Ted Balmer

The one, the only.

I am a freelance web developer, graphic designer, and author from Milwaukee, WI. I grew up in Shorewood and later Mequon. In the years after high school, I bounced around a few colleges, including a few years in upstate New York, trying to find the right fit. I ultimately returned to Wisconsin still seeking a place. In that time, I spent a few years working for a small IT company designing and developing websites until they closed. After that, I worked as a freelance web developer on the side with marginal success. In 2006, I produced the majority of the illustrations for an engineering textbook titled Exploring Engineering, published by Elsevier which is in it’s second edition. As of right now, I’m working as a supervisor a retail store until I can get my act together and figure out what I want to do with my life; which could be something outside computers altogether.

What I do

The projects that I take the most pride in have been my personal projects done in my free time. Two years ago I wrote and illustrated my first children’s book called Mistletoe’s Night, which I self-published on Lulu, and now I am in the process of writing another children’s book with some of the same tools I used for the first. After that, I would like to do a graphic novel based on a story that I’m still working out.

Skills

Originally, I started working with 3D modeling and animation, and then moved over to web design and programming. Later I started dabbling in web design and programming, followed by moving from the expensive proprietary tools to open-source equivalents. More recently, I’ve been focusing on more tradition 2D design on my drawing tablet. These days, virtually all of my work is done with open-source software on Linux. More recently I’ve been trying to do more things away from the computer, and as such, I’ve been playing with photography, drawing, and some woodworking.