Showing posts with label web development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web development. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Shooting For the Moon

Ambition is a funny thing.

By definition, it means a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.  In practice, more than anything I believe ambition requires patience.

Why is this funny?  Mostly because I'm notorious for a lack of patience.

For the past few years, I'm proud to say I've been very ambitious.  Went back to school, studied hard, graduated with honors.  Started a tiny little side business, took on an extremely wide variety of projects, gained invaluable experience.  Got an awesome job, actually use my degree, validated for my talents.  Pretty dang cool if I do say so myself.

So what have I been striving for lately?
Hehe.

To prove that there's so much more to my praised, mad skills - and I'll do so every time I get the chance.

In my time as a graphic designer I've created: logos, business cards, letterheads, tee-shirts, social graphics, website graphics, envelopes, product labels, greeting cards, memes, newspaper ads, magazine ads, website ads, tabletop ads, stickers, bumper stickers, pens, pins, hats, CD cases, zines, book covers, flyers, brochures, pamphlets, posters, banners, feather flags, trade show booth panels, even a graphic that ended up plastered to the side of a party bus.

Not too shabby, eh?

As a web designer, while I relish in and quite enjoy many of the technical, tedious and tiresome aspects of the job, it's the design - the visual and aesthetics, the look and feel - that will always drive me because no matter how much time, effort, blood, sweat and tears I pour into a site, it's the user experience that will keep people there once they've found it.

Bringing these two distinctly different but remarkably similar designer sides of myself together has always made sense to me.  I take great satisfaction in bringing a certain coherence and continuity to every design, and if I can bring that into not just a single design, but into a brand, I see nothing but potential.

I'm excited to be a part of a company that's growing, a position that's growing, that's enabled me to develop this side of myself.  I'm lucky really, damn lucky.

I learned several years back that's not enough to maintain status quo, there's no fulfillment in it.  I plan on continuously proving myself as an asset, continuously learning something more and striving towards something greater.  It's who I've become, and I'm pretty okay with that.

This is progress dear blog, progress and I gotta say, it feels good.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

I Heart CSS


I'm  sure there's a support group out there for me so I might as well admit it:  I'm addicted to CSS.

To others in the know of the Jedi way of the website code - yes, I know I have a problem.

To those who don't have this geeky privilege, it's a nifty part of website coding that dictates styles, i.e., design.

While I primarily consider myself a web designer, this lovely infographic (I also heart infographics, but that's a discussion for another time) depicts a rather conflicting message to me.

The obvious lack of a stubble-beard aside, unlike our web designer persona here, I would never be caught dead wearing skinny jeans or carrying a Macbook Pro.  I am un-regrettably a PC gal through and through, and while I don't bring my own keyboard to work, it's only because I have the EXACT same keyboard at work as I do at home.

(On a side note, I did take my own mouse to work, until my awesome employer bought me another so I didn't have to.  Let's face it, my boss is cooler than your boss.)

The esoteric tee-shirt is another glitch in my web designer claims.  Why I am a spectacular fan of esoteric humor, only the code-snob's "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" statement is the one that made me chuckle.

As for the fears?  Aside from Perl and server crashes, most of these rank a big "eh" on the worry-meter.

I'm not sure what all this says about my nerdtastic ways, but after having spent the weekend doing exactly what I spend all week doing (for projects outside of work), I can't help for it all to be running around tirelessly on that hamster wheel I call a mind.

I spend half my day (every day) bouncing back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator, and the other half of my day lost in coding, most notably CSS (and of course HTML), with a dash or two of text documents, emails, databases, FTP clients, multi-tab/multi-window/multi-browser research and the occasional conversation on the telephone.

So what does that make me, a web designer or a web developer?

Hell if I know.

Either way, it's time to get back to work.

Hmph.