David Caputo Biography
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David started out in the computer industry in 1982 with such companies as Digital, GTE and Cabot, Corp. At Digital, he was one of the first ever laserdisc multimedia programmers, utilizing DEC's IVIS system and large format Phillips LaserDisc players. At Digital he met graphic artist George Wisnowski, who was to create posters, ads and other visual materials for David's first company, Verge Productions. In 1984 he started Verge Productions with Laura Tilsley to sell records and promote events and media appearances for such bands as New Man, which featured Greenfield, Mass native Scott Gilman, later of Foreigner. These included distribution through Strawberries Records, winning the MTV Basement Tapes competition, radio appearances, and T-shirt sales at concerts opening for Bryan Adams, Culture Club, INXS, ELP and others. 1985 he hitched up his wagons and moved west to the happy valley, where he has remained happily ever since. In 1987 David teamed up with Ramon Olivencia and graphic artist George Wisnowski to create the board game Go To Jail, which was featured in local specialty stores. Through the late 1980s David worked as a consultant in the Boston area with such companies as DEC, Lotus, TJX and others. He also held some temporary programming positions with local valley companies. This of course was while David was attending the University of Massachusetts, where he was a STPEC (Social Thought and Political Economy) major. In 1989, David started The Weekly News with Mykal Ostapovicz, B.J. Cummings, Ralph Reed, Stacy Adams, Ramon Olivencia, Michael Levine and many others. The Weekly News was an independent journal of opinion sponsored by STPEC and distributed free in the happy valley and sent by subscription nationwide. It published 19 issues over 2 years and saw its circulation expand from 200 to 5000 over that time. The Weekly News was mostly supported by small business advertising and benefit concerts by the band Phish. David produced four Phish concerts in all, two at the UMass Student Union Ballroom (2/90 and 9/90), one at John M. Green Hall (2/91) at Smith College, and one at the Greenfield Armory (12/91). Tapes of these concerts are available, email for details. It was during the production of The Weekly News that David became fully conversant with the Graphic Design process. Initially, columns were typeset in a 38 character per line format on various PCs and Digital Vax terminals. DEC had the best laser printers back then. Then the columns, cartoons, artwork, etc. were all pasted up with scotch tape in midnight Kinkos sessions. Then an event happened that forever changed David's life. He bought his first Apple Macintosh computer. It was an SE/30 with a 16 mhz 030 processor, 1 MB of RAM, 40 MB Hard Drive, 9" b/w screen and a 90 day warranty for $3,500.00!!!! But it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and it caused David's housemate Robert Llamas a case of Mac Envy since his formerly wicked cool SE was now rather pokey by comparison. So he went out and dropped a cool 8K on a IIcx with a 19" Radius greyscale monitor, LaserWriter IIntx, and greyscale scanner. Now they were in business!!! The Weekly News switched to this new production method and they got pretty good at it. They used PageMaker and Photoshop and Illustrator and cranked out some pretty good stuff. Graphic Design Guru Ralph Seaman turned them to the true path of Quark Xpress and markedly increased their graphic design technique and sensibility. For this David is forever in his debt. David and Robert decided they could compete in the then embryonic desktop publishing market and Radical Solutions was born. A storefront in downtown Amherst, Mass. was opened in September, 1990. Radical Solutions featured graphic design, print brokerage, specialty product printing, multimedia programming and web site design, maintaining a downtown storefront presence for six solid years. Radical Solutions served such prominent local clients as The UMass Mullins Center, Dar Williams, the Amherst Chamber of Commerce, Yankee Candle and Mt. Holyoke College in addition to national clients like L'Oreal and ITT/Hartford. In January 1997, David closed Radical Solutions and moved his base of operations to David Caputo Graphic Design at Studio 11, 140 Pine St., Florence, MA where he remains to this day. He can be reached at 413-587-0011 or 800-472-3765. References are available upon request, please call or e-mail for more info. Obviously things have been left out. Send e-mail if you think an important detail has been omitted. ;-) |
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