My Experience of Learning Design. . . yet another year later

The process of learning design – both in the sense of learning to arrange professional art and learning to construct programs – is an extra suitcase I will always carry behind my laptop. Just when I think I have leaped ten steps ahead of my skills level by learning how to achieve another editing task in Photoshop or another coding miracle in programming, I find myself starting a project with a client (or, in a recent project, with an employer) with the expectation that I am going to finally learn one new programming technique and instead learn 3 (or more) new techniques.

I am about to embark on another journey in my field. Having completed a website with over 100 pages over the past nine months and more features than I ever expected, I am ready to move forward with larger projects.

I am not certain if anyone has read this blog besides my college professors, but I have reached a point where I will no longer be discussing the skills I have learned (or perfected), only the projects I have completed. I can call myself a Web Developer who is skilled in XYZ languages until the job title becomes my trademark, but unless I can provide samples of completed projects, who is going to take me seriously?

I have recently redesigned and updated my portfolio: www.elizabethanngray.com. It now includes the 100+ page website I worked on (and maintained) since last May. I had been given permission to add it to my portfolio, so I posted the site within my domain as it looked the last time I worked on it (not including links to the company's database, which have all been disabled).