Dan Bouweraerts has been teaching for a long, long time, and he's been designing for even longer than that. He loves it when students tell him that their design is "simple," or that it looked much better on the monitor, or that they lost all of their work because they left their hard drive on a car dashboard in July. He's heard it all before, and as strange as it seems, he wants to go on hearing it for another decade or so. The man is entitled to be a little snarky sometimes.

Dan has several loves in his life - his wife, his girls, his colorful ties, and his enormous music collection. There is no song he hasn't heard, or band he hasn't critiqued. The only time Dan didn't have to do research for a design project was when his daughter's volleyball team asked him to design their stuff. Otherwise, his mantra is RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH! Oh, and thumbnail too, you dummy. Thumbnail until your thumbnails fall off with the effort, and then maybe, just maybe you will have created enough to please him.

"The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master," says Michael Ganschow-Green. That's how he opens every new semester of web design, and Michael is living proof that hard work and a whole lotta bullshit will see you through the GRC program. Once he was a mere student, like you, poor soul, but now he is a successful web designer by day who moonlights as a part-time instructor by night. Does he need the money? Does he do it to fulfill some strange fetish? We don't know why Michael teaches web design, and we don't ask because we're afraid to learn the real answer, but we're glad that he does it, because none of the other professors want the gig. I mean, coding? Seriously? Yikes!

Michael likes to throw a pizza party on the last day of the semester, which is a cool tradition that more professors should take up.

Ron Marston is probably the most cerebral of the instructors in the GRC department, and as such, he spends a lot of time making jokes that hardly anyone gets. Please take pity on him, and give him a laugh even if you don't have a clue what he's talking about.

Ron believes that pixels are like babies - never to be harmed - and that type is like a raccoon - never to be tamed. If you don't get what he's talking about, then you aren't ready to touch Photoshop. Seriously, uninstall it right now before you harm another picture, you thoughtless eraser-tool fiend.

Taking a class from Brian Wells is like going to boot camp. He flushes out the posers and wanna-bes PDQ. He wants you to draw every day until your hand feels like it's going to fall off, and then switch to the other hand, damn it.

Brian is something of an old, Wild West holdout. He likes drinkin', fishin', and he wears his phone in a holster on his belt. He wears funny hats in his off hours. Don't let him into your house, whatever you do, because he'll start drawing on the walls with one of the 20 pencils he keeps in his shirt pocket.

Brian was an animator for the Simpsons, and although he won't admit this, he was most likely a model for Homer Simpson himself. Not every man can claim that kind of legacy.