Steve Gifford is a designer with almost 19 years experience in working with design applications. I first got into design as a junior in high school. While working for my high school newspaper, on top of the line Mac IIcis.

I taught myself Aldus (remember them?) Pagemaker and Freehand. I still mourn the day that Adobe discontinued Freehand.

Then, it was on to college. I spent two years at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana, studying Graphic Design. I really wanted to study digital arts. In 1993, there were very few programs for what I wanted to do. So I worked as a graphic artist for the Ball State Daily News, creating informational graphics. I also worked in the Fine Arts Graphics Lab, supervising students and providing technical support. It was there that I first used Photoshop, version 2.0. Our setup consisted of 15 Mac Quadra 950s and 10 Quadra 610s.

I transferred to Indiana University in the fall of 1994. I studied writing under many great writers and teachers, such as David Wojahn, Catherine Bowman, Gerald Stern and Yusef Komunyakaa. I became the Graphics Editor for the Indiana Daily Student, where I was responsible for all of the graphics work for the daily newspaper, and managing a staff of graphics artists. Graphics like the ones you see here (yes, I still have the original Illustrator files). They have travelled from floppy to Zip disk to CD to DVD to thumb drive. One day, I hope to turn them into holograms.

While at Indiana, I also got my first taste of freelance work, and did some work for Billboard magazine.

After graduating from Indiana, I accepted a position with Macmillan Publishing, in Indianapolis. There I was able to hone my Quark skills in the fast-paced world of computer book publishing. After one year and approximately 764562 books, Macmillan restructured, and I volunteered for the opportunity to join the professional publishing group, which consisted of New Riders Publishing and Cisco Press. There, I was involved in every part of the production process, from design to layout to indexing to pre-press to press checks. I co-designed the book Flash Web Design, by Hillman Curtis, and it sparked my interest in web design. After the book was finished, I was invited to spend a week in New York at hillmancurtis.com. I designed business cards for them, and observed their process.

I taught myself Flash and Dreamweaver, from my massive library of New Riders books that I’d worked on, and I moved to Los Angeles in 2001. I put an ad on Craigslist, offering to design sites for free, to build a portfolio. As you can expect, the response was overwhelming. It was a great method of networking, though, and in no time, people were paying me to build sites for them.

I took a print position with Marshall & Swift in downtown Los Angeles, and continued to build web sites in my spare time. In September of 2005, I decided to become a full-time freelancer. I spent time as a user interface designer at Pacificare, a web designer at various advertising agencies, and at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

In June of 2006, I accepted a full-time position with Connexus Corporation in El Segundo. Connexus is a performance-based marketing company, and I designed ad banners, landing pages, and emails for Connexus clients, until July of 2008.

Since then, I have freelanced and worked for a variety of clients, including Guess? clothing, Terra Matrix Media, McLenahanBruer Communications, Encore Software, and Frederick’s of Hollywood.

I am currently interested in freelance and full-time opportunities. I am interested in companies with strong creative direction, and good technical savvy. It’s not just about building a web site. It’s about creating an experience.

I like to be challenged on a daily basis, both creatively and technically. I watch Lynda.com training videos as if they were in my Netflix queue. I recently learned to build sites in Drupal, just for fun.

If you’d like to discuss my skills and qualifications, you can contact me at steve@stevegifford.com. If you prefer to just stalk me, you can find me @stevegifford on Twitter. Either way, I look forward to “seeing” you soon!