My name is Ian Baker. I am at this moment of time sitting at my computer wondering what the heck to put in a personal portfolio. I have not made one of these before. I am presently at Kingscliff Tafe enrolled at Certificate 4 Web Design, and hence part of my course is to come up with a personal portfolio.

I am a Plumber by trade and due to certain bodily ailments derived from my overzealous younger years, I am now retraining and refreshing some earlier skills.

I firstly enrolled at Tafe in the Multimedia course and the Flash animation course. Multimedia was making a small movie, about 8 minutes with music and sound effects, transitions etc, some slide shows for web, and some photoshop skills. Flash animation was like making cartoons, picture manipulation, banners with all sorts of effects, and basically whatever you could think of you could do with Flash. I did well in both and the Teachers there said I should keep on with Tafe.

I asked them what sort of courses were available. They then told me that Certificate 2 in Information Technology would be a good start and then that course would open up Certificate 4 courses. Certificate 2 was good. I had previously built a few computers in Sydney ranging from X486, X586, X686 and Pentium based computers with Intel, AMD and another one that escapes my memory at the moment. Most of Certificate 2 that was new to me was the word processing and the databases. I also enrolled in the Web Design course for small business.

I did well in both and that is how I came to be at Kingscliff Tafe now in Web Design. Doing the Flash animation, Web Design for small business, and Photoshop skills from Multimedia have really made it a lot easier in the web design course. I would recommend to anyone interested in doing web design to if possible start with the Web Sites for small business. This course is a good introduction to some of the tools used in creating web pages, and also gives a look into some of the code used.

Prior to starting these courses I was involved in helping at a number of music festivals. I was helping the Hare Krsna's with their food programs. Anything from driving trucks, picking up and delivering supplies, helping cooking, serving food, looking after the gas supplies to all the burners, looking after all the water supplies, and basically what ever was needed to be done.

Festivals we took part in were Woodford, Dreaming, Big Day Out, Byron Blues, Splendour, Nimbin, and a host of other smaller festivals. We also took part in Weddings with catering for up to 350 people, and other religious festivals for between 100 and 250 people.