Well I have finally decided to join the blogging movement in my own little way. On my blog I hope to share nuggets of helpful information with all those you wish expand your understanding of this miracle called the internet. Please feel free to request entries on certain topics. As things come up in my every day work experiences I will hope to share them with you.
To start off I will share a little about me and what I do. I was born and raise in Oregon as a middle child between my older sister and younger brother. As I grew up in Salem I loved being creative and in particular drawing and painting. I also enjoyed the other arts, lettering in theater and singing and traveling with the high school jazz choir. Back then I was intrigued by the newly emerging internet but our house didn’t have access and I never thought of it as a possible career until I was in college. It was still just a novelty to me. During college the number of talented artists over-whelmed be and my Dad’s voice warning me not to become a starving artist haunted me. So I changed from fine arts to graphic design and started learning Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and the elements of good design. As I started working more and more on computers and my technically aptitude was unleashed I decided that I would change my major again to the new web design field. I changed schools and started attending the Art Institute of Portland and got a degree in web design and multimedia.
The end of school was really just the beginning of my real education. I worked for an online store as a designer, then a small IT company as a production artist and as I got more skilled designed websites their too. I later transferred to a popular Portland art gallery where I did more graphic design work and later to a winch and hoist manufacturer as a graphic designer and webmaster. I started getting pretty bored. Tired of the 9-5 but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do freelance full-time as I had nice benefits and steady work. My position was terminated and my decision was made for me. So I worked for a month selling cars and I sold a few too but selling cars has to be one on the worst jobs ever and I was a dish washer at Red Lobster for a summer. Then I worked from home part-time for a friend of a friend designing a website and then stayed on as salesman. It wasn’t bad but I still felt like I should be designing full-time.
Finally I decided to tighten my belt and make a go of it. That was 2 years ago. Some months are good and some months are lean. I still get antsy sometimes but I’ve learned to be my own boss and how to sell my services. I’ve learned a lot about the work and feel I have grown a lot as a designer. I would like to work for agency and rub shoulders with other designers one day but there is something to be said for working in your pajamas and commuting from your kitchen. One big change has been my use of wordpress. I had a client using it and got into it and now love using it on most projects. It has opened up my tool box considerably and give my clients lots more bang for the buck. I’ve been freelancing full-time now for over 2 years.
I just moved from Oregon to the Toronto area to be the my Canadian princess who I married last May. We met online on facebook.com and I guess the question is – Where else would a web designer meet his wife? Now we are writing the next chapter of our lives together and I am looking forward to buying a puppy.
Yesterday on Halloween I got a call from a potential client. He wanted me to take over a project that had been started by an outsourcing firm. He explained to me how he had asked them to build him a custom e-commerce website on the Magento Platform. Part of the customization required integration with a third party. When the programmers couldn’t get the API to work with Magento they decided to re-build the entire website in Joomla without notifying the client (after months of delays).
