Anna Thompson

I am
Anna Thompson

I love to learn; I live to create

Artistic creation has been a part of me from the moment I could pick up a chunky paint brush and dunk it in Clag. Even when I didn’t know what Graphic Design was, I was making books about overseas holidays I’d been on and tiny little booklets in MS Paint about Pokémon, but it wasn’t until I learned about Desktop Publishing at school that I realised I could turn it into a career.

I’ve been an in-house graphic designer at print houses in Adelaide since 2010, and in that time I’ve learnt so much about how to manipulate pdfs to produce the right result. You won’t catch me sending RGB images to print, or designing something with a fluoro Pantone colour for a client who clearly can’t afford it. I’ve designed for digital and offset, business cards and pull-up banners. I know print better than a lot of designers—trust me, I’ve had to fix my fair share in prepress!

Outside the office, everything I love to do is creative. I do drawing and illustration with my Derwent Artists or my Wacom tablet and Photoshop, I’ve been writing a novel series (with various offshoots) for over a decade, and I dabble a little in photography with my snazzy little travel zoom Sony. I set a goal for myself that I’ll take up one new creative hobby a year, and 2015 was the year of brush pen lettering, so expect to see a lot more of that in the future!

Oh, and I also love cooking (hit me up for a brownie), reading, watching my boys in their Baggy Greens in summer and being a one-eyed Crow in winter.

What I really, really want to get into, though? Digital media design. Give me websites and app development. Give me user interfaces and hierarchies. Give me cool animations and snazzy image galleries. That’s what bloogum here is all about, learning as much as I can teach myself about web design.

I started at 15, teaching myself the basics of html and css, and built up from there. On bloogum, I’m deliberately stretching myself as much as I can. Every new page I create makes me learn something new. I wrote the script for the little jQuery menu in the corner and all the php includes scattered around to make my coding life easier. I made sure everything works beautifully in every browser, designing from the mobile up so every page is responsive and perfect.

The print portfolio, web portfolio and this about page use Skrollr to implement parallax scrolling, giving the impression of the image 'slides' scrolling slower than the text to really send them into the background.

The blog, (th)inky thoughts, is my first foray into Wordpress. I created the layout there from scratch, not from any Wordpress templates. All the php and extra scripting was a steep learning curve, but I’m super glad I took it. So many websites now are powered by Wordpress. It really is a powerful tool, and especially user-friendly for clients who may want to update their own websites in the future.

The two galleries, for illustration & photography and logos & lettering, were a second challenge. I used jQuery rather than css to animate the rollovers on the thumbnails. The gallery itself is built on touchTouch, a highly-customisable gallery script that allows the user to scroll through with the arrow keys on a computer, or by swiping on a mobile device touch screen.

The original print portfolio page was created with Bootstrap to make my first responsive design. Since then I’ve learned how to use flex-boxes to give myself a whole lot more control.

This portfolio showcases as much coding as I know how to do. I’m not a code monkey, and I never will be, but I know enough to communicate my ideas with one. I know what html is capable of. Raw JavaScript is still beyond me, and I’ve barely touched the edges of what php and jQuery are capable of, but that’s just the fun of it—the more I learn, the more I get to use it!

Perhaps even more than the self-portrait up top, that gumleaf in the inkwell there is me. I always wanted for my logo to have some tie-in with all my creative pursuits, as well as have that feeling of the real and maybe a touch of the Hills I’ve grown up in. The gumleaf in the inkwell displays that perfectly. I love feathers and incorporate them often into my writing and drawing projects, and turning that idea to a quill, for my writing, was obvious.

Twisting the feather into a gumleaf was what made it feel suddenly me. I’ve had bloogum.net since I was a teenager, and I wanted to bring that into the logo somehow, it having been inspired by my beautiful Adelaide Hills. I love the smell and the tweety little birds, the sound of the wind in the trees; I love the Hills, and there’s no way you could keep me out of them.

Drawn first in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet and favourite pencil-like brush (using Derwent swatches), then vectored up in Illustrator, and finally refreshed a few years later with a brush pen. My bloogum has evolved along with me.