Hi my name is Kevin DiGennaro. I am a professional graphic designer and website developer. Back in 2005 I started to get interested in graphic desig ...more Hi my name is Kevin DiGennaro. I am a professional graphic designer and website developer. Back in 2005 I started to get interested in graphic design I started drawing and designing in Microsoft Paint as you can imagine this didn't take me very far. I was always reading online to learn more, whether it was a blog post online or a how to article in a magazine. I struggled at the beginning. I honestly would admit I wasn't very good, but I figured like everything else if you REALLY want something and you work hard for it you will eventually achieve success. I stumbled upon a program known as PDN or Paint.net. This program was open source and a much more advanced version of paint. It was a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Keep in mind it was 2005 and I was only 12 years old so Photoshop was a little out of my price range. I played around with PDN and learned about layers and filter effects but really could not figure out how to use them effectively. Around the end of 2005 I found the Paint.net forums. The community there was absolutely amazing quickly I became a daily user on these forums and started soaking up all kinds of things. Quickly I became a respected member of the community and started to contribute back by creating tutorials and helping moderate the forums. While I was doing this I continued to design and people continue to critique my work. At first I took the criticism pretty hard, I really didn't understand why people were so `mean'. I quickly realized that it was the criticism that pushed me and kept me going, the criticism made me become a better designer. I continued this until 2007. In 2007 I became a member of 99Designs and started to create designs for competitions. It was around this time I won my first contest. In 2007 I began to learn HTML/CSS by the beginning of 2008 I could code just about anything in HTML/CSS. In 2008 my parents bought me my first copy of Photoshop and my designs got better and better. I became a member of zymic.com, it is a free hosting site with an amazing community which I enjoyed being part of. Once again I started from the bottom, people began critiquing my work again and complementing the good elements. Slowly but surely I climbed the ladders and became a respected member of the community of which I am still a part of the community. These days I usually hang out on the IRC chat and help those that need help and talk with people who have critiqued my work for years and years. Becoming a graphic designer and a web developer is not something I achieved easily. I worked hard to get where I am today and each day I have to fight new struggles and learn new things. If you are a graphic designer or just starting to climb the ladders do not give up. Search the internet, read a book or a magazine. Work hard to achieve success. "Everyone is capable of success; you just have to work for it." Kevin DiGennaro hide