There are a lot of things in my past that have contributed to my becoming a web designer and I thought I’d share them in case you want to breed your children to become web designers too. To start with, we always had a computer in the house because my dad worked at IBM during the 1970s and saw the future of home computing. The first desktop we had that I remember by name was the IBM PC Jr. and it didn’t even have Windows on it. Then when I turned 10 years old, I was given a Timex Sinclair 1000 to play with for my birthday. It didn’t have a hard drive, so you could only store programs with a cassette player. My dad would buy magazines for me that had BASIC programs in them, so I would usually just type them out every time since I rarely played the same game repeatedly.

Now that I’ve explained how I got into computers, I’ll go into the things that I think contributed on the design side. I played around with cameras when I was a kid and the first one that was all mine was a Kodak disc camera. (Again, my dad was an influence there because he’s a total shutterbug.) The first time I really got to take one around on my own was when I went to Girl Scout camp for a week when I was 9. I don’t know what happened to the negatives, but I still have some of the pictures and it’s funny to see what I thought was important to capture on film as a kid. Aside from the fact that I’m still into photography today, I think where it influenced me is in the composing of photos. I guess I see capturing the right things at the right angle as a type of design.

The other creative influence on me when I was a kid was sewing crafts. When I went to my grandparents’ farm to visit, I would be the one kid inside quilting with my grandma while my sister and cousins played outside. I was also a big fan of cross-stitching and both of these made me realize how much I like making things by working with my hands.

Next up: the teenage years…