Troy Fleischauer academic portfolio

My Photoshop Story

I had my first experience with Photoshop in 2004 when I made a poster for a band that I played guitar in called From the Icy Coast. The band had a shared computer at our rehearsal space with Photoshop installed on it. I took existing assets and arranged them with a red, white, and black color scheme. I found the Soviet style typeface searching on-line, that typeface became the typeface for the band's logo and headings.

In Autumn 2011, I took Informatics 424 - Information Visualization and Aesthetics at the University of Washington. I muddled my way through the visual design portion of the assignments using Microsoft Paint, Microsoft Expression Suite, Sencha Animator, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Other than MS Paint, I was learning all these visual design programs for the first time. Professor Brooks would sometimes say we are working with these programs "from 10,000 feet." The class was getting a brief introduction to many design tools.

To take advantage of my student discount before graduating from the University of Washington, I bought Adobe's Creative Suite 6 for $600 in the summer of 2012. Finally, I owned the coveted design software.

In March of 2013, I completed an internship at KCTS 9 in Web Production. I was working in the Interactive Department and we used Photoshop CS6 on nearly a daily basis. I muddled my way through the work load there but my small amount of Photoshop experience, mainly from Dr. Terry Brooks' INFO 424 class, just wasn't enough. The internship inspired me to take a Photoshop course offered at Seattle Central Community College. I had a great experience in Martin McCann's class learning many of the ins, outs, and throughs of Photoshop CS6 & Photoshop CC.