Well im self taught. I actually used to want to write/illustrate comics. Then when i got to high school i decided on photography. During this time though i was also dabbling in graphic design with photoshop 4 (ahhh memories) and teaching myself HTML. I wen to sate university for a year and then decided it wasnt for me. After that i got a job at kinkos and thats where i had real knowledge growth and really got into design oddly enough. I worked in Document Creation so I learned PageMaker and Freehand and got turned on to prepress. After that i worked as a designer at a politcal strategy firm and then at a flexo shop doing prepress. All the while I was freelancing and all the while doin on and off spurts of web design stuff jsut because the work was there when the print work wasnt.

Then i got my current job as a designer at a marketing firm and got pushed even more into web because it was something we wanted to offer (and I wanted to get more up to date on). You guys have seen me progress through much of this last phase as ive been posting here in this tribe since its beginning.

And thats my story haha.

I'm another self-starter. Started programming basic on a Sinclair ZX81 when I was a wee 12 years, graduated to ZX80 assembler, then got an Atari so I could make graphics and learned 6502 assembler. While in high school, I built a synthesizer based on the the Atari 800xl with some custom sampler hardware. It was freaky. After that, I got an Amiga and started taking freelance videography projects (that's what they called it back then), did that while in school for Mass Comm, but I went to work for CompUSA, bought a Mac and learned Deneba Canvas, Photoshop, Macromedia Director, which led to my getting consulting leads and leaving CompUSA. I went back to school for Industrial Design and Film, but moved west to SF and kept doing web, Director stuff and consulting on web and tech support projects thru 2003, and have been focused more on more technical web systems since.

I don't get the chunks of time to explore design like I used to, and I kind of like not arguing over teal vs fucshia, triangle vs. trapezoid issues with clients, or not being a "hip" designer. I've always been more practical, probably because I know more about the long-term maintence/standards.

It's funny thinking that the web is this old, isn't it? Gosh, I got my first ISP account in 94-95, been an ebay member for 10 years, bought my first domains in late 90's! eek!

1995 - Couldn't tell you how a computer worked except maybe where the on button was.
1996 - Bought my first computer, bought my first HTML book. Temping as an admin asssistant then. Playing around with web design and HTML, not seriously.
1997 - Ask a friend to teach my how to build my first PC from parts. Built around 6 PC that year for friends to see if I could do. Started getting serious with web design after I saw the glassdog site. Started all the required reading. Mostly print and graphic design books. Did around 4 sites for money. I still have them on disk somewhere. They sucked!!
1998 - The print books helped. Designed my first really good site. Made friends with the IT person at my admin temp job and finagled my way into doing 4 of their intranet sites (it's always good to have a great boss who's looking to see you grow).
1999 - Temp job closed. Used my personal site which was the most popular swing dancing sites (not a huge accomplishment since I only had 4 competitors but still proud of it) and my intranet sites to get a job at one of Colorado big design firms. Realized I was way out of my league, but made do. Left short after because some startup offered me double my salary to go design for them.
2000 - While designing for the startup, I convinced them to pay for a ColdFusion course. Started learning Coldfusion.
2001 - Startup crashed. I ended up at another design firm. Taught myself ASP and PHP to where I could create small apps that need to read and write from a database. ASP I ended up getting really good at. My PHP is passable.
2002-2004 - stayed at that design firm for a while doing mostly front-end coding (HTML/CSS) and grunt work photoshop stuff for the lead designer. Did a lot of freelance design work. Did lots of ASP and PHP.
2005-present - left design firm when management changed. went to my current job which was all ASP, javascript and C# for one web application. Started learning C# to convert the ASP. That's what I do now as a dayjob which is C#.

I don't freelance design work anymore because it's too time consuming. I have about half a dozen graphic designers that I code for and educate on web stuff. Mostly, I work on my own sites and my wifes. I've had two really popular niche sites - the swing dancing one and the short track speed skating one which taught me more about web sites then working at any company. I learned alot because I could take action and make decisions on those sites and see the results they gave me. I used my short track site to learn SEO.

Over the last 3 years, I've been experimenting with my wife's business sites. I got her to #1 on google and high on the other big 5 under a search for "china adoption videos" pretty easily, but start realizing that traffic doesn't equal sales. She works part time and currently makes a 3rd of our income, but her sales and referral numbers aren't great considering she's almost at 100 clients and all of them are ecstatically happy.

So I've been reading sales books and listening to sales tapes for the last 3 months and am starting on the redesign of her site. Either the ideas that I implement work or they don't and I get provable numbers.

HND Diploma Multimedia
BA Hons Design for Multimedia Studies

hopefully it doesn't surprise you how many people here are self-starters... that is the kind of business this is... and the kind of forum i suppose...

I had a commodore 64 that i tinkered with but mostly played two dimensional games on, then an old MS_DOS kind of thing that i also tinkered with but that was as far as that went. they could never do anything interesting enough to get me interested. Primarily I am a painter/artist and that was and is always my first love. So i left college after two years (wasn't my bag), gave away my old computer and went skiing for a few years. In that time a friend got me to register a website for my artwork and I taught myself the basics of Frontpage (and i mean basics...) and i was coming at web design from my nomadic artist lifestyle so it was pretty poorly done...

Maybe six years ago I bought a new Ibook cause computers had finally gotten to where I found them interesting again - as somethimg that could be more responsive to my creative whims. So i obtained Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Aftereffects and spent a winter in VT learning them all - esp PS and AfterEffects. I used the WYSIWYG aspect of DW mostly. THen, ever so slowly, I started to hire myself out, friends mostly, to do design stuff and learning all the way, sometimes the hard way, about what to do and what not to do, printwise, webwise, etc. So i made websites for people that "worked" for all intents and purposes but I had yet to really consider myself a web designer or a graphic designer. Like I said, i am a painter and that has been the main intention.

Then I went away to Costa Rica, learned spanish and came back understanding HTML. Weird. So suddenly it all opened up for me and I could read and write code. It was a pretty cool realization but sobering too cause i could look into the underbelly of all the websites I'd made and see how atrocious their code was. overnight I became a code snob. Since that time it's been a lot of googling, sitting in bookstores, and, like you say, late nights cursing the computer for not doing what i want- then I find the misplaced semi-colon or something.

Since then, I've also taught myself InDesign, Illustrator and can now write HTML and CSS from scratch without any kind of graphic interface and can also hack PHP in a beginner level and mess around with limited Javascript but I have enough of a limited understanding of it to know how to make people's plugins function like i want them to, etc. It's a nice feeling really.

And along the way, I've learned to pay attention to design and how things work. In my opinion, the two are closely related- a site I might really like works well because of a cohesive design (the teal! the teal!) as well as cleanly functioning code so i find myself looking at the code to see what they did and also the design to see how they used it. All of this has informed my painting quite a bit as well. It is, after all, always just the presentation of Information and we look to present that information in relevant and cohesive manner.

And a final note- at this point I work off of all word of mouth referrals and returning clients, and get by fairly well off my design skills and my artwork. yay for being self-employed.