From greeting cards to Web sites, business remains active
By Valerie Jones
Staff Writer
Maggie LaNoue always knew she wanted to be an artist.
As a child, "I made little cards from construction paper and drew a lot of dogs and horses," she said.
Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Kensington Md., LaNoue's father worked for the U.S. government as a national security systems analyst, which led her to seek a government job of her own.
One summer during college, she went home, took a federal employment test and scored a 95.
"I didn't want to do typing so I told them I was an artist," said LaNoue, of Albion.
Luckily, there was an art job no one had applied for in two years.
While her work for the government was classified, LaNoue can say, "I drew bombs and things."
The third generation of her family to attend Albion College, LaNoue graduated in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in visual arts. After finishing college, she decided to stay in Albion.
"I thought about the rush hour traffic in D.C. and decided, 'Why go back?'" she said.
During college, LaNoue worked at Cascarelli's, a downtown Albion tavern where she served us cook, barmaid and hostess - sometimes all at once. She continued the job after graduation and began selling her artwork to bar patrons.
"People wanted pictures of their homes," she said. "I also did a winter scene of downtown Albion that sold 5,000 copies through a local bookstore."
LaNoue left Cascarelli's to work at her art full time in 1981, and now owns Albion Design, a custom art and card, print and Web marketing business.
She no longer has time to create pictures of people's homes or individualized greeting cards.
Today, LaNoue sells copyrighted corporate greeting and note cards, camera-ready brochure designs for the print industry, business logos, drawings of schools and other buildings, and graphics for Web sites.
LaNoue has enlisted the help of Action Associates to market her Web-site design skills in the Jackson area. Working with owner Ron Acton, she has provided the artistic and coding aspects of Web Site design for Maddalena's Inc., Krupa's Boat Mart, Allied Tool Inc., Anderson's Insurance Agency Inc., Gilbert's Steak House, Universal Phone Books and others.
Her own Web site can be accessed at www.albiondesign.com.
Businesses that employ LaNoue's artistic talents to create greeting cards and notes include Felpausch grocery stores statewide and Dawn Food Products.
For Dawn's holiday greeting cards, LaNoue always uses the same characters, but ages them each year.
She describes the cards, noting that in the first card the characters had just met, in the second the woman was carrying a baby, and in the third they were pulling their toddler on a sled.
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| Maggie LaNoue, of Albion, is a graphic artist. She has been making greeting cards for years and has branched out into graphics for Web pages. LaNoue has done several greeting cards for local businesses, such as the Dawn Food Corporation and Felpausch. |
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PROFILE
WHO: Maggie LaNoue OCCUPATION: Graphic artist and owner of Albion Design PERSONAL: Divorced. Her children are Charlie, 10, and Linda,8. CAREER HIGHLIGHT: "Meeting (then Vice President) George Bush in 1985, and giving hime some art work. There was a long line of people, but he stopped and chatted with me." |
LaNoue believes she is best known in the Jackson area for her drawings of Jackson landmarks, on display at Citizen's Bank on Spring Arbor Road, and more than two dozen drawings of local corporations displayed in the lobbies of the businesses.
All of LaNoue's work is copy-righted, so if someone wants to buy copies they must go through her.
"I just read a book shout Walt Disney," she said. "He didn't copyright the first character he created, and lost it to someone else."
"Disney was careful to obtain a copyright on his next character -Mickey Mouse," she said.
While LaNoue was trained as an artist using traditional media, she finds herself working on the computer more and more often.
"The machine doesn't do the artwork by itself. It's a tool and I have to tell it where to put the strokes," she said.
She finds a computer a helpful tool, although it does haves drawback, she said.
"I need a new computer to do all the things I want to do. Mine is two years old,which makes it ancient," she said.
On the private side, LaNoue volunteers at her children's schools, and helps with fund raising for the' Albion Public Library.
She teaches Sunday school for kindergarten through fifth grade children at the Presyterian Church in Albion, and will add a junior high class in the fall, to continue working with both of her children, Charlie, l0, and Linda, 8.
She likes to get students excited about the stories Of the Bible as she reads them.
"They tell me the stories are just like television," she said. "We even tipped a table over to illustrate what Jesus did (to the dishonest money changers) in the temple. It helps to make the story more real."
Down the road, LaNoue hopes to illustrate children's books.
"If I didn't have to work all the time to make money, I would he doing it now," she said.