about/webmistress
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Name: Emily
Age: 22
Birthday: March 09
Location: FL
Occupation: Full-time student, web designer
Web Design
I've been interested in the computer since I was about seven years old. I had a Vtech laptop of my very own as a child, and also a Nintendo which fueled my interest in the computing and gaming world. When I was eleven, I began taking an interest in a computer game called "Petz", where you can adopt and care for your own virtual cats and dogs. I became so immersed in the game and began to look for more information about it online, where I discovered that there were many people out there like me who enjoyed the game, and had built websites to show off their animals to the world.
I was floored. Being a creative person, I immediately wanted to build my own website and showcase my petz on the internet. My first page was built on a website called Expages, which I don't think even exists now. It was incredibly simple and used little HTML code. But when I saw how other petz owners had decorated their websites with flashing marquees and beautiful images, I knew I wanted to do that on my own. So I searched the web to learn about HTML code and how to build websites.
After Expages, my sites moved onto Yahoo! Geocities, which offered more space for pages and images, and more room to maneuver with my own HTML coding. And once I learned a little bit about HTML, I continued to want to learn more and more about it, so I kept on trying new things and looking up all sorts of different codes.
Now, in college, I'm taking courses on web design and my interest and passion for the activity has only grown stronger over the years as my knowledge continues to grow.
Graphic Design
After several Petz pages and many personal websites, my journey through web design inevitably caused me to encounter the beauty of graphic design. Along with creating my own HTML code on my websites, I wanted to design my own graphics as well. Fortunately, I had been blessed already with an artistic side, having grown up with a father who had majored in graphic design in college and pursued it as his career.
Paint Shop Pro was the first program I learned to use (minus Paint, of course), and from then on I moved onto Adobe Photoshop. At first, my graphics sucked, but after many frustrating hours just playing around in the program, I began to get a feel for the basic controls and develop my own method of designing.
Even though I'm not majoring in graphic design, I still thoroughly enjoy spending hours and hours "playing" in Photoshop and creating innovative graphics.
Other Thoughts
Both the skills of web and graphic design have helped me get the part-time job that I have today, which includes managing a corporate website and creating graphics for that corporation.
My goal is to one day become a full-time web and graphic designer; doing what I love and earning great money along the way! (hopefully!)