Me: Professional Bio

Biography of a prolific professional creative.

Twenty year graphic communications industry veteran and renaissance man Pariah S. Burke prolifically pursues his passion for all things creative as:

Publisher and founder of Designorati, a 360-Degree View of the Creative World;
Editor-in-chief of Quark VS InDesign.com;
Author of Adobe Illustrator CS2 At Work: Projects You Can Use on the Job (Sam's,2005);
Co-author of Special Edition: Using Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Que, 2005);
An in-demand design and publishing workflow consultant and creative software trainer;
A freelance print and web designer;
A nice guy.

Before Designorati, Pariah created and wrote until April 2005 the Design Weblog, the Magazine Design Weblog, and the (Unofficial) Photoshop Weblog for Weblogs, Inc., the world's largest blogging network. His opinions on graphic design and in particular Quark and InDesign are widely quoted, and his best known website, Quark VS InDesign.com, has occupied for over two years the top search engine results slot for "Quark sucks," a mantra among Quark users.

Pariah travels around North America training and consulting for ad and design agencies, print and pre-press production houses, and government and military agencies in InDesign, Quark, Adobe Creative Suite, InCopy, Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, Acrobat, Variable Data Publishing, and PDF Section 508 Accessibility.

As a professional in creative design, Pariah has enjoyed success in nearly every field of print and web design, prepress, magazine publishing, internet marketing, and advertising. He founded iHost and iWebPro web hosting providers and iCheck (later Hermod Internet Check Systems), the world's first online B2B check-based payment processing provider. His former projects include the internationally acclaimed small press magazine, On Night's Wings, which he created and captained in the early Nineties, and the then definitive reference on the Windows 95/98 and NT Registries, the ebook The RegistryFAQ, which he published in the late Nineties. He has co-owned a pre-press service bureau and spent seven years as the principal of Imaginations UNlimited, a small but influential design and advertising agency.

Among Pariah's design credits are work for Time-Warner, Black Crow Broadcasting, UPSCALE Magazine, and Playboy, for whom he created and managed the Playboy Sun skin- and sun-care product line national campaign, including designing the line's brand identity as well as all product packaging, promotional materials, and photography.

In 2001 Pariah sold Imaginations UNlimited and moved from Daytona Beach, FL to Portland, OR to accept a position training and providing advanced how-to support to Adobe Systems, Inc.'s North American Technical Support team. As Technical Lead to Technical Support for InDesign, InCopy, PageMaker, Illustrator, and Acrobat, and as primary how-to guru and MVP for Photoshop, ImageReady, typography, color management, pre-press, and QuarkXPress, Pariah trained Adobe's Technial Support team to use Adobe products and related technologies. In February of 2004 he left Adobe to return full-time to his life-long passion of graphic design, and to explore exciting new projects like Quark VS InDesign and Designorati.

His articles have been published in InDesign Magazine, TUAW.com, CreativePro.com, and other media. His many projects, as well as detailed contact information, may be seen on his personal website, I Am Pariah.com.

Pariah resides in Beaverton, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, with his girlfriend, two lovely step-daughters, a dog, five uppity cats, and three hamsters.

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