I continued my education after high school at Montana State University. The degree of choice was a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis on Graphic Design. If you're not familiar with what you study with a graphic design degree, it's basically a four year trade school degree with emphasis in art (painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, etc.) and then a study in how to create logos, print media, concept art, website design and the like. When I was enrolled in my classes, there was one design student that was an excellent developer as well as an artist, and when we created websites in one course his skill set allowed his website to be far far better then anyone else in the class.
This is when I realized I needed to learn to code.
If you told me when I was 18, I was going to get a design degree and write more code than click around in Photoshop I would have thought you were crazy. However, that is exactly what happened. It started with me reading through online tutorials, about 3,000 stack overflow questions, blogs and forums for tips, tricks and techniques. I learned a handful a CMSs, each which required a different amount of technical prowess and kept pushing me forward. I went to bed at 3:00 in the morning multiple times until I got the issue fixed.
Having an art background and the technical ability to achieve it without having to hire an outside developer has made the business much more efficient and capable. Where others have problems creating custom interfaces and functionality we were able to push ourselves to create unique and interesting interfaces for our client's websites.
The culture this experience instilled in me has trickled down to our team and the spirit of ingenuity and trying new things continues to grow. It's something I push every chance I get. In the end, the one thing I learned is that not knowing how to do something, or thinking that it's not something you need to know is unacceptable. Your ignorance or skill set can only be created and limited by you.
You create your own self worth, and your own ability to help your clients.
