Today, I looked at my design on a Dell monitor whose resolution is 1024 x 768. I was surprised at how cluttered my design had become; the original aspect of the design was to remove the clutter, and make the design itself one which was very sleek and elegant, similar to my older design in which there were four navigation choices, and one place for content.

Well, allow me to clarify. I like the top of the site; the choice of very simple horizontal navigation and a central logo. I like the front page, with its “Welcome” written in a sans-serif and a pulled title and 200 characters from the latest post in my blog. Read more »

It seems to me that spammers are getting more and more creative.

One of the most recent spams I received was actually through two IM conversations. The first was on GTalk; I have a GTalk account set up specially for BeLink’d to communicate with clients et cetera without utilizing my personal account. Well, I received a friend request; not sure what it was, I accepted.

Later that day, while working on a site, I received an IM asking if it was a good time to discuss web development software that I had been solicited in the past over my work line. I told said marketer to please remove me from their contact list when they initially called me, and now I was being IM’d by them.

And that wasn’t the last time. I also use Skype for personal, and received a friends request from a random person. I add them… and it turns out to be yet another marketer. Wonderful. Blocked and removed; the major annoyance, however, is that now they attempt to message me and send me notifications, which are… excessively annoying. Read more »

So, I’ve recently begun to work in an office once again, as opposed from home.

I can’t complain. In many ways I prefer to work in an office; instead of having to shoot off emails, for the most part I can just lean over to the next office and say whatever I need, request whatever I need, et cetera, in addition to being able to see things as they happen or from the other person’s screen. Read more »

I am the sole owner of BeLink’d, a graphics and web design studio or site, whichever you wish to call it. As I stated while making the About page, I’m generally the one who runs things around here.

BeLink’d is not an agency. It is a single freelance artist.

I program. I design. I draw. Dre helps out and I usually make Sam into my content slave, but this is generally a one-person show, as are most freelance sites.

Dre and I do work as a team on some projects, but for the most part, I do as much of the heavy-lifting as I can. It has helped me develop and grow at a remarkably fast rate as a designer; one of the things I have always emphasized is continuous growth, and BeLink’d is the outcome of my own continuous growth.

And frankly, through design and programming, I found a passion, something that I could really grab onto and hold. To be completely honest with you, I love what I do and I hope to always do what I love.

I’m a student, I’m a designer, I’m a bird mom, I’m an equestrian, I’m a writer, and I’m quite a lot of other things. But I hope that through my efforts, I will always be able to make this site grow and flourish, and use it to create what contribution I might to the design community as a whole.

What are your passions? Leave a blurp – I find it interesting to hear what other people identify themselves as.

Rinir is one of the major characters in an allegory which I wrote during high school, and in order to become more accustomed to what was new with Adobe Photoshop CS4, I chose to do a digital painting portrait of Rinir. Now, granted, I haven’t actually done any digital painting or sketching in quite a while, so a few things are off – namely, her eyes are a tad large and her lips a tad small, but overall I view this piece as a “success”.

The background was actually done in Illustrator; I wanted something kind of mystical, and I think that I accomplished just that.

There was no model used for this picture (I rarely use models to draw), but I have enabled print ordering on the DeviantArt page for this piece (the image in this post links directly to the DeviantArt post – I prefer to add these to my DeviantArt gallery for much easier handling of images, ability to produce prints, as well as networking benefits).

Enjoy!

[edit] For reasons unknown, the image link is currently not showing. Thus, this link should bring you to the image page: View the digital painting