About

My creative drive pulls me in several directions at once…

Art

My parents are both artists and I’ve drawn and created from a young age. I graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art with a BFA in Illustration in 1996, and then realizing that the world of of the freelance illustrator sucks, I promptly taught myself web design and ran off to San Francisco (see Design)

San Francisco… yeah I don’t have to say much about it. Here, I’ve been able to evolve my art punk freak creativity beyond anything I ever did before. From helping organize crazed events such as Balsa Man, SF Tweed, What’s Your Answer, the Buzzed Bee Spelling Bee and Stow Lake Pirate Battles to interactive sculpture/performances such as Crack Houses For Humanity to doing branding, signage, and graphics for art projects such as Interpretive Arson and Dance Dance Immolation. Logos for oddball art projects has become one of my bailiwicks.

Code

In high school, I was taught how to print hello world in Basic on a TRaSh80. My parents bought a Amiga 1000 when they first came out. In the late 80s, I dialed into my friend’s BBS, the AMIGA users group BBS, and the Cleveland Free-net. In 1996, at the tail end of my Art School career, I taught myself HTML and web design.

Since those early days, I’ve continued this auto-didactic process—always striving to learn new skills. Not satisfied with being a master at carving up sites into tables, I became an early proponent of CSS table-less designs. As the web shifted to CMS-based sites, I taught myself how to install and build for a number of systems (Wordpress, Joomla, Umbraco, etc.) and dabbled a little in PHP and ASP.NET. Recently, with the maturation of webkit and gecko, the web world has become once again on fire with renewed momentum. As a result, I’ve begun to pick up new skills like HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and SASS.

Design

Like I mentioned, I began my career thinking I would be a illustrator. I still do illustration here or there but my primary focus since the late 90s has been design—primarily user interface design, information architecture, and brand strategy for the web. I’ve worked in small web-shops (the ad-hoc group), huge internet firms (Proxicom), and in the wild jungles of freelance. Currently I am the web manager for the UCSF Fetal Treatment Center and the Bay Area Pediatric Surgeons.

While my primary focus is online, I am not completely foreign to print design and have a fair number of logo designs under my belt as well. At some point, I plan on adding a portfolio of my logo designs to this here site, but it’s not quite a pressing issue at the moment.

Other Interests

You will also find me writing from time to time about my other interests. I’m an avid bicyclist and use it as my primary means of transportation. I have a passion for all things science related and especially brain and psychology related. Occasionally, I’ll get the politics bug and write about that. And from time to time, I write simple posts about what is going on in my life.

Posts that explain a bit more about me

~ Colin Fahrion