(Very) Early Days

By Brent Long

Lance Murphy, Norm Hay, and myself were classmates at Sheridan College’s Graphic Design Program out of the Oakville campus. Soon after moving on from Sheridan, at a New Year’s Eve party at my apartment, Norm and Lance and I had a brief conversation about starting our own studio. Norm and Lance were working together at an agency in Oakville, and I was working at the in-house graphics department of Consumers Gas (now Enbridge) in North York.

After having registered Fusion Design Group in September of 1995, we worked out of a room in Norm’s parent’s basement. We did this while we continued to work at our respective “day jobs”. We found small businesses with small projects (logos, business cards and stationery, brochures, etc.) for a number of years.

Lance left early on. And soon after that Norm had a major health scare, which forced him to leave his job, and take time to recover at home. And when he was up to it, he went full time for Fusion (since he was already “at the office”). We built up enough small business clients that he was able to keep busy (with my support in the evenings and on weekends) without overdoing it. Pretty much all of our revenue went towards Norm’s paycheque.

“Everything was exciting. Everything.”

Our aspirations far outweighed our clients’ understanding of design. We got frustrated often. Learned the stress of quoting to actually win a project, and then the stress of collecting on completed project invoices. We worked a lot of late nights. Actually, all we did was work. When I took “vacation” days from my day job, it was usually to attend a client meeting with Norm. But we were loving every minute of it. Everything was exciting. Everything. Even if it was frustrating and stressful at the same time, because we were young, and we were living our dream, taking control of our futures.

Everything we did was another lesson. Every moment a memory. Singing at 2am while we worked to a next day due date (both of which happened too many times to count). Having a heated argument with a client that arctic is not spelled “artic”. Me falling down the basement stairs after accidentally stepping on the cat that slept on the top step to the basement. Deleting a client’s website for a few hours before finding a copy to re-upload (a very, very stressful memory for all involved).

We worked hard. And we played hard. And we loved it all. But we were still pretty small time. Until a call from one of my friends at Consumer Gas changed the course of Fusion…