Designer tendencies

Early artistic leanings showed up in the form of hand-drawn calendars I made for my grandmother, which she requested annually during my early years. Along the way, I was enrolled in drawing and painting classes. Spending a few elementary years at The Children’s Workshop further encouraged outside-the-box thinking. Landing at Kalāheo High School in Hawai’i gave me the chance to explore cinematography and media literacy. One of my professors declared that computers were the future of design—but I definitely wasn’t an early adopter.

During my time at the University of Hawai’i, I focused on fine art and art history and interned with a graphic designer in Honolulu. After moving to Georgia, I continued studying art at Kennesaw State University, where graphic design came to the forefront. In the early nineties, I realized that many early-Internet websites weren’t very pleasing to the eye. I took an HTML Fundamentals course and began creating websites in Macromedia Fireworks. I designed to my heart’s content and then “sliced” the designs, exported them, and built them out as web pages in Macromedia Dreamweaver—one of the first tools to provide a visual interface alongside HTML.

I worked with other developers to create custom portals and dynamic, database-driven websites. I learned Flash animation. Next came the flexible and open-source WordPress framework, which allowed for customizations but relied heavily on plugins and server maintenance. In 2011, I became a Shopify Partner and built websites for e-commerce-driven brands that required payment processing and inventory management.