We had the good fortune of connecting with Carol Brouwer and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Carol, do you disagree with some advice that is more or less universally accepted?
You must engage in paid advertising to grow. We have built our business on word of mouth and referrals. We have a wonderful community of clients, many of whom know one another. The benefit is seeing them root for each other and collaborations grow.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My degrees are a BS in horticulture (I wanted to be a landscape designer and work outdoors – thanks to Grandma), I have an MA in Agriculture and Extension Education both from NMSU, and a Ph.D. in horticulture from Texas A&M. While I was in school at A&M in the late 90’s I took an elective class in this thing called HTML. My dad worked for NASA in the space program as an electronics technician and so the nerd in me thought this Internet thing sounded interesting. I learned to write HTML from a horticulture professor named Dr. Dan Lineberger. During the 12 years following that, I worked for the Extension Service as a garden and horticulture educator. I was the only person in the office that knew much about building websites. By the time I met my husband, Larry, a degree programmer, Oracle database engineer, and owner of Tempora, I had 12 years of experience building websites and had learned CSS and some JavaScript in my spare time. We now work together building websites and web applications. Our mutual appreciation of technology, agriculture, and cats has made us a winning team. Yes, we work together and yes, we’re still married.
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to bring together all of the things I love. Some of the projects I’ve enjoyed the most are designing logos and websites for wineries – old world meets agriculture meets technology. This logo for Denise Gardener Winemaking is one of my favs – the font is Mayer by the amazing sign artist David Smith.
I still enjoy volunteering for the AgriLife Extension Master Gardener program class here in Texas. I enjoy teaching Landscape Design, Botany, and WaterSmart Landscaping classes.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Easy. Gardens, art museums, and restaurants – the Centennial Gardens at Hermann Park, the Butterfly exhibit at the Natural History Museum, The Menil Collection, Rothko Chapel, and the new Houston Botanic Gardens. I also love history so we’d check out the San Jacinto Monument and Museum. We’d take a drive through the Heights and eat somewhere along Washington Avenue. I’d try to work in lunch at Tiny Boxwoods and maybe the Tolkien Café or the original Ninfa’s and the original Lupe Tortilla. If there’s time, we’ll see Galveston and tour some of the old homes there too. I love Houston’s theater scene as well. I really hope the Main Street Theater will reprise its production of Wolf Hall.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
They say you are what you eat. I would add that who we are is an amalgamation of all the people in our lives. Predictably, my parents played a huge part. They instilled in me the importance of education, family, always doing the right thing, and a love for the beauty of my home state of New Mexico. My grandmother had a green thumb and taught me to be a conservationist: “Stop watering the sidewalk. It’s not going to grow.” She mowed the lawn barefoot, made a mean chocolate cake, and always saw the value in things. I may actually blame her for my tendencies toward being a pack rat but such was the way with people that grew up during the Depression. Neither of my parents has a college degree but when I was in high school my dad told me I didn’t need to get an after-school job. My job was to make good grades because he couldn’t afford to pay for my college education. No one ever thought I wouldn’t go to college. It was simply assumed. One of the rules in our house was homework first, fun second.
I am grateful to have grown up in Las Cruces, NM. It’s both beautiful and has a great public school system. I had many teachers that were passionate about their subjects and instilled in us the joy of learning. Maybe some of that was me too. I love learning. I went on to get degrees from both New Mexico State University and Texas A&M University.
Later, I married Larry Brouwer, a programmer who grew up on a farm in Iowa. My background in design from my undergrad work combined with my knowledge of web development somehow conspired together to be the perfect combination to be a front-end web developer and designer.

Website: https://www.tempora.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/time4tempora/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/time4tempora/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/time4tempora/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/time4tempora

Image Credits
Me and Marcel the monkey on site for client StoriModern/Jean Liu Design photoshoot. – Photo by Aaron Opsal. Headshot – Photo by Cristie Williams Selfie with Simon – Photo by Carol Brouwer

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