About...
- Age: 21
- Location: Central/Northern California
- Occupation: Currently a student working as a computer lab consultant and an intern with the Information Technology department on campus, working this summer as a web developer. After that, who knows! I'd like to work in graphic design, but I'm open to suggestions. If all else fails, I might move to China and teach English.
- Hobbies: Learning languages, art (watercolors, sketching, digital art, digital photography), Chinese (language, history, literature), webdesign, enjoying nature, Ballet, cooking, and more!
My webdesign philosophy can be summed up largely in three principles:
- Simplicity
- Colors inspired by the world around us
- Creativity
I also happen to be a big proponent of .png images. The only way something awesome is going to become universally accepted is if many people start using it. Go alpha transparency! I'm sorry if you have an older browser and this site doesn't look so good...it should look fine in most modern browsers. I recommend Firefox!
Concept
I was struggling to figure out the name of a domain that I liked and could live with about...3 years ago? I think it was something like that. One of the niftiest vocabulary words I learned in middle school was "zenith" (along with "lilting", "caprice", "wanton" and all sorts of romantic words like that), and I sort of imagined something like a ball in a big arc soaring toward the highest peak in its trajectory and then falling from there. It was an image thing really, though I have a soft spot in my heart for words that start with the less common letters.
Current Layout
The current layout was inspired by the ocean. One day I went for a walk along the ocean cliffs in the city where I go to school and the water was a particularly brilliant sea green. There were also masses of the lovely but highly invasive Ice Plant creeping over the cliffs with bright magenta and yellow flowers. I didn't particularly include the magenta in this layout, but I decided I liked the combination of a pale yellow and the sea green. The photo is actually a photo of me from another beach adventure (one that I went on with my parents back in my home town), in case you were curious. :) The seashell buttons are actually adapted from Microsoft Office 2000 clipart, made into a vector-like illustration in Photoshop.
The idea with this layout is to have a simple, clean, easy to navigate page that doesn't forsake graphic interest for cleanliness. I chose to use PHP instead of an iframe for this layout, as I'm currently tring to develop my skills in that area.
Previous Layouts
Spring/Summer 2007:
With this layout, I was attempting to do my best to have something that would work in all browsers approximately equally well with a nice summery theme. I've always had a liking for iframes because you can plop them anywhere; that kind of freedom is very attractive to me artistically. This was intended to only be for two seasons, but I unfortunately did not have time to work on webdesign while having a heavy course load and working two jobs, so it actually stayed up into 2008...whoops. To see a full screen capture of this layout, click on the image to the left (opens in a new window).
