2004 (A Digital Decade, Part 5/10)
Monday, December 21, 2009
This is Part 5 (Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.
As much as I enjoyed school, and would argue for the importance of a good education, sometimes we learn best by just doing. 2004 was when I got tossed into the deep end of design and web development without my floaties on and was forced to find my own way back to shore.
I started working at a small-ish architecture, design, and brand strategy firm called Pompei A.D. (more on that website when we get to 2006). I was helping them to create some flash animations to be used as projections at a FORTUNE Magazine Gala Event. What's interesting about this situation was that I was neither a designer nor a flash developer, I merely knew how to use Photoshop and had done some basic programming in HTML, JavaScript, and a little PHP. Suddenly, I was learning ActionScript and the basics of graphic design the hard way, by just doing it.
Then one Friday, Pompei A.D.'s real graphic designer quit. On the following Monday, I became the in-house graphic designer.
Meanwhile, Greene Street Salon was going strong. We launched a new website, and I created my first blog for the three of us who ran Greene Street Salon to write about the NYC arts scene. I started to actually think about what I was writing, and attempted to get better at it. I learned both the challenges and the pleasures of trying to create a successful blog. The burden of regular posts. The importance of connecting with other bloggers within your community. The way that blogging can open up new ways of thinking about the world around you.
This site continued to change, making use of my newly acquired flash skills with a very tasteful animated banner (see below), and figuring out how to use PHP to syndicate events from upcoming.org onto my home page.
MySpace put Friendster out to pasture. Everyone I knew migrated over. And little ol' Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates at Harvard started introducing Facebook to their Ivy League friends.
As much as I enjoyed school, and would argue for the importance of a good education, sometimes we learn best by just doing. 2004 was when I got tossed into the deep end of design and web development without my floaties on and was forced to find my own way back to shore.
I started working at a small-ish architecture, design, and brand strategy firm called Pompei A.D. (more on that website when we get to 2006). I was helping them to create some flash animations to be used as projections at a FORTUNE Magazine Gala Event. What's interesting about this situation was that I was neither a designer nor a flash developer, I merely knew how to use Photoshop and had done some basic programming in HTML, JavaScript, and a little PHP. Suddenly, I was learning ActionScript and the basics of graphic design the hard way, by just doing it.
Then one Friday, Pompei A.D.'s real graphic designer quit. On the following Monday, I became the in-house graphic designer.
Meanwhile, Greene Street Salon was going strong. We launched a new website, and I created my first blog for the three of us who ran Greene Street Salon to write about the NYC arts scene. I started to actually think about what I was writing, and attempted to get better at it. I learned both the challenges and the pleasures of trying to create a successful blog. The burden of regular posts. The importance of connecting with other bloggers within your community. The way that blogging can open up new ways of thinking about the world around you.
This site continued to change, making use of my newly acquired flash skills with a very tasteful animated banner (see below), and figuring out how to use PHP to syndicate events from upcoming.org onto my home page.
MySpace put Friendster out to pasture. Everyone I knew migrated over. And little ol' Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates at Harvard started introducing Facebook to their Ivy League friends.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home