Hello.
My name is Chad and I'm a designer.
I'm pretty certain that I have loved design in one form or another since I was a child. It was the night that my parents let me turn my closet in to a painting studio, when I was six. I remember making compositions of my teddy bears, Tonka1 trucks and a little placard that displayed 'Chad' in shiny metallic blue Courier2. My favorite toys were those Lincoln Logs3 and Domino Rally4 - both of which fueled my OCD for perfection and interest in layout schematics.
I was introduced to the internet while waiting on my mother to get off work one day after school. I had used computers before, but the internet wasn't really a utilized tool at the time. My first search was using the term 'X-Men' and coming across all of these websites hosted by Angelfire5 and GeoCities6. I remember my amazement and wonder staring at these little animated .gif's of flames lined up in a row separating paragraphs of text about Wolverine and Storm - I was hooked, it was so magical.
I wanted to make one of these shrines. I wanted to create these little homes of admiration on the internet for my favorite things. I wanted mine to be better though. How was I going to do this? Hence the beginning for my thirst of knowledge surrounding HTML and how to make dancing flame header rows7.
As I grew from a child in to a young adult my design aesthetics also began to mature. The more I learned about different art forms and design, the better my web pages became; the better my layouts became. The internet continued to evolve giving me an endless opportunity for learning and self expression. The limits and boundaries of what I could create started to blur and this world became so encompassing.
Then, in college, I realized that you could make a living from this kind of self expression. My nerdy passion for coding languages and my ever critical eye for design could actually get me somewhere in life, it could make me money. For some reason, however, I decided to sell jeans at Gap8 instead - foolish college years lead you to do silly things.
I'm thankful for the experiences that I have had and continue to have. Everything teaches you new lessons and gives you new ammunition for creativity. Now, as an almost thirty something, I am excited to be putting all of these tools and ideas together. This website gives me an outlet to dig up some of these thoughts and get my hands dirty in design again.
I hope you enjoy.
Posted: Wed Apr 15, 6:45 PM
1Tonka - Tonka is an American toy company most known for its signature toy trucks and construction equipment.
2Courier - Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface designed to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter.
3Lincoln Logs - Lincoln Logs are a toy consisting of notched miniature logs, about ¾ inches (1-2 cm) in diameter. Analogous to real logs used in a log cabin, Lincoln Logs have notches in their ends so that small model log buildings can be built.
4Domino Rally - Domino Rally was a toy product manufactured by Pressman Toys in the 1980s and early 1990s.
5Angelfire - Angelfire is an Internet venture offering free space for web sites.
6GeoCities - Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).
7Dancing flame header rows - Just go look at it, I promise it will bring back harsh memories.
8Gap - The Gap, Inc. is an American clothing and accessories retailer based in San Francisco, California, and founded in 1969 by Donald Fisher and Doris F. Fisher.
