I’m excited to announce that for the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly coming out of the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced. I’ve had significantly less depressive episodes and I (sometimes) have genuine motivation to get work done. Because of this, I’ve been back into the game of developing my scripting and designing skills to prepare for my life as a web designer (or developer or both) after college.

There are so many things I need to work on! HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript to name the languages I need to learn/learn more about. I need to read about design theory (color theory, layout of elements, etc). I need to get better at making, editing and manipulating images in Photoshop. I need to familiarize myself more with WordPress. I need to read up on how to start and maintain a freelance career. THERE’S JUST SO MUCH I NEED TO DO!! Furthermore, I keep getting inspired to do a bunch of random things: make icon sets, make WordPress themes, etc. I’m so excited to do ALL of this that I think I’m overwhelming myself.

What I need to do is take it one step (or a couple of steps) at a time. I’m currently working through a tutorial that takes you through the process of designing a (verrry) simple layout in PS, slicing it, coding it in HTML, then making it all fit on the page properly with CSS (click here if you’re interested). It’s going pretty well but I keep feeling anxious and I just want all of the information in my head so I can move on to the more interesting things. I know that this is all information that I need to learn in order to advance and although it doesn’t seem like it, I am learning a lot from this tutorial.

In addition to doing that tutorial, I’ve also been reading articles here and there about design theory and freelance careers (on Net Tuts and Web Design Tuts. By the way, I freaking LOVE Tuts Plus. I’m actually totally and completely in love with Envato in general).

Anyway, this is what I’ve been up to the past week. Which is really bad because today marks the first day of finals week and I’ve been focusing more on web design instead of my finals!