The Stem Creative Started on an Alberta Farm

The Stem Creative is the studio of Rick Gold, a Calgary designer who has spent more than 30 years turning a love of art and computers into a career. Before The Stem Creative built its first website, Rick was a farm kid with a paintbrush and a borrowed computer. Today the studio has built 140+ websites and designed dozens of logos, hours of video and a long list of 3D renders, all from Bowness.

Here’s how it started.

Born blind, raised on the farm

Rick was born blind. His future in the visual arts didn’t look promising, until one day at six months old he suddenly started looking around, much to his parents’ surprise. He’s been looking closely at things ever since.

He grew up on the family farm, from a small acreage to a full quarter section, raising cows and horses with his father and stepmother. It was called a hobby farm, but that term was used loosely. It took just as much work as a real one, on top of his father’s full-time teaching job, and plenty of that work happened in pitch-black, minus 40 blizzards. Did Rick hate it at the time? Absolutely. Today there’s nothing he looks forward to more than a weekend on the farm, riding his horse.

The first computer

Being a teacher came with one big perk: Rick’s dad could bring a computer home from school for the summer. For a kid on a farm in the 1980s, that was a window into another world. Without that early access, The Stem Creative probably wouldn’t exist.

His first digital art was made in MacPaint on a 128k Macintosh, in black and white, one pixel at a time. In the early ’90s he moved up to ClarisWorks on an Apple Colour Classic, and suddenly there was colour. By high school he was serious about both painting and computer graphics, and it wasn’t long before he started tying the two together. That’s when he found his calling: art, made on a computer.

Myst, Bryce 3D and the move to Edmonton

After graduating, long blue hair and all, Rick moved to Edmonton and landed a job as a computer technician. Years on a Macintosh had given him real expertise, and being an all-around geek, he mastered computers in general. He worked in tech support and computer resale, then moved into telecommunications, doing web design and 2D and 3D art on the side the whole time.

Around the same time, the game Myst sent him digging into how its worlds were made. He found Bryce 3D, bought it for his Macintosh LC 520, and started building 3D scenes in 1996. It had its limits, but he learned to build just about anything with it. It also cost him a lot more than the software, since every project pushed his computer to its limits and demanded a new one. Then another, and another.

The Stem Creative today

The web design career grew straight out of that lifetime of art and creativity. There’s no challenge Rick likes better than coming up with a new, innovative design that truly reflects the business it’s for. He brings attention to detail and abstract thinking to every concept, and he writes the code himself on The Stem’s own Framework 7.0, so the design and the build never drift apart.

• Web design: custom WordPress websites and online stores, with SEO built in
• Graphic design: logos, brand identity, print and packaging design
• Video production: brand, product, testimonial and event video
• 3D rendering: the grown-up version of those Bryce 3D days, now in Blender

How we work

At The Stem Creative, we have a few rules we don’t bend. Every project is full custom design, never a template. Everything is designed and built locally in Calgary, never outsourced. Clients own their domain, hosting and files, so they’re never locked in. And we quote fixed rates, so there are no surprise invoices. For bigger projects we bring in a trusted network of designers and programmers, but you still deal with Rick from start to finish.

In 2021, DesignRush listed The Stem Creative among the top 3 packaging design companies in Canada. The Stem Creative also shares its Bowness home with The Stem Support, our repair and cybersecurity business.

Get started

Want to work with us? Visit us at 6415 Bowness Rd NW, call 403-619-9121, or start your project online. See what past clients say on our reviews page.