Guess Web Design for a Living Was Inevitable

Guess Web Design for a Living Was Inevitable

It really is hard to believe that it has been over fifteen years since first beginning to design websites. Originally it was a part-time, sideline thing during the lunch hour while 'playing' with html and some very dodgy looking animated gif's. This healthy obsession with animated gif's by the way may become apparent up here on the blog.

That said, after graduating in 1997 with a BSc Honors in Food Industrial Management you could never have envisaged designing websites for a living. The data entry job post university was only supposed to be a temporary position, besides there were dreams of world domination... that, or at very least head of quality control at a food production plant.

Thankfully though the food industry wasn't meant to be, some divine plan had already been mapped out by destiny. Now, when looking back at the milestones laid out along the way, becoming a web designer and eventually running a web design company was obvious, really.

Take a look at this picture from around 1985, 10 years old and writing rudimentary BBC Basic code. Guess the phrase once a geek - always a geek springs to mind. Hours upon hours were spent on the poor mans BBC Micro... the Acorn Electron! Not only writing basic programmes but also designing 8-bit graphics and games.

Designing graphics and games at such a young age was inspired by such classics as Chuckie Egg, Citadel, Codename Droid, (I was never really an Elite fanboy), Frak, Jett Set Willy, Overdrive, Ravenskull, Strikers Run and the daddy of all Electron games... Repton, to name just a few. The love affair with retro games goes as far as to a couple of years ago when Citadel was revisited and this map was created one screen grab at a time. The full size version of the Citadel map can be downloaded here (4.3 MB).

So yes, so much of a geek of course there is even a BBC Emulator on this machine! All this computing power at hand, just to emulate a machine whose 32 kilobytes of RAM was as good as it got back in the day.