Colin Cutler: Co-founder of boldmethod.com

Graphic artist Colin Cutler grew up on a South Dakota farm where his grandfather told him stories about the time he owned a 1940s Piper J–3 Cub. The fish and game department was paying for fox and coyote pelts—and according to his stories, Cutler’s grandfather shot the animals from the airplane with a sawed-off shotgun, landed in a nearby field to collect the carcasses, and later turned in the pelts. That’s how he paid for the airplane. His grandfather had sold the airplane before Cutler was born, but the stories from earlier times stirred his interest in flying.

Cutler began flying as a high school senior in 1999, in a Cessna 152 based at Aberdeen, South Dakota. He finished his private pilot certificate at the University of North Dakota and used his certificate to take students who couldn’t get home for the holidays to his parents’ farm for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Cutler met another entrepreneurial student, Aleks Udris, his freshman year, and together they created 15,000 cockpit posters to be used by students during training. The two later worked together on software projects used by the school’s flight labs—Udris providing the software and Cutler providing the graphics. Their efforts continued after graduation, producing software to monitor oil and gas pipelines or to help nonprofit organizations manage donations. One contract created training software for military drone pilots.

Cutler’s furlough from Mesaba Airlines provided the impetus for the creation of a new Boulder, Colorado-based company in 2006: a website called Boldmethod.com, concentrating on general aviation training. The name captures the complementary skills of the two founders: bold type from the world of design, and method from software engineering.

Boldmethod is a site for tips, quizzes, and videos to aid student pilots, but the next goal is to offer a complete instrument training course, followed by completion of a private pilot course. It’s been a long route, but the former airline pilot is back to doing the kind of work he loves.