Couldn’t think of a better way to launch my new blog than to provide a timeline of the events that helped mould EminenceDigital. I’m sure some of you might be curious to know why I retired the world-famous SideEfx.com (world meaning close friends and family of course) and came to settle on a less “flashy” – pun intended – new look. A lot of my early work saw me going through an experimental phase. EminenceDigital, however, uses less flash, and more server side programming to facilitate content management and the like. So I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and miss playing with flash like in the old days, at least not until the moment when I started writing this. In any case, it went a lil’ sum’ like this.
1999 – Accidental Computer Science Major
Started out as an International Business Management Major in University of Maryland University College – Germany. The lack of creativity and challenge in that major led me to add on Computer Science as a double major.
2000 - How the hell do I make stuff move on this thing?
Fervently explored options for PC based animation. My close friend Daniel mentioned that his roommate Eddie Marquez, had been messing with this software called Flash that did just that. So I checked it out and got hooked.
I proceeded to use and abuse Macromedia Flash 4 as much as I could. None of my experimentation involved websites per se at that time. I mostly intermingled real life photos against background music. One piece I did was to promote a campus seventies revival party that was hosted on the College’s intranet portal. My friend Garrett and I dressed up in seventies regalia, took some high resolution photos of us doing…well…seventies stuff, then I proceeded to set up a montague, using Frankie Valley’s Grease theme as background music. Funny stuff.
2001 – From Flash to Photoshop — Is there anyone that doesn’t use layers?
UMUC’s webmaster, got wind of my flash experimentation and asked me to do an intro piece for a freelance website he was building. This was my first paid flash project. I decided to build SideEfx.com shortly after this using just flash.
I find myself designing a poster for a school play courtesy of the art department. Basically I was translating their hand drawn concept into Photoshop, which I had never really worked with before. By the time I was done with the poster I had developed a new interest in Photoshop.
2002 - Did you hear? Jon is teaching Elements of Graphic Design this semester
Was reccommended for a position as an assistant to the head of the computer science depatrment by the webmaster who was graduating (remember the guy I hooked up with the flash piece?). My job was to handle the field work for the boss. I built Unix computer labs, toyed with Red Hat Linux, maintained the Intranet portal and yep, even taught a class.
UMUC found itself on a tight budget once upon a time, so my boss basically gives me two huge Photoshop textbooks and says, alright Jon, you have one summer to learn all this stuff so you can teach it. No big deal. Teaching was fun, even gave a mid-term. Lowest grade was 90%. Tried to critique everyone’s work as much as possible in place of giving them the score they deserved.
2002- 2003 – SideEfx v.2.1, Aufwiedersehen Deutschland and Becoming a programmer
Enter Montclair State
Transferred to montclair state after 3 and a half years in UMUC and had to give up my International Business Major due to regulations at MSU.
SideEfx v.2.1
Created SideEfx v.2.1 as somewhat of a portfolio piece, but freelancing wasn’t really a big interest of mine at the time neither. In any case, SideEfx v2.1 differed from its predecessor in that it had slicker graphics, and lots of 3D studio Max animation and graphic integration.
From C++ to JAVA
Much to my Chagrin, MSU wouldn’t allow me to transfer all my CS. credits over from UMUC, so I had to retake a lot of Comp. Sci. classes. Unlike UMUC MSU used Java on a UNIX platform to teach their CS classes. This is probably the one event that changed my life. Somehow the drudgery of programming didn’t seem so bad after all, everything made more sense the second time around especially using a different language, and all of a sudden I had one more option to add to becoming a designer or a flash developer after graduation.
2003 – 2004 Money talks and Photoshop walks
Broke as a Joke. Will PHP for food
Let’s just say the powers that be decided that yours truly was doing a little overtime with the whole college thing and decided to pull the funding. Think Van Wilder. So I had to think fast. There seemed to be no shortage of people looking for freelancers at the time, so by some reflex action I started taking on freelance projects, with PHP and MySql as my weapons of choice.
Work work work
Yeah, your boy had to put in some hours. My PC couldn’t handle the workload so I begged my supervisor at my campus job to let me do my freelancing in the office where I worked at MSU. I spent many weekends there hacking it up. I practically slept there. I also worked for various companies as a contractor.
2004-2007 Graduation and .Net Career
There wasn’t much to my starting to use .Net. A client wanted a site and insisted I use .Net only. I fumbled around with Visual Studio and MSSQL for a while until I got the hang of it. It wasn’t funny at the time, but I recall trying to write .Net code in much the same way as I wrote PHP code. You know, without the IDE and all. Had to find out the hard way that Microsoft had flipped the script on server side scripting.
Around the time I graduated from MSU I officially gave up PHP to concentrate on coding in .Net. Freelancing gave way to full time jobs, but never quite made it out of the picture completely. Like I said, I need that design fix.
2007 EminenceDigital
I decided to do a major re-sculpting of the SideEfx image, including a new name as well as a new look. The name ‘Eminence’ was a name I had played with since my high-school days. It’s really a play on a middle name that I rarely use – ‘Emisang’. Call it a journal; call it a portfolio or an outlet. I guess it’s a lot of things. It’s a more mature SideEfx, or at least just another evolution of it. Stay tuned.