AIM / MSN / YAHOO: connorsmacartist
I was born in Jersey City, NJ in 1972. Both my parents were teachers and devoted their lives to special education. At the age of 12, I began taking weekend lessons in comic book drawing. I pursued these drawing classes through High School, in addition to a course in Commercial Art. I attended SCCC State College in the Catskills with a scholarship. I also worked at the local newspaper doing paste-ups and operating the stat camera. Shortly afterwards, I began working full time for a few advertising agencies in Fishkill, NY, creating newspaper advertisements, logos, brochures and menus.
After a couple years, I started working as a freelance designer with companies in predominantly the New York area. The numerous projects include: a line of snowboards for Apocalypse Snowboards (Ellenvile, NY); production work for a package design firm (Hell's Kitchen, NYC); graphic design for a bag designer (Fashion Ave, NYC); and a multitude of catalog work for JMJ (Printing District, NYC). While I was working as a consultant for a CD ROM house in South Norwalk, CT, I was first introduced to the world of interactive work like 256 super palates, streaming files, html and Macromedia Lingo programming. Through the years, I collected a "morgue file" of photos and resources on my computer and started distributing these files through IP addresses and my home computer. When digital photography became affordable and easily accessible, I set up a large web-based repository of morgue files that could be freely distributed to the World Wide Web community.
I continued freelance work for a few years before one of my biggest clients in the advertising field, Grey Interactive, offered me a full time position as a designer. In a short time, I became Grey's lead multimedia developer and their primary Action Script coder and worked in that position for over eight years. I have also learned Perl, MySql, XML, javascript and php coding, which I used to develop several websites, including www.morguefile.com. In addition to keeping up with interactive design, I have been pursuing an interest in fine arts through Oil Painting courses at the Educational Alliance in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Art Students League.