Nancy J. FosterI’ve been a professional graphic designer, web designer, and writer since I started my own design company in 1994. I’m currently available for freelance work. This blog serves as my portfolio.

I actually started down this path much earlier. As a school-aged child, I always gravitated to the Arts, whether it was sketching, creating things with my hands, or writing poetry. In high school, a new program was created, offering qualified students with the option of going into a vocational program at a different school. I applied for and was accepted into the commercial art program, but at the last minute, changed my mind. I was just about to go into my sophomore year and didn’t want to leave my school and friends. Amazingly, I ended up in that field anyway.

When I first entered the job market, most of my jobs were office-related or managerial, but despite that, I kept finding myself adding to my duties, handling various marketing and design work. For instance, one of my earliest jobs was as a receptionist for a marine distribution company, but it wasn’t long before I was assisting the Sales Manager with creating the company catalog. This was long before the days of desktop publishing software — we did it the old-fashioned, literal cut-and-paste method.

Even on my own time, I dabbled in this arena. Around that same time, I belonged to a historical society and started a newsletter for the group, typing the articles on a manual typewriter, drawing my own illustrations and calligraphy, cutting and pasting it all together before photocopying and distributing it.

Fast forward several years and I found myself working for a marketing research firm. I learned what marketing was effective and what wasn’t, lessons that would serve me well once I opened my own design shop.

Once desktop publishing software became commercially available, I thoroughly enjoyed using it to create artwork for employers, then later for clients in my own shop. In the early days, I used Word Perfect and its companion Draw Perfect. From there I went to CorelDRAW, its companion PhotoPaint, and Microsoft Publisher. I wasn’t using those for long before graduating to PageMaker and FreeHand, and Adobe Photoshop for bitmap image work. Eventually Adobe bought both PageMaker and FreeHand, putting all my graphic design tools in one basket as it were (of course, I eventually switched from FreeHand to Illustrator for vector image work; and InDesign replaced PageMaker). During this time, I also added web design and HTML email blasts to my skill set. I started out using Netscape’s Composer, but quickly moved to Macromedia’s Dreamweaver (also eventually brought under Adobe’s tent).

I’ve been using Adobe’s Design Professional Creative Suite since CS2, so that adds things like Bridge, Acrobat, and Flash to my arsenal. On top of my main design software packages, I’ve used iMovie and Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing. For general office work, I use both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice suites. When it comes to presentations, I’ve created numerous PowerPoint presentations, both for Account Executives to pitch a product, and for educational purposes.

As to hardware, while I started out on a Windows platform and used it for the majority of the time I’ve been professionally working in this field, I moved to Mac OS X in 2009 for my own work. I much prefer my Wacom stylus to a mouse and have used one for more years than I can remember.

I genuinely love the challenge of creating just the right illustration for a piece. While there’s a lot of stock photography out there, sometimes you can’t find exactly what you need. That’s when the magic of Photoshop happens. I can take a piece of this and a piece of that, play with the light and shadows, adjust some colors, and voilà, there’s the image I needed. Or recreating a client’s low-resolution bitmap logo as a vector image so it’s crisp and sharp, and can be properly color-separated if needed. It’s all good.

If you couldn’t tell by reading this blog, I’m also a lover of the written word. I’ve been writing since I was a child. I’ve lost count of how many articles I’ve written for clients’ newsletters, but it’s well into the thousands. Whether it’s short and punchy copy for an ad, an informative article, or even fiction, I’ve been doing it for a very long time and it never gets old.