My name is Mike Garcia and SD-DEZIGN is my personal website and portfolio. I was born in Wisconsin where I lived until I was a freshman in high school. My freshman year I moved to Illinois which is where I met my wife 7 years ago. I now live in Mineral Wells, Texas with my wife of five years.
I've been developing websites for the last 13 years which has given me the opportunity to dabble in everything from HTML and SSI to Flash and PHP. In recent years, I've been playing mostly with Flash...specifically Actionscript.
My interest in web design began early in high school. I've been an avid gamer for years and started out by helping out on a few different Final Fantasy and RPG (Role Playing Game) sites that I visited on a regular basis. Back then, most of the work I did was pretty basic HTML, SSI and JavaScript stuff before moving on to advanced JavaScript and dHTML
In my junior year of high school, I joined my high school web team which is where I was introduced to Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. After a year of working with the school web team, I applied for the Assistant Lead opening and began helping to develop professional web sites for local businesses in the area (under the direction of webTEAM LLC.) while I worked on my Flash certification (version 4 at the time).
After graduation, I began working on a degree in Computer Science. After taking a few classes in Java and C++, I decided to focus my energy on the web and began teaching myself Actionscript, PHP and mySQL.
I began working for Fedler Photographic Studio in 2001 (where I worked until October of 2007) and it is here that I was finally able to really experiment with the web. In my time with Fedler Studio, I became engrossed in Adobe Photoshop (6-CS3) and honed my general graphics skill with photographic images. I designed my first data driven application specifically for them called The Preview Center. In January 2007, I designed the current version of their site which you can read about in my portfolio.
I actively research the web community. In recent months, this has included Adobe's AIR technology that allows the development of RIAs for the desktop using web technologies like HTML, Javascript and Flash. The beauty of the web is that it is ever changing. I look forward to what the future holds for both me and the web and can't wait to experience more.