Meet Terry Duffy of Glyphics/Terry Duffy Design in We were in downtown Scottsdale

Today we’d like to introduce you to Terry Duffy.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up the fifth of six kids, in a creative family in Minneapolis Minnesota where we all did some form of art and still do but my desire to learn more about alternative health lead me to Santa Fe, New Mexico where I went to school and learned about how much I love anatomy and physiology. My tandem career went from there. I got a job in a publishing company and worked in the art department and lined long galleys of type with wax and burnished them into place. My tools were a rapideograph pen, an Exacto knife, and at-square. I was an apprentice for Cynthia Homire and Jorge Fick, a potter and a painter on the side and helped them glaze pottery.

My family spent a lot of time in Mexico when we were growing up so Santa Fe felt like home to me immediately but the need to know more about health lead me to San Francisco to get a degree in alternative health and design from Antioch University where I could combine my two passions. With my one-year-old son in hand, I left a bad marriage, and we moved to the Bay Area. I got a job as an art director at Yoga Journal Magazine while I was going to school. That was a stressful time in my life as any of you who have kids and went back to school know. I learned to multitask big time!

I asked at school if I could redesign the magazine and get credit for it and they allowed me to take a black and white magazine on newsprint with swamis on the front with a string going through their nostrils and modernize it. I told them that there was a whole audience out there that we were missing and I proceeded to rebrand them and put a beautiful yogini on the cover and Paul Horn after that with his alto flute. I have to laugh when I think of where that industry is today and that I might have helped it along a little.

I married my current husband, and after I graduated, we moved back to Santa Fe where I started my studio Glyphics. My husband graduated from Berkeley in architecture, and we ended up doing a lot of museum design together. He would do the 3-dimensional work, and I would design the graphic panels. There I learned that teasing people to read was and is my most important job as a graphic designer.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Having your own business is never easy. It’s usually feast or famine, and you need to do the work and then market and spin many plates. I have always been blessed with incredible people that worked with me over the years, and we are all still great friends. I have worked with Becky Ankeny for over twenty years, and she is my friend and ally and an incredible designer on many levels. Making our own schedule, having offices that are “kid central” has been crazy and exhilarating at the same time. To me, freedom is worth a lot of money.

After moving from Santa Fe to Phoenix, we got caught in the housing crash, and we lost our house as many people did over that time period. We lived in our office for a period of time, and that was very devastating but packed with lots of lessons as well. My yoga and yoga community helped me through that as well as joining a group of 12 women in 2012 that worked on the Lode Star Homeless Shelter in downtown Phoenix. It was the perfect project for me to work on right then since it showed me how lucky I was and how much I had after meeting those who really had nothing.

We’d love to hear more about what you do.
I designed all the branding and collateral for three classical/jazz music festivals, Bravo Colorado, Vail Valley Music Festival, Music From Angel Fire outside of Taos New Mexico and Ocean Reef in the Florida Keys. My client John Giovando was great, and he let me do whatever I wanted, and we really got to do quality design. That was my bread and butter for over 30 years. My tandem design and health interests have always overlapped and run side by side. I have designed many books on health and healing, and the epitome of the universe giving me what I asked for was redesigning the Halle Heart Children’s Museum for the American Heart Association in Tempe, Arizona.

We gutted a 20,000 sq ft museum and curated, designed and fabricated eight interactive exhibits that show kids how to take care of their heart. We worked with an incredible group of talented people and with them we wrote all the copy in raps, designed interactive games, filmed three videos and opened an incredible teaching museum that is the only cardiovascular museum in the world. I am very proud of that project. Thousands of kids go through that museum and go home, and many tell great stories about how they saved a life because of what they learned. I have been designing a lot of curriculum lately, and I really love that.

It allows me to curate, design and learn so much myself. Along with the exhibit panel design, developing curriculum really sets us apart. We designed the curriculum for The Arizona Burn Foundation to teach kids how to not get burned. I got to hire Mellissa Diggens to write and Greg Ham to illustrate and develop characters for the book. They also worked with Becky and I on the Halle Heart Children’s Museum, and it was great to team up with them again. We have done the curriculum for LA Kitchen a culinary school for ex-cons and kids growing out of the foster care system.

We designed, did the photography and wrote part of the curriculum that teaches the anatomy and physiology of digestion and I teach it through art. We draw, stencil and paint the organs that allow us to digest food. It’s fun, and everyone loves to learn about themselves. We also designed the curriculum for The Garden School Foundation and I got to work with Lauren Corallo on that project to develop an interactive gardening curriculum for kids from Kindergarten – 6th grade to teach them how to garden, cook the food that they sow and even learn math, science and vocabulary while they are at it. They have turned asphalt into gardens at five different schools in downtown LA.

Education is how you change the world, and that is what I like to be a part of the most.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Working with great people and helping our clients succeed by listening to what they really need, enjoying the process and celebrating our successes. Then get excited and go back at it by doing something that stimulates your creativity. I love to paint, and now I’m doing more health coaching.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.glyphicsdesign.com
• Phone: 602-670-3114
• Instagram: terry@glyphicsdesign.com

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