ABOUT ME

The Beginning

What first brought me into the graphic design world is my love of video games. Yeah I know, I bet you’re asking yourself ‘how is that possible when they don’t really relate?’ right? It’s not the video games themselves it’s the artwork from the cases that drew me in. I had begun to experiment with programs like Paint and Microsoft Picture It! at the time.

Primary Skills Learned

During this time I had learned to adjust photos, crop, add text, etc. These skills were only basic at best for the time since I was still in high school and only just beginning to learn the strategies of photo editing.

One year later

Later I had found a program called PaintShop Pro, which was definitely a step up from what I had been using. It gave me a variety of new things to look at and play with. Layers, photo adjustments, color variations, borders, gradients, etc. This program opened up so many things that at first I was a bit starstruck but I had begun to play with the layers, settings and such.

Primary Skills Learned

With this program opening up so many avenues of photo editing I had begun to learn a lot more. Especially with layers and coloring adjustments. These two in themselves were the things I loved the most about learning PaintShop Pro.

Three Years Later

This was the year that I had finally found myself Photoshop. I had begun learning with the CS3 suite. This was also the same year that I had begun to show an interest in learning how to code web pages. It was slow at first but in my opinion coding takes patience and a lot of trial and error. I had begun experimenting with just playing around with forum coding.

Primary Skills Learned

After getting into Photoshop I had finally understood what I had been missing. Sure the program had layers and color adjustments but it had so much more. Learning how to use the blending modes such as Overlay, Darken, Multiply, etc definitely helped show me how good photos could really look than just being taken by a person behind a camera.

Four years later

After discovering Dreamweaver from Adobe, I had looked into how to actually make a webpage. Most of the pages I had visited were sites created by fans for actors, actresses, shows, movies, etc. It got me thinking as to how it all worked and I soon had begun experimenting in Dreamweaver.

Primary skills learned

I had only just begun to dive into the world of html and css and so I wasn’t quite confident with anything that I had been learning at the time until I had truly begun to retain the information that I was reading up on coding.

The next eight years…

Over the next few years I had slowly begun to get better and better with editing photos of anything I could find but mainly things that I enjoyed. Like TV shows and movies with some video games thrown in there. I have created a lot of photos with color adjustments, cropping, textures and text over the years. Then I had also learned more and more about coding HTML and CSS, mainly learning to mockup a page in Photoshop and then recreate it in Dreamweaver from scratch.

In 2011, I had my daughter who is now currently 5 years old and I had decided to go back to school and learn more of my craft and the things I love doing. I had looked up Specs Howard of Media Arts, after seeing a commercial for it on TV, got in touch with a representative and took their Graphic Design Program that gave me more in-depth details about programs that I had never used and those I that I have.

To this day I am still learning coding and the new ways with HTML5 and CSS3. I search the web to find new and interesting things to tryout on my own pages that I create for myself. Mainly codes for link styles are the most interesting along with learning how to do hover instances, when you hover over an object and it does something fancy and cool. I will continue to learn as much as I can about coding and I’ve slightly dove into learning PHP but that one is taking a bit longer to comprehend that I had originally thought. Though it is still in the works of learning.

2017 marks a new year with new possibilities to explore and I’m taking advantage of that. I’ve taken the liberty to fashion myself a new logo style and page layout. To help keep myself looking fresh. I’m also currently working with a friend on building our own small graphic and web design business, The WonderQuake Project, that will not alter my ability to work with any new clients or jobs that I may receive. I’ve also been recently asked by the Store Director at the Royal Oak, Meijer that I work at to make posters for the store. So far I’ve made 4 different posters and I’ve heard they just might go out to the rest of the market to be also featured in other stores as well. It’s pretty exciting to hear!

My Passion for what I do is rendered in what I can offer

Web Development

HTML5 and CSS3 content

Social Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc

Graphic Design

Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign etc

Microsoft

Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc

Web Design

Dreamweaver

Industry Related

Duration: 6 months, between October 2013 to March 2014.

Programs Used: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

I had gotten an internship with MOTOR Information Systems back in 2013. I was there for six months and I learned quite a lot about how to think of new ways to design a webpage or even a printed piece. A lot of my work centered around print and web which is showcased in my portfolio.