Greetings! It is January 1st, 2010. What better way to start a decade than to open up a blog? It has been a fast six years since 2004, which has been dubbed “the Year of the Blog”, but it is only now that I feel that I have something to blog about, something worth blogging about.

Back in 2004 I knew nothing about graphic design or photography. In 2005 my brother Aaron hooked me up with my very first blog on Blogger. He taught me how to edit the links in the sidebar and that was my introduction to HTML. Kinda fascinating.

Before long I wanted to build a whole website. My two younger brothers, Isaac and Judson, and I would make films and I thought that a website for our films would be pretty fly. I realized that in Blogger I could replace all the code with my own. Great! But I soon ran into a problem: what if I wanted more than one page? So decided to start more Blogger blogs and link them together. I ended up creating close to 30 blogs and linking them all together for our “Greenefilm” website. Looking back that was pretty jolly clever. But I still didn’t know anything about design. I was still using Papyrus in the titling of those films after all.

But at the end of a project that started with code, the revelation was that I loved designing the website. I was hooked.

I found some open-source software on the web (Inkscape and the GIMP) and started designing for anything that I could think of—Flyers for my church, my graduation invitations, or a logo for Greenefilm. This was one of my main hobbies until the end of my senior year in high school. That is when my parents got me my first camera: a Nikon D50. Only two weeks after I got the camera I had the amazing opportunity to go to Israel for 12 days. I read a lot of manuals in two weeks but it was in Israel where I really learned a lot. I took 4000 pictures in 12 days. Once again, I was hooked.

I’ve learned a lot in the past few years about design and photography and it has changed the way I perceive things around me. My younger brother remarked recently that the family “can’t take me anywhere” because I point out the typefaces on signs or the bad kerning of the letters. He may say that, but the rest of my family are nerds too, in the best possible way. Everything that I have learned is a direct result of my parents instilling a love of learning in me, and I can’t thank them enough.

I hope this blog will be helpful as I share some of the things I have learned about design and photography with all of you. I hope you will learn some things, you never knew before, be reminded of things that you have forgotten, and maybe, just maybe, change the way you perceive the world.