOUR team. Let’s face it—most designers are notoriously unreliable, flaky and temperamental. But I want folks to say of leftlane, “Those folks are different. They do what they say they’ll do, when they said they’d do it, and for how much they agreed to.”
