A Life of Reading Water and Dropping Fall Lines

Background
Brian built his life around the outdoors; navigating rivers, skiing backcountry lines, and exploring landscapes globally. That same instinct for reading water and finding lines through complex terrain carried into a multi-decade career in product design, marketing, development, and creative direction, helping early-stage, resource-constrained organizations turn ambitious ideas into successful products and experiences. His ability to find the story inside something complex and make it legible to the people who needed to understand it set him apart. The tools were different. The orientation was the same: figure out where you are, understand the terrain, and find the best line through it.

History with Maps
Somewhere along the way, Brian became obsessed with maps; not just using them, but understanding the artists, cartographers, navigators, and explorers who made them. He often jokes that he should have been born during the age of exploration. And by pure luck, in the early 2000s, he was asked to create a map of Vail, Colorado, for a new event series that would later become the GoPro Mountain Games. That single map led to several moonlighting years illustrating, designing, and producing visitor maps for resorts, guidebooks, realtors, outfitters, and outdoor events across Colorado. Among the people who knew his work, he was simply known as "Map Guy."

A New Line
After years of burning the candle at both ends in emerging tech and AI, Brian eddied out. And before long, he found himself drawing again. Maps, mostly, but not visitor maps or product systems. These were something else: visual memories of places that had shaped him. The rivers he'd rowed. The mountains he’d skied, the landscapes he believed were worth protecting. Those drawings became the foundation for what is now Fall Lines & Maps, a Narrative Cartography practice dedicated to telling the stories hidden within a place and helping to preserve what's there.