I first started as a graphic designer using QuarkXPress and later moved on to Adobe InDesign. I created everything from business cards, logos, flyers, brochures and other promotional material to complex fully indexed instruction manuals that were hundreds of pages.
I soon moved on to website design and hand coded HTML and CSS for many years. With my experience in Photoshop as a graphic designer, I was able to build websites from the ground up and create custom assets myself as required. That gave me an edge that I still have today over coders that don't have the same amount of graphic design experience.
These days, web development professionals tend to be good at one or the other. I'm good at both and that allows me to create images that are optimized for each project that I'm coding up on the backend.
While I'm certainly not an expert with all software programs, the reality is I can learn just about anything that's required. I learn new tools practically on a daily basis and my past experience allows me to adapt quickly.
I've had some experience in college focusing on graphic design, but most of my experience is real world and I've graduated, with honors, from the school of hard knocks. As most people know, real world experience is extremely valuable.
Website Development
I know HTML5 and CSS3 like the back of my hand and I've been hand coding it for more years than I care to admit. However, these days I rely on libraries and frameworks to make sure my code is accurate, optimized and safe.
Even though I haven't really used it for anything, I wanted to know how to set-up a YouTube channel just in case anyone needs one. I used the channel to demonstrate what makes a website good or bad...
Within the past year, I've been focusing on using the TALL stack with Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Livewire and Laravel. Laravel has a lot of potential and it's my favorite development enviroment.
The first project that I created in Laravel is called StepByStepCocktails and it's database driven through MySQL using Laravel Migrations and it has many features that I haven't made public yet such as user authetication with different levels of access, email confirmation, image uploads and more.