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FrozenFire
I'm an old fart who farts.

Matt @FrozenFire

Age 33, Male

Graphic Designer

Texas A&M University

Houston, TX

Joined on 9/26/05

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Been a while!

Posted by FrozenFire - January 8th, 2015


Hey NG!

So I'm ashamed to say I've not been working on anything personal the past 7 months. I wish I was.

Started a job as a Graphic Designer in June and it's been a real job experience with a steady income. The steady income part is the most appealing, as creating content for the web just gives you various bursts of money which are sometimes unreliable. I do miss creating what I want to make on my terms, though. 

I've learned so much. The company I work with uses Drupal as a CMS for all four of their children company websites. Before I began working here I didn't even know PHP and now I'm the only person who can understand how their sites function internally.

I've learned a few new 3D programs, including NX, Solidworks, and Keyshot.

I designed a huge booth that was put up at a huge industrial convention in Orlando, FL. (POWERGEN)

1349426_142073593841_tumblr_ngacdeSdsN1rnbtyzo5_1280.jpg

 


Any advice I can give to people who are just getting out of college with a degree in animation.. don't just look for games or movie studios to hitch onto. There are other industries interested in your services. The companies that wanted to hire me were either medical (which pays well) or Oil&Gas related (which pays really well). They can help you build up some capital to help support you later when you try to achieve your dreams.
 


Comments

Need a like button for blog posts, I read this earlier and enjoyed it but didn't reply so now I'm replying so you know it's been read!

Cool to hear about all the stuff you've been learning and that's a nice booth! Did you go to the convention?

I was not at the convention mainly because I couldn't talk about the products like the salesmen could.

but Tom, gearing the site closer to social media is a step in the right direction. I enjoy the interaction feature and I would use a like button quite frequently. I still get on NG every day pretty much.. just to read your news posts and watch some shorts.

Just refreshed my Supporter badge for 2015 too.

How much traffic did the NUMA NUMA surge get NG? I've noticed things picking up lately.

The Numa Numa surge was interesting because Numa Numa had OVER 600,000 views on the day of the surge (and 70k the day after) but it didn't ripple across the rest of the site the way it would have in the old days. It was cool to see people popping up in the "Welcome People of Reddit" forum post though.

Traffic returned right back to normal after all that but it was energizing. Our forum updates have been helping, too; more and more people are making use of the @ before usernames and I'm hoping that will keep growing. People don't realize they can pretty much summon their favorite artists and quite possibly get a response. It's like Twitter where you know you're publicly getting called on, whereas in the old days, users could talk about artists and the artist would never know because they didn't have a feed.

Well that's a bummer. I do like the @ feature too. It could be brought to these user posts as well maybe? (unless it does already.. I haven't tried)

I'm actually pretty envious that you get to work on your own projects as a job (NG & Behemoth). It's a goal of mine to have a similar setup one day. Lots of ambitious ideas in my noggin that may become reality if I try hard enough.

Another designer huh. Grrrrr. Hi matt!

I was a designer before you butt head :P

I was a designer before you were born

I was doing interior design in the scrotum. The other sperm lived very comfortably.

I've given similar advice to the artists and illustrators here, and like the @ thing, needs to be repeated constantly, or something. Myself, I think the functionality of the site, should come before any more upgrades to the social tools already in place :\ Something as simple as listing movie/game file sizes, matter to people who are on data plans, pay monthly for so many GB a month... We could really use some more interactivity with other social media sites, but since we're not mainstream enough to add NG's icon to the sprite sheet and code.....

BRING GHANDI BACK

yes massa right away massa

I have to say. Relive your life has to be one of my favourite flash games. So while there may not be a proper sequel yet. Congratualations on a good learning 7 months.

JJ JJ