Dordt Alumni in Design: Rick Hoogeveen

I graduated from Dordt in 2002 as an art major emphasizing fine arts and graphic design.

Here’s a fun little timeline about my first year after Dordt:

Sent out a number of resumes throughout my senior year and made a lot of “cold calls” without much success before graduating in May. Found out about a Team Leader position in the art department at The Mitographers, Inc. in Sioux Falls, South Dakota through a local staffing service, applied, interviewed and was hired. Moved to Sioux Falls on Saturday, June 8 and started my job June 10, 2002. The department was made up of four people including me. One team member had already put in her two-week’s notice the week before I started so she left soon after I started. I married my college sweetheart in mid September. The second team member from my department stayed on board until around October, but then decided to pursue his childhood dream of working in the movie industry. I then had the task of trying to train two new hires in late October to learn a job that I was still very much learning myself. The third and final original member of the department had made plans with his wife that when they were ready to start a family, he was going to be a stay at home dad and do freelance graphic design from home as well. So he was done working in my department at the end of December. So six months after I started I had gotten married and I had a brand new department! Quite the first year on my first job out of college!

I am still the Team Leader of the art department at The Mitographers, Inc., a printing facility located in an industrial park area north of the airport in Sioux Falls. Screen-printing is our main business but we have also gotten into and grown in the digital printing category as well in recent years. Our screen printing presses allow us to print large quantities of decals for machinery. The majority of our customers are OEM companies in the agricultural, industrial and lawn and turf sectors. Our digital presses have been helpful in allowing us to provide very low quantity orders to our customers when it would have been much more costly to try to print small runs on screen presses. Our large format digital presses also allow us to print large banners and many other materials that don’t work as well or fit in our screen presses like the ones shown here:

Many of the decals we print are safety or informational labels; ones the OEMs are required by law to have on their machines for the customer’s protection, like these:

We serve a variety of other customers on a custom basis as well. Here’s an example of a decal: