I became a design professor by accident. That’s not false modesty. It’s just the truth.
In 1999, I was 38 years old and broke. Not “between opportunities” broke. Broke broke. The international sales territory I’d spent five years building, accounts across nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere, millions in annual revenue, had collapsed. My marriage ended. I lost the house, lost daily access to my children, and moved into the back of my parents’ house wondering what exactly had gone wrong with the plan.
There wasn’t a plan after that. There was a beach, and a hurricane, and a lot of debris. I started picking up trash because I couldn’t think of anything else useful to do. One piece of paper at a time, every morning, walking two miles before sunrise. It sounds like a metaphor. It wasn’t. It was literally picking up garbage off the ground because that was the one thing I was sure I could contribute.
Somewhere in the middle of that, through a chain of coincidences I still can’t fully explain, a friend asked if I could teach a computer class at a small university. I said yes because I didn’t have a better answer. Twenty-five years later, I’m still here, still teaching, and the classroom turned out to be the one place I’d ever felt like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do.
What I Actually Do
I’m the Graphic Arts and Design Department Chair at Keiser University in Lakeland, Florida. I teach typography, layout, digital imaging, color theory, web development, and creative problem-solving. But if you asked my students what I actually teach, most of them would say something closer to: how to see things you couldn’t see before you walked in.
I teach design as applied neuroscience. How the brain processes visual information in a specific temporal sequence, and how understanding that sequence makes you a fundamentally better designer than any software tutorial ever will. Software is only a tool. The thinking is the craft.
The Creativity Research
Here’s something students eventually discover about me. I have a question I can’t let go of.
Over 25 years of teaching, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat in every class. One or two students overflow with creative ideas, images, concepts, directions pouring out of them. The rest stare at blank screens and jump to the first thing they see. The technical students learn the tools, produce technically correct work, and it’s hollow. Something is missing, and it’s not talent.
Christmas break 2019, I finally sat down with that question and refused to get up until I had an answer. I found the research. Creativity is a skill. It can be measured, taught, developed, improved. It’s not a mysterious gift some people are born with. It’s a sequence problem. The reason most people believe they aren’t creative isn’t because they lack the ability. It’s because nobody ever taught them to practice it.
That discovery changed everything. I went back to my students with five to ten minutes of structured creativity exercises at the start of every class. Within three weeks, the transformation was visible. Students were collaborating before jumping to solutions. They were generating multiple approaches instead of clinging to the first idea. The work got deeper. I looked at those results and thought: where has this been the whole time?
Those three weeks eventually became Playing With Purpose, a collection of 650 original creativity exercises designed to retrain the sequence that creative thinking depends on. Each one is built on solid research, wrapped in a short parable, and followed by reflection questions. Research says 98% of people test as creative geniuses at age 5. By 25, that number drops to 2%. This isn’t a talent problem. It’s a conditioning problem. The exercises are designed to undo that conditioning.
What This Site Is
This site is several things at once.
It’s the thing I spent 25 years telling my students to build and then didn’t build myself, until my daughter walked into my classroom and demonstrated, in two hours, in front of my students, exactly how far I hadn’t taken my own advice. That was humbling. She was right.
It’s a place where I write about the things I care about. Design. Teaching. Creativity. The moments that change how you see things. The mistakes that taught me more than the successes. You’ll find personal stories here, and they serve as teaching moments, not autobiography. Every story has a transferable lesson or it doesn’t make the cut.
It’s also a testing ground. The featured images on this site, and much of the visual consistency you see across posts, are produced through an experimental pipeline I’ve been developing that combines multiple AI systems to generate images and maintain a unified voice and aesthetic. I’m not going to bore you with the technical details, but I will say this: the pipeline exists because I believe the best way to understand what AI can and can’t do is to build something real with it, push it until it breaks, fix it, and push it again. That’s the same philosophy I bring to the classroom. You learn by doing, not by reading about doing.
The Disclaimer
Everything on this site represents my personal research, observations, and opinions. My own. Nobody else’s. This site has no connection to my employer. The views expressed here are not endorsed by, affiliated with, or representative of Keiser University or any other institution. I write what I think, I stand behind what I write, and if you disagree with something, I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
The Rest of the Story
Before teaching, I built an international sales division from roughly $100,000 to over $10 million in annual revenue. I managed accounts across nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere. I designed packaging, training materials, point-of-purchase displays, and websites for international markets years before I ever walked into a classroom. I was solving design problems for a decade before anyone called me a designer. Then I lost all of it, and what I found on the other side turned out to be better than what I’d been chasing.
I’m an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop. FAPSCA Florida Teacher of the Year. Recipient of the Evelyn Keiser Award for Teaching Excellence. An Eagle Scout. A Certified Toastmaster, which I value more than my college degree because it took me two years of failing at public speaking before I earned it. I’m a professional photographer who founded the Lakeland Shooters Photography Club, now over 1,300 members. And I’m a Professional Santa Claus for nonprofits, because sometimes the most important design work is making a child feel seen.
I also became an ordained minister at 60, checking the last box on the three life paths I identified as a teenager: teacher, photographer, preacher. Everyone told me none of them were practical. Nobody told me you could do all of them.
I live in Lakeland, Florida with my wife T. I believe design is communication, creativity is structured thinking, and the grade is the enemy of the education. If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of my students, one of my colleagues, or someone who stumbled onto this site through a search engine. Whoever you are, welcome. Pull up a chair. I’m glad you’re here.
Greg Williams, design instructor