About the Author

I’m Brian E. Young, an illustrator and graphic designer in the Washington, DC metro area, specializing in print design, advertisement, publication design and marketing since the year 2000. My graphic design work has included creating banners, posters and other printed media for clients including Hilton Hotels, DoubleTree, Hyatt and various other national and local businesses. I’ve also designed advertisements for several magazines and newspapers. Currently, I work as a publication designer creating various supplemental publications, area guides and marketing materials.

I’m on DeviantArt, MySpace, Twitter and many other sites usually under the username “sketchee” if I can get it..

In 2002, Sketchee.com was created as an online showcase of my works. As a painter and fine artist, I have participated in various online outlets including the Illustration Friday, Illustration Mundo, and Wetcanvas communities. My paintings have been sold nationally to public and private collections.

In 2007, I became a member of AIGA, the professional association for design.

EDUCATION

In 2005, I completed my Bachelor of Art degree in Fine Art in 2005 from Bowie State University studying computer graphics, design, illustration and various traditional media. While attending the university, I participated in various juried art shows winning first place for his piece Sunset and Stairs and a merit award for A Church in Winter. My 2005 senior art show combined graphic design elements including brochures and posters with acrylic paintings and traditional media. The following year, I returned to Bowie State to perform a recital as a solo pianist taking the opportunity to create printed promotional materials: full color invitations and high quality recital programs. I also received a fine arts scholarship and dean’s list honors.

BA, Fine Art. (Bowie State University) December 2005

Related Coursework: 2-D Design, Computer Graphics, Portrait / Figure Drawing, Life, Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, Museum & Gallery Seminar, Photography, Computer Science.

Exhibitions: Juried Student Art Show: First Place, Spring 2005, Third Place, Fall 2004, Participant: Spring 2003, Fall 2003, Spring 2004.

Senior Art Show (2005): Developed all graphic promotional materials including brochure and posters.
Scholarships: Piano (Spring 2003) and Fine Arts (Fall 2004 - Spring 2005). Deans list (Fall 2004, 2005).

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

Computer Graphics

Understanding of process and spot colors, print resolution, creation of digital artwork (PDF, tiff, jpeg, etc.) and print production.

Software: Adobe InDesign CS, Photoshop, Illustrator, Streamline, ImageReady, Corel Draw Suite, Macromedia Flash MX Actionscript, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, OpenOffice, Microsoft Powerpoint, QuickBooks Pro, DOS, Microsoft Windows. Apple Macintosh OSX.

Web/Interactive design: Hand-coded HTML, CSS, SSI, FTP, Command Line Access via Telnet & Security Shell (SSH)

Arts & Illustration

Creating conceptual and technical drawings and illustrations.

Traditional and digital photography, acrylic painting, sculpture / modeling, drawing and illustration.

Domain name provided by:
DotYou
I’ve had excellent service with dotyou. They have features that I’ve never seen from any other domain name host. They can let you use their dns system which can allow for instant dns changes or you can use classic name servers. This doesn’t work for all hosts however, Sketchee.com runs on the classic name server system while I have PrettyMagic.com using their dns system–which by the way gives me subdomains to use and direct anywhere on the web I’d like. I highly recommend it.

Hosting server provided by:
ICDSoft
(Make sure to mention sketchee.com referred you in the comments!) This host is really great. They’re support is superior to my old host, your-site.com. Don’t use your-site! They’re employees are very rude and as you’ll read in the blog they’ve insulted me several times. When I was with your-site.com I got so many complaints all the time from my users. ICDsoft is apparently run much better. The servers are running very smoothly and there has been little to no downtime. For $5 a month I get 333mb of space and 5gigs of traffic. Same cost as the old host and much more features. They helped me with info on how to tranfer hosts before I signed up and quickly helped me when I ran into problems with the inital setup. By quickly I mean hours, sometimes minutes and always the same day! When I couldn’t get something myself they did it for me!At any time of the day their support is running. I had questions late at night, early in the morning, in the middle of the day–whenever my schedule let me work on it–and they were there. That inital experience with support has made me very positive with them and the lack of server problems is refreshing compared to my old host. It’s a bargain. Search around google and you’ll find the other emphatic reviews of this host.