Silent Storms

I stopped blog­ging for a long, long time, mainly because it just wasn’t fun any­more. Yet, dur­ing my hia­tus, I missed blog­ging, so I knew I would come back to it. I’ve taken the time to think about what I want to blog about, and what caused my lack of inter­est before. I’ve come to the con­clu­sion I was try­ing too hard. I wasn’t even mak­ing money off this blog, nor did I plan too, yet I focused too much on my traf­fic sta­tis­tics and how I could gain more read­ers, cre­at­ing sched­ules for myself, push­ing myself to come up with blog posts more reg­u­larly, even if I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly inspired to write about any­thing. I’ve now decided I’m not going to write about things I’m barely inter­ested in or have lit­tle knowl­edge of just because it might gain me more read­ers. While I’m still focus­ing this blog around arts & design, I’ve now decided this really is a place for me, to keep track of what I learn, and for those already inter­ested in the things I have to share.

My blog posts will mainly include web design, web devel­op­ment and graphic design, and are all focused on hob­by­ists. Pro­fes­sion­als are unlikely to find much here that’s of inter­est to them.

While I’m very pas­sion­ate about arts and design, and have actu­ally very seri­ously thought about mak­ing a career out of it, I have found I’m not too fond of design­ing for oth­ers on a reg­u­lar basis and very much pre­fer keep­ing it as a hobby and a per­sonal cre­ative out­let. I have no degree in any form of design (or arts), but love mak­ing graph­ics, run­ning web­sites, tak­ing pho­tos and draw­ing in my spare time. It’s purely a hobby, and Silent Storms is the place I show­case my works and keep track of the things I learn. When­ever I blog or write arti­cles about some­thing arts and design related, it’s geared towards fel­low hob­by­ists. I’m not a pro­fes­sional, nor will I ever imply that I am. The blog posts and arti­cles will be writ­ten to the best of my abil­i­ties and knowl­edge, but please do feel free to cor­rect me when­ever you feel I’ve made a mistake.

I’ve been build­ing web­sites and mak­ing graph­ics as a hobby since 2002. I started out with those small “pixel” images, quickly moved on to pixel dolls, found fan­list­ings and started my first fan­list­ing at the end of 2004. Espe­cially as a fan­list­ing owner have I been work­ing on improv­ing my web­site graph­ics as well as my cod­ing (HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL). Around the same time, I moved on from pixel dolls to blends, icons and web­site graph­ics. Real­is­ing the amount of time I have been mak­ing graph­ics, my graph­ics are nowhere near as amaz­ing as I’d hope them to be. Even though over the years I’ve been a part of sev­eral won­der­ful com­mu­ni­ties and they’ve all played a part in teach­ing me about all these things, it was only when I joined graphic forums that I really started improv­ing my graph­ics by learn­ing from fel­low hob­by­ists. Every­thing I learned in those com­mu­ni­ties, I had to reg­is­ter for. Openly acces­si­ble design-related web­sites are mainly focus­ing on the pro­fes­sion­als. I don’t care about mak­ing money from my graph­ics or web­sites, I don’t care about start­ing a free­lance career, nor do I care for any­thing else that might be of inter­est to pro­fes­sion­als. For me, this is all just a hobby, and I just want to improve my graph­ics and my cod­ing as well as help other hob­by­ists with theirs when I can.

Basi­cally, I plan to share the things I’ve learned over the years with fel­low hob­by­ists, whether they’re just start­ing out and look­ing to learn the basics, or have been in this hobby for a while and are look­ing for ways to improve their cre­ative works or expand their knowledge.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 12:43 by Anouska and is filed under SilentStorms.net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.