I initiated my career as a freelancer in Brazil back in 1996 but didn't have much luck in the field once I moved to Canada in 1998 which prompted me to take full time positions with established companies. My last full time job was with a financial corporation, for close to 4 years, as a web designer supporting their intranet and public sites. This last job taught me a lot about how to incite project requirements from clients, access control and project approval methodology. Although there was not a lot of space for skill development and we worked under strict guidelines for browser support (IE6 for most of the time I was there and then IE7 and that meant using table layouts and no interactive elements) it did teach me a lot about corporate layout/design and acceptable look/feel for corporate sites.

I left that job in January of 2010 to pursue a freelance career once again and to allow myself to do what I love most: work in wildly creative projects, constantly learning new web technologies and upgrading my skills in the process.

I absolutely love what I do, the freedom to create custom Joomla! templates is wonderful and being involved with the Joomla! project in a higher level than I could when I was tied in a 9-5 job is also a big plus.

The only thing that sometimes bothers me is that, because most of my work is done via projects outsourced to me by design companies and/or other designers and developers, most of the time I cannot claim any participation on the final product that I feel particularly proud of having been involved with.

I am thankful and happy when I am given credit for any work I have done therefore I felt compelled to write this post and thank Kitty Cooper from Open Sky Web Design for giving me credit and allowing me to post our last joint project in my folio.

Although I played a small part in the launching of this particular project, as any project, it was unique and with its uniqueness came also the opportunity to learn new things. I thoroughly enjoy working with Joomla! templates be it to customize or write from scratch and overriding new extensions is a kick and this one allowed me to do just that. I am already looking forward to the next project (aka challenge)! Onwards I go!