I rarely make my political beliefs public, as I feel that they are something which I hold close to my heart. Nevertheless, I am always willing to take on any project, no matter how controversial it may be – and that includes political or religious projects. My work with Forward Focus Media can only be described as one word: rewarding. Honestly, I have greatly enjoyed the month of work which I put into the site, and the month which I worked closely with the people behind the company.

That being said, I’m quite sure that they give their clients the same amount of brilliant treatment. If your political beliefs happen to fall under “libertarian” or “conservative” and you happen to be politically involved, this Alabama-based firm can certainly help you out – but how? Why not check out their site to find out!

Specifically, my work with this site was to customize a pre-built Wordpress template. The original design was very nice, I must admit, but I saw many ways in which it could be changed in order to better suit the site’s purpose. From coding an RSS puller in order to display their latest posts to editing a Twitter widget, the facelift to this design was actually pretty large; I may as well have written the theme myself from scratch. However, Forward Focus had already selected this template, and I noted that certain things could be thrown out altogether and that certain things could be redone. We started small, working on the graphics you see – the logo was provided, but I did create all of the graphics such as the Twitter and Facebook graphics (after all, graphics were how I was pulled into design in the first place).

I am a Mac person. However, before I entered the world of Apple, I was a PC person.

I was introduced to Mac through Dre, who manages the server-side issues of this site. I wanted a computer I could do development and design work on, yet at the same time use casually.

Frankly, once you go Mac, you never honestly go back. 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