I had the pleasure of spending time with Patrick when I judged the CA Advertising Annual a few years ago. I have subscribed to the magazine since I was in art school. Getting the magazines and the annuals in the mail was like Christmas morning. Still is. I didn’t appreciate the family heritage of the company until I spent time with both Patrick and his mother, one of the co-founders. I marvel at how little the quality of the magazine has changed. It’s remarkable. I also found myself wondering what it was like growing up in a curated creative environment.

Communication Arts is a family business co-founded by my parents in 1959. Like in all family businesses, children are a terrific source of cheap labor. I did my share: gluing gold seals on award certificates, stuffing magazines into envelopes, cleaning toilets and ashtrays. But the best part was working the competitions, meeting the judges and seeing the work.

Back then, I think I was the only third grader who knew what an art director and copywriter did for a living. All the judges seemed so smart and curious. Many became friends of my parents. Saul Bass (my favorite), Lester Beall, Lou Dorfsman, Howard Gossage, Allen Hurlburt, Herb Lubalin, Hal Riney… They were almost always first-gen creatives who fell into the business through accident or circumstance.

I suppose it’s not like being bilingual from birth, but visual communications has always been an integral part of my life. In elementary school, I made signs for friends based on letterforms my Dad taught me. Then it was designing band logos, posters and airbrushing T-shirts in high school. While it seemed harsh at the time, I know my Dad was honest when critiquing my early work. I certainly couldn’t question his qualifications.

I still worked the design and advertising shows in the summer, sometimes pulling all-nighters at the hotel where the competitions were held splicing 16 mm TV commercials together into reels for the next round of judging. A teenage kid in a hotel room with a viewer/editor and garbage cans full of film—I was sure the maids thought I was running some kind of clandestine porn operation.

Growing up, I never wanted to run the family business. I wanted to run my own and did, a design office in San Francisco, probably because of the entrepreneurial role model I grew up with. It wasn’t until my Dad decided to retire that family pride brought me back into the fold. Communication Arts is a family legacy after all.

Over the next 28 years, I’ve seen typefaces, layout and photo techniques go in and out of style; agencies and careers rise and fall, and sometimes rise again—I’m always awestruck by people who successfully reinvent themselves or their companies. More and more our juries are made up of second and third-gen creatives who grew up in the business like myself.

And then there’s the ever-broadening media spectrum—Broadcast, OOH, desktop, mobile, social, wearable…

Yet, despite the accelerating pace of change, I’m struck by what hasn’t.

Jurors are still looking for the big idea, that spark of insight that makes someone stop, smile or nod in acknowledgement that a connection has been made. It’s still fun to see that “I wish I’d done that” look come across the face of a juror when recognizing a brilliant piece of work.

And I still see the judges’ frustration when viewing pieces that are close to greatness, yet just fall short on execution or concept; work that’s a knock-off from a previous year; or seeing a new idea become a trend and then a cliché in a matter of hours.

At the end of each competition, I’m still impressed with the final selection of smart concepts combined with beautiful craft. I’ve come to see that anybody is capable of producing a great idea, of having that moment of brilliance. The hard part, of course, is repeating it on a consistent basis.

Each year, I think I’ve seen everything. But then the next year comes with a new crop of innovative ideas to inspire me all over again.

There is no end to human creativity. The joy of witnessing its evolution is what gets me into work each day.