Transparency
REDDING, Calif. — For Colton Thorsfeldt, graphic design started as a childhood hobby. Today, it has grown into a full-fledged business and a career path he hopes will continue to expand long after his current internship ends.
“I’ve had a kind of a love for creating artwork and flier designs and the typography, the texture designs all throughout my life since when I was 11 years old,” Thorsfeldt said. “I didn’t start, of course, doing it till around 2020 or 2021 at community college, when I started my multimedia studies degree slash graphic design degree.”
That passion led him to launch CTMultiGrafix, a design business that specializes in event fliers, logos, brochures and business cards. The name, he explained, blends his initials with the fields he enjoys most: multimedia and graphics.
“I decided to put part of my name because it’s my initials,” he said. “The ‘multi’ comes from multimedia, and I added ‘grafix’ with an ‘f-i-x’ at the end to make it look more bold and cooler.”
While event fliers are his favorite projects — “they tend to be the most colorful and the most abstract artwork,” he said — Thorsfeldt also values accessibility in design. He has trained in contrast and screen-reader tools to make his work more inclusive. “I learned how to make the text either really, really bright on a dark background, or dark on a light background so people can more easily read it,” he said.
Thorsfeldt is currently gaining professional experience through a paid internship with O2Staffing and Far Northern Regional Center, which runs through the beginning of October. He calls the opportunity “nothing short of fantastic.”
“These people are really amazing and supportive to me,” he said. “They put me in this position, gave me an opportunity to get paid and learn various skills … as far as meeting clients and building my portfolio, it’s been really amazing.”
Colton’s Job coach at Mains’l Services said he has seen Thorsfeldt’s creativity extend beyond the screen. “Colton actually took it upon himself to go to the venue and get an original picture so that it was his original artwork,” Ben said. “He built the whole flier around that. I thought that was really cool.”
Looking ahead, Thorsfeldt hopes to grow CTMultiGrafix into a thriving small business. His five-year goal is to work with more than 100 clients, strengthen his marketing skills and expand into video production.
“As long as you don’t give up and don’t get discouraged and just keep pushing forward all the time, you will get there eventually and you’ll make a successful business,” he said.