valkyrie // walquiria
Born in Curitiba, Brazil, in the early 90s, I spent a good chunk of my life behind a computer. Weekends on end connected to dial up, on IRC chat rooms and surfing the web. I had a blog and posted pixel art dolls that I made using Paint and Animation Shop... until a friend of my mom's gave me a book about Photoshop. The first Photoshop I managed to get my hands on was 7.0. Before selfies were a thing, I was taking them with a TekPix keychain camera and applying Photoshop effects to them before posting them to my flog, and later on, to my Orkut page. I learned basic HTML using a huge book and Microsoft Front Page, before I got my hands on Macromedia DreamWeaver. I built a lot of table based pages on GeoCities before I learned how to Blig, Blogspot, WordPress and cPanel.
Over time my interest in photography, design and all of that "computer stuff" got me taking classes on Photoshop, Linux and 3D Studio Max. I read design magazines and exchanged knowledge with other design enthusiasts. I learned how to Corel Draw and got a job as a graphic designer, and then I went on to become an image editor for a wedding photographer, where I learned about Lightroom and WordPress.
I took some detours in life, and thought I would end up doing something else, while keeping design as a hobby. I took bartending classes in New York, but I ended up right back where I belonged: taking pictures, photoshopping and building websites. Eventually I got a job at a tech company, where I worked my way from sales to tech support to web design, and that's where I got most of my experience, helping thousands of companies get their online business up and running.