About
My name is Jeff Smith and I’m a web developer and graphic designer living in St. Albert, Alberta, Canada. That being said, I’m not originally from the prairies, I’m a maritimer, born and bred, namely an Islander (Prince Edward Island). Hence the subtitle of From Away: “The tales of a nomadic Islander†(I’ll explain the main title a little further on). I spent the first eighteen years of my life living on PEI, completing my high school education, playing lots of hockey and basketball, drawing, and finding lots of trouble to get into with my crew of friends. Coming on the end of my senior year at Montague Regional High School, I made the decision that I wanted to move on to university, but the question was what and where. After doing a lot of research and soul searching, I decided to study Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
For the next four years, I studied, and did a bit of partying at UNB, met a lot of really excellent friends, and now I have lots of stories about my years at university. It was also during this time that I met my wonderful fiance. Near the end of second semester of my fourth year in my Bachelor of Computer Science program, something didn’t feel quite right with the path in which I was heading with my education. At this point I sat down and reassessed what I really wanted to do with my life. The logical choice for me was graphic/web design which I had been dabbling with throughout my university career. I made the decision to leave UNB at the end of the year and pursue an education in graphic design and theory. For the next year (until August 2004) I studied graphic and web design relentlessly, through my studies of my correspondence course as well as any other reading I could get my hands on. I spent countless hours sketching out ideas and then creating them in digital form.
In September 2004, my fiance (the girlfriend) and I moved out here to St. Albert after she landed a job in the area. I began to pursue some freelance jobs in the area, and as of January 2005, I started work full time as a web designer/information architect/technical writer for a small web development company in Edmonton.
Christmas of 2005 was another big change in my life as I proposed to my girlfriend on Christmas day. We plan to get married somewhere in the maritimes in the summer of 2008.
Currently, I’m working as a designer/developer for Further Ahead.
