Web Designer Finds a Home
— Creative and Otherwise —
On CI

By BILL STUTTIG

Photo: Susan Farley

Katie Geddes, who runs a successful website and business design practice from her apartment on Fordham Street, loves City Island, and she credits the online world for making it possible for her to both live and work here and be successful. “I think there are more and more people like me living and working here,” Katie told The Current, in explaining how she has the best of both worlds. “Because of the online world, that is why it is possible.”

Not only does the digital universe make it possible to work from her City Island home, but it makes it possible for her to work at all. Katie defines her profession as a “spiritual business designer” who “takes her clients on a journey of self-discovery” as part of the process of creating websites, graphics and marketing copy that define the business, its goals and its offerings to their potential customers.

Katie Geddes (above, left) designed the wine labels for City Island wines (above).

Katie said that the journey to what is now her successful home-based business was long, winding and not always easy. She graduated from college with a degree in religion and came to New York to pursue a career in acting. “I started out as an actress, but i never loved it. It is a very competitive business, and you feel guilty when you decide you are no longer going to pursue it,” she recalled. “But we are all here to figure out why we are here. I am a really good designer and writer and communicator. I love technology and I love design passionately. The one thing different about me is that I am equally strong in all of these.”

So she left acting and took her communication skills to the corporate world and found work as a communication consultant for the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse. She left that firm after five years to expand her horizons, start her own business and work her own hours, but she soon found out that the ebbs and flows of self-employment can take its toll if you are not prepared.

While Katie was living and working in Manhattan, she says, “I literally woke up one day and realized that I only had 46 dollars in my bank account. I don’t know how I slept at night, but we all get through these times in our lives.” Her plan to get through this particular time was to fall back on her secretarial skills. She accepted a job as a secretary with a Manhattan-based music publisher, and just as she was due to start, her own business landed a client. She was offered the chance to design the art work for employee benefits packages and materials for Pepsi Bottling. Pepsi would go on to become a long-time client of hers, and designing packages to accompany corporate employee benefits explanations became a niche that she has since brought to other firms.

Katie reports that she was still making a living at this kind of work in Manhattan in 2005 when the community of City Island, which she had never heard of, came to her attention three times in the space of one week. She thought of that as an omen. “At the time I had just learned how to drive and I realized that because of this, I could actually live somewhere besides Manhattan.” So she got in her car and drove to City Island for the first time. She liked what she saw.

“It is so important if you are artistic to nurture whatever makes you feel creative. I came to City Island and I said, “I like it here. This is the place.” She rented one apartment but soon moved to the one she lives in now, which she says gives her the space to both work and practice her essential yoga.