In the beginning…
I’ve been designing for quite a while now. The first website I launched was a hilarious Geocities page when I was twelve years old. It had a black background, bright green font, flashing images everywhere, and was entitled “Phreakhouse’s Revenge.” I don’t know what I was avenging exactly, nor could I possibly tell you how I came up with the moniker “Phreakhouse.” All I can say is that I wish I still had a copy so I could look at it occasionally and shake my head with confusion.
The High School Years
In high school my design took a turn into the world of corporate and business design. I participated and was the president of the Business club at my school, known as The Business Professionals of America (BPA). We participated in several competitions, and ended up winning a few awards for our websites, which, needless to say were slightly more professional than the websites I designed when I was twelve. However, as important as this club was to me, my biggest improvements came from a healthy competition between a friend and me to see who could produce the most interesting and lively graphics. We swapped secrets, shared compositions, and constantly strived for improvement. Luckily, we have continued this tradition today online and whenever we see each other. Some people refer to is as “geeking out,” and I would say that is a perfect term.
A little college, perhaps?
Fast forward to college, and I get hired by Spectral Fusion Designs, at the University of Montana in Missoula. At first, my whole world was rocked. I hadn’t done a design in about a year, and had to learn an entirely new approach to designing websites (working for a public university, accessibility for disabled users is extremely important, and an aspect I hadn’t paid attention to at all before). I had also never worked with an entire team of people, and had always created my own rules. Spectral Fusion taught me more than any other job I’ve ever held, and eventually led me to the path of starting my own web design company. I unfortunately had to leave Spectral Fusion when I transferred schools, but will always hold any employer to the standard by which they set.
Real Life Sets In
Which leads us up to the present. I’ve been designing sites for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries for a little over two years now. I’ve had the opportunity to design some really cool sites, and write some awesome jQuery plugins! Overall, libraries have some of the most interesting IA challenges of any field — after all, these are the institutions that bring together physical collections, journals, government documents, historical documents, the list literally goes on and one, in about as many formats as you could imagine! It’s as maddening as it is fascinating, and it’s been a lot of fun to be a part of such an institution.
