As a very young child, I can remember doing things like collecting objects made of translucent colored glass or plastic, just because they dazzled my eye as they caught light and colored it. I have more or less always been driven artistically by this sense of visual impulse. As it happens, that part of me has been probably the single most important factor in my pursuit of visual design. This approach embraces that idealistic notion that to be good at what we do, we need only appreciate what we do, and do it often enough to be appreciated by others. If you have ambition and a sense of adventure, find someone else who has the same.
Amazing things can happen.
I have a friend who several years ago was a contractor for a consulting company in Silicon Valley. Eventually, when the California-based company decided to step up to an Internet presence early in 1995, I was selected as the person to build their Web site. Shortly thereafter, I was mailed a book documenting the HTML 1.0 specifications and instructed to have a working prototype completed in a couple months. I guess I learned to swim by jumping in, so to speak. The primary focus of my skills has always been graphic design, although computer programming has fascinated me since the third grade, where I started learning to write little basic programs.