Tom Hapgood

About

Tom’s interests are typography, motion graphics, information design, ubiquitous computing (qr codes), father depiction in mass media, Radio Frequency Identification, and installation art. Lately, he’s also been involved in production, design consulting and strategizing with Monster.com and U.S. News & World Report with HarperCollins publisher and authors Jeremy Hyman and Lynn Jacobs. He is a consultant for Applied Minds out of Glendale, CA, and recently the Arkansas Air Museum, the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and launched the site and packaging for The Buffalo Flows.

Tom Hapgood grew up on the banks of the Sudbury River outside of Boston, Massachusetts, before moving to the deserts of southeastern Arizona. He then went on to live in Karlsruhe, Germany for five years, followed by a mission in central Italy for two years. He earned an undergraduate degree in photo journalism and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. He has experience in print and Web design, some of which happened at newspapers, where he could be seen designing and laying out pages with X-ACTO knives and one-point tape, or hand-coding html for early Web browsers. While working in Web design at the height of the dot-com boom, Tom worked with clients such as Marriott, MTV, American Bankers Association, Lifetime, Nickelodeon, Water Environment Foundation and Verizon. Before coming to teach interactive design at the University of Arkansas in 2005, Tom was Design and Project Manager at the Treistman Center for New Media, a Digital Arts research and development lab at the University of Arizona employing cutting-edge technology such as rapid prototyping and 3D scanning, internet2-driven collaborative design and virtual reality. While there, he led the interface team for the Pachyderm web-based presentation software, collaborating with designers and programmers from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Media Consortium, Metropolitan Museum of Art and several other museums and universities around North America. He also acted as Design and Project Manager for several other collaborative projects including the University of Arizona’s Fine Arts ePortfolio and Artstream: Exhibitions of Digital Arts (with the UA Museum of Art). Presently, he is at the University of Arkansas Art Department, where he teaches Web Design, Animation and Typography (see Courses) and is involved in research involving SecondLife, semacode and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) with the Walton College of Business and the College of Engineering.