My Humble Beginnings

It all started with Yoda in a santa hat. That was the feature “content” I was posting to my first website hosted on Geocities circa 1995. Very web 0.5.

My story started getting more interesting soon after that. Halfway through high school I got an internship at a local technology company as a member of their call center. Five summers later I had been heavily involved with two redesigns of their corporate website, designed the logo and website for a subsidiary brand, and built a secure document deployment application in classic ASP.

An Educated Man

I moved to Pittsburgh and spent my college career pursuing a degree in Information Science while doing [mostly for fun] web design on the side. I still remember the thrill of my first serious client saying, “Would you design my website? Unfortunately I can only afford $1,000″ to which I thought, “Does he know I’m in college? I would have done it for a few loads of laundry and some more mac ‘n’ cheese.”

I graduated from college, degree in hand, thinking I would conquer the world as a C++ programmer. I thank God for saving me from that fate (no offense to any C++ fanboys). Instead I found myself as a one-man design department for a boutique software consultancy in the Philadelphia area. I was thrown into a world of print, spending the better part of three years learning the world typography, transparency flattening, color theory, the Pantone Matching System, bleed, color profiles, and lots of other things that now seem elementary.

A Revolution

While I was immersed in paper stocks and printing inks, a revolution (which we now call “web 2.0″) was happening in my old stomping grounds. Lots of people were talking about these things called “web standards” and separation of presentation from content. Web publishing became easier: I found I didn’t need to write in notepad and upload via command-line FTP. Technologies like WordPress, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, and of course YouTube started being adopted in the mainstream, and that meant that websites were becoming more and more about sharing the content of the moment—yesterday’s content was already too old.

Combine these trends with a shift in my position from internal marketing to developing user interfaces for our clients’ web applications, and a “big bang” happened. All the sudden, I was the one advocating web standards, showing developers how elegant their applications could be with well-formed CSS and JavaScript, pushing for priorities on usability, teaching JQuery and JavaScript best practices, engineering (and not just designing) entire front-end systems, and on it goes.

So in some ways, I’ve come full circle, but am in no way just a web designer. My portfolio is evenly split between various disciplines and mediums, and I’ve had the privilege to work on so many different ventures.

Why don’t I help you with your project next?