About a Web Designer & Musician in Oslo, Norway

I have been working with web design since 1998, though I only started to make ripples in the pool in 2003, when I left my monastic life behind and got married. Those first years were very important for me to grasp the importance of "Alt + Ctrl + Delete" and to find my way through programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash, among others. Much of what I know today I learned then, the hard trial-and-error way.

1999 was the time I made my first Flash animation (you know, the ball that goes from left to right). But I should say I picked it up fast, and in one year I was quite into ActionScript, being more fluent in Flash than in HTML. My first years on web design were mostly spent at studying on my own, as I had many obligations running a children’s home close to Bucharest, Romania. 2001-2002 was a great learning period as I developed my first site based on an open-source CMS written in PHP, which became my personal lab. It got many thousands of hits, hundreds of members, but went down after one year because the "middle-man" domain provider realized there was a lot of traffic and kept the domain. Too bad. The domain is still unavailable today!

Leaving my robes and commitments to social work behind in 2003, I could focus entirely on web design. There was, of course, a transition period that went a little bleak professionally as I had to find my ground in the Norwegian society. Fortunately I still managed to crawl through it and establish myself as a freelancer. My first big step towards a stable web design career was at Cateno AS, a fast growing Norwegian web design studio. There I did many projects, finishing most.

That was interrupted by a long trip to south of Spain. There I was doing something entirely different, but released the 4th version of InnerFlash.net, which used to be my personal portfolio.

Shortly after coming back, I returned to my routine as a freelancer, until I got a job as a Flash Designer & Webmaster at Illusion AS. There I did loads of Flash banners that appeared in over 350 highly visited Norwegian sites. I dived deeply into several CMS systems as well, both open-source and commercial, and did a lot of web development. In the last three years I have become particularly good at working directly at the code, tweaking bits of XHTML and CSS and bending them to my will.

I'm now working at Prioritet Norge AS as a web designer and developer. Prioritet is specialized in SEO (Search Engine Optimalization) and has an incredible team of very capable people. I've been learning a lot and having a great time in good company, since January 2010.

These last years also marked a bigger focus on standard-compliant web design, and even though I retreated from Flash sites development, I still continued using it on a nearly daily basis. Flash sites are cool, I still think that some of my best projects were made in Flash. But over the years it has been proven that when it comes to accessibility and search engine optimization, Flash sites really can't keep up with XHTML based ones. Flash has not yet been adopted as a part of the standards for the world wide web, which are set by W3C. It's a big discussion...

Anyway, HTML5 & CSS3 are around the corner, getting more and more support from the latest browsers. In a couple of years we'll be able to do some really exciting things, so I'm of course playing a little with both to keep the pace with the web and have some fun!

My skills as a Web Designer

I think my biggest strength is to create / change layouts that are visually compelling. My web design skills are greatly extended by my graphic design skills – something most people take for granted in a web designer these days anyway – but it isn’t easy to keep a balance between graphic skills and coding skills, considering the fact that one is always studying. I do my best to keep an acceptable gap between these two aspects of web design.

I have used many tools to accomplish what I need, trying to keep my choices as open-source as possible. However I could never leave commercial applications aside as they are the current standard in the world of professional designers. I have worked intensely with products from Adobe and Macromedia, now formerly Adobe too. Below is a little description on my skills on each one.

Photoshop

I’m very confident with Photoshop, and take most advantage of keyboard shortcuts, recorded actions and custom brushes for creating / editing whatever has to be done, fast. It has set so many industry standards that is has become the image editing tool, that can handle anything from a hollywood-standard poster to an animated banner for the web. There’s hardly a day that goes by without me opening it at least once. I know, I get scared sometimes...

Flash

Flash used to be my specialty. I’m still very comfortable with it, but I haven’t studied it for a while now, so there could be things I would have to figure out eventually. For the most part, I know it hasn’t changed that much. Though ActionScript has gone to the next level, it’s 3rd version hasn’t been widely adopted, and it’s 2nd version is still supported. I still use it on a nearly daily basis.

Dreamweaver

I’ve used it from version 3 and I wouldn’t be where I am today without it. Lately however, I use it mostly to identify code by their color and do global searches for code on several folders at the same time. That’s especially useful when one needs to locate that little nasty language variable in a CMS with hundreds of pages to change XHTML tags around it. I could as well use an advanced text editor that supports that, like Notepad ++, which does all this and perhaps a little more. Notepad ++ is simply the best open-source code editor available today, and I have used it several times. But I'm still very comfortable with the good old Dreamweaver...

Fireworks

There used to be a time when I used Fireworks instead of Photoshop. Its interface with those colorful icons and its integration with Flash were features I preferred over the boring monochrome interface of Photoshop 5. I have never stopped using Fireworks and have always favored it above ImageReady (now discontinued) as my web image optimizer. Now that it integrates with Photoshop, there was no reason to keep ImageReady around. I’m glad Adobe agrees with me on that. Fireworks will do everything you need to when it comes to images for the web, but it can't replace Photoshop in some of the most advanced tasks.

Illustrator

I haven’t used it as much as I wanted / ought to, but I can get around. Illustrator is the application I’m mostly interested in getting a good grasp on nowadays, so whenever time allows, I give it a spin. I just love vector art!

Other Design aplications

I have played a little with several aplications, according to my needs. InDesign, GoLive(now discontinued) and Fontfolio were always around the corner, and should be mentioned. I also found my way through some 3D programs like Poser and Vue. To make it short, I’m quite confident that I can get the work done, if it falls within graphic or web design. Professionally, I haven’t done as much with video or sound editing as I have with other kind of applications, but did enough to be familiar with interfaces like those of Premiere for video editing and Cubase for sound editing. These I used for creating content for Flash movies, screencasts, promotional videos or simply for leisure. I'm a member of two bands. We use Cubase extensively to produce our own music, so I can get around. Sound editing shouldn't be a problem.