Basically I’m a dyed-in-the-wool designer and developer. Currently I live in San Diego, CA and specialize in web design and company identity creation; basically I make your website and printed materials shine above all others.
Though I hold a degree in Visual Communication with an emhpasis on Interactive Multimeda and Web Design I have learned how to be an effective designer from life itself.
I was born Richard Sherman Zinn in 1985 to a couple of lovely people I have had the privlege to call my parents. I was born and was raised in the mountains of Colorado and Utah until one fateful day when my mother brother and I, like reverse pioneers, made the trek across the country to Ohio. I attended high school there and it was in high school that I developed my love for computers and the art that could be created on them. I would spend hours in my room in the basement on my self-built pc playing with Photoshop and Illustrator making various kinds of digital arts.
Roundabout my sophomore year in high school I decided that it would be pretty neat to do that for the rest of my life, so I got myself an internship with a local small-scale design company, Mojomedia, and proceeded to fall in love with the interactivity that websites and flash could provide. The beginning of it all.
Fast forward to my college years. I graduated from Ohio University (not to be confused with OSU, which has a much less prestigious interactive multimedia program) with a degree in Visual Communication with and emphasis on - you guessed it - Interactive Media Design. Over those years I was trained on everything from the graphical parts of web and media design to sound/video engineering and web languages. around me.
I learned mastery of Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as InDesign, Flash, XHTML/CSS and design principles like typography, color theory, spacial and structural systems (grids, symmetry vs. asymmetry etc.) among other things. Short story - I got educated. I also worked with a local company, Eden Marketing, as a designer and developer for some years while developing my own freelance identity along the way.
After I graduated I moved myself out to beautiful sunny San Diego to continue my web career as a full-time freelance designer/developer. Since I have moved out of Ohio I have really come into my own - Helped in no small part by the people and weather of San Diego. I continually strive to learn more and grow as a person and a web/graphic professional, and am currently training to become an even stronger programmer by adding PHP/SQL and advanced Javascript techniques to my arsenal. Who knows - maybe someday I’ll even start writing iOS and Android apps. Only time will tell!
If you have made it this far I commend you and shall reward you with this pearl of wisdom given to me by my friend and mentor David Ayers:
Life does not reward timidity.
That said I reserve the right to continue to attack every day and use them to the fullest to grow, develop and enhance the world around me. Cheesy, but True.
