I was the kid growing up who took everything apart and wondered how it ticked. I’ve always had an insatiable desire to figure out how something works. I remember first learning how a manual transmission worked after watching my dad drive for years and years. Once I learned about flywheels and clutches, I instantly gained a respect for the engineering that went into every car. I played primarily with Lego and reclaimed parkay flooring as a child with my older brother. We would construct vast structures out the wooden blocks which would later include a cathedral, various other buildings and a bridge that spanned both our sofas. Littered on the bridge were toy cars and lego vehicles we managed to build out of nothing but pure imagination.
Fast forward a couple of years and I began learning about design and photography. Aperture, ISO, shutter speeds, typography, colour theory and the grid were my next adventures. I learned about the rule of thirds, exposure; and, how to compose a photo in a way that told a story. Much was the same when it came to designing websites. I loaded up IE 6’s source code viewer and began my journey into front end development. Back when I started learning these techniques, Iframes were popular and Google was just beginning to gain traction. There were no guides on how to build a website, you had to go to school to do it. I learned how to build a site by de-constructing my favourites.
From there, I learned to respect the medium and how to exploit it in order to get the best designs on the net. Photoshop can do great things, but they didn’t necessarily transfer over to browsers 5-10 years ago. I learned that in order to be a better designer for the web, my experience with how to actually build the site came into play when I made executive design decisions. Today, the lines are blurred since browsers have caught up and now allow us designers to go nuts with our work. Webfonts, transparency, css3, and html5 are amazing tools that I am so grateful to have access to nowadays.
