Print2Web

My transition from print to web

I got a 2 year degree at Seattle Central Community College in graphic deisgn and illustration. I worked for several companies in the early nineties, then stopped doing graphic design for several years. I picked it up again working at the seattle music magazine The Rocket in 1998. I became the Ad Design Manager there, then the Assistant Art Director.

I moved from the Rocket in 2000 to a company V-Design which worked almost exclusively with Nintendo of America in Redmond. We produced editorial pages for Nintendo Power, strategy guides, packaging and ads for the video game industry. It was initially a great job and, to my great surprise, I excelled at it. I was promoted from Graphic Designer, to Senior Graphic Designer, Strategy Guide Coordinator to Manager. The first five years I really enjoyed my work, but it started to become very difficult and painful to do my job.

I ended up working out schedules for books with Nintendo that were incredibly unrealistic, involved un-compensated overtime for employees, and being a project manager in addition to art directing and managing everything. I wanted to change jobs for something new, but everything wanted web design skills or experience!

I had always played around with Flash, and had even built some websites with Dreamweaver's GUI interface. But it never worked out exactly like I planned, or had weird problems where I had to build two versions of the same site for different browsers. It was purely a freelance thing, but it interested me. I never wanted to learn "programming" or html because I kept hoping they would just create a program like Illustrator that built it all for me. I also thought to learn html you needed to be good at math and variables and other things I didn't think I could learn.

Finally I got so sick of my job I set myself to learning html and css specifically so I would have a better chance of getting a better job. Used the book Head First XHTML + CSS. The book really opened my eyes to what was possible, separating content,(HTML), from presentation,(CSS), and including code that others created in the form of javascript and php for creating dynamic interaction. To my great surprise HTML is far more about memorization and practice than programming. CSS is slightly more complicated, but in practice nothing more than stylesheets in Quark or InDesign.

I finally did find another job, at 10,000 less than what I was making. I joined a start-up and worked there for a year, which really helped by putting everything I was learning into practice everyday. When that ended, I suddenly found I was far more employable than I ever thought I would be. I have the grounding to talk intelligently about web design, hand-code compliant websites, and have increased what I can make, my opportunities, and my enjoyment of my job tremendously.

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