How I Started Designing and Coding
It all started with drawing comics. I’ve been doing this for as long as I remember. In primary school, I already couldn’t wait to come home to continue working on my characters and their stories.
I don’t remember when and why I started to use my parents’ PC, but instead of using it to play games like most of my friends did, I enjoyed drawing in MS Paint. In the next years, there were some points of contact with coding and graphic software. For example, in a replacement lesson, a teacher taught our class some HTML basics. I also got in contact with Photoshop at that time and played around with it. These things fascinated me, but they did not keep me interested enough to continue learning about them.
Around the same time, the first „homepage editors“ appeared, which made it possible to create web sites without knowing how to code. Soon, me and my friends from school would have our own ugly web sites with stolen content. While there was not much creative about choosing predefined designs and including funny gifs made by someone else, I was stunned by the fact you could publish something from home which everyone in the world could access immediately.
A bit later, a friend introduced me to Flash cartoons. While he simply enjoyed watching the short films which usually weren’t age-appropriate, I saw a chance to breathe life into my comics and wanted to make something like this myself. I think I must have been around eleven years old. I somehow got my hands on a pirated copy of Flash and started to play around with it. I wrote stories, animated my characters and even gave them a voice. It was magic.
Soon, my Flash movies would have clickable play buttons and preloaders. This lead to complete web sites designed in Flash. I started to enjoy designing interactive things more than making cartoons, so I stopped making cartoons and redesigned my web site every week instead. The web community seemed to agree that Flash sites are not very accessible, so I started to learn HTML and CSS.
When I visited a web site and didn’t know how something on there was realized, I immediately looked up the source code and explored it. I got more and more into graphic software like Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time and played around with these tools a lot. I loved flicking through design books about branding and typography in book stores (but couldn’t afford buying them).
Someday, I found out that you could study something called „Communication Design“ at a lot of universities, informed about it and made the plan to study this after high school. After a few more years of school, the first freelance jobs, a lot of self-initiated projects and a short internship at a design studio, I realized this plan and started studying Communication Design in 2013.
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