This site is serving several purposes for me. First and foremost, this is a place for me to write about the art of web design. Many titles have been applied to web design over the last year or two (user interface design, user experience design, etc), but basically what I do is think through any design challenge and make it as simple and intuitive for the user as possible. My number one priority is to make whatever the user is doing easy to do. Its as simple as that, yet takes a lot of care and experience to accomplish. After that task has been handled, I set out to make it visually appealing.

My second objective is to showcase a few pieces of my recent work. Every designer needs a portfolio. Its our livelihood. Whats interesting is how the portfolio has evolved over the past 10 years. Its no longer a big black suitcase full of artwork. We can now couple our visual portfolio with a blog and a sleek design online to further display our talents and to gain reputation and recognition within our communities.

My third objective was to gain a better understanding of WordPress. I’m not a developer, so writing the code to my own site and turning WordPress into the content management system I wanted it to be was a challenge that I wanted to conquer. I’ve created a few small sites with WordPress using free themes that I modified to fit my needs, but never really dug in and created my own theme. I created this site from scratch starting with the design in Fireworks, exporting slices and writing my own css and xhtml using CSS Edit and Coda, and finally inserting the php pieces to complete the puzzle with the help of Smultron. Throughout this process I relied heavily on the WordPress community, plugins, and especially Ian Stewart’s series of articles: How To Create a WordPress Theme: The Ultimate WordPress Theme Tutorial.

With these goals in mind I set out to create a simple and effective site. The old saying “you are your own worst client” holds true. As a designer I’ll never be happy with what I’ve designed for myself. I can’t help but compare it to everything else I see out there, but with some self discipline and a self imposed deadline I made it happen. Now I hope that I can give back some knowledge to the design community, and continue the learning process at the same time.

I’ve been designing for almost 15 years now. One of my classes in my freshman year of High School required us to write a report about a possible career that we’d be interested in. Thats when I discovered David Carson. I instantly knew what I wanted to do, and he quickly became my hero. Shortly after that I began laying out school yearbooks as well as being one of the staffs lead photographers. After high school I went straight to the Art Institute of Dallas and took advantage of the great staff on hand to learn as much as I could about Visual Communications.

After spending about 10 years in print I decided to make the switch full time to web design and never looked back. I still love print and have a huge respect for it, but the always evolving online world presents an ongoing challenge that I can’t turn away from. I’ve spent the past 3 years working for a .net shop in Dallas, Texas called Telligent as their Interactive Art Director. Its a great place to work and gain experience designing for a wide range of users and clients. We have a broad base of projects ranging from grunge inspired Skate2.com to the more structured and clean design requirements of Microsoft.

My work with Telligent has honed my user interface design skills. I’m constantly challenged by projects with new goals and challenges. We have an amazing staff of developers here that has crafted an awesome set of community focused products: Telligent/Community, Telligent/Enterprise, and Telligent/Analytics. Using these tools I am able to design very rich and useful sites and applications for our clients.