about

For starters, my name is Zain Syed. I am a 20 year old York University student majoring in Human Resources Management and minoring in Physics. I know they’re both very distinct subjects but I don’t really decide where my interest lies…sorry folks. I am a free-lance web designer with a whole bunch of experience under the belt.

I have no academic background in Web Design or any thing that relates to it. If anything, the closest my academic background has been to web development is the computer science course not too long ago. However, we just covered Fortran 77 (something that cannot be applied to anything nowadays).

Everything I know about web development is self-taught. It always seemed like something so interesting and unique that the only way that it could ever be learned was through practice. In wasn’t until 2001 where I shifted gears and finally decided it was something that I would learn on my own. Of course, in that time I was 13 years old and would have to beg my older siblings to use the computer…good ol’ days. At the time, my brother had his own website and would publish his work online. His work would usually just be random wallpapers that he would produce in his free time. In those days, a lot of people were using combinations of stuff, when it came to Photoshop at least.

The technique that I used for learning would consist of me searching for a Photoshop tutorial and following it. After following it, I would then close the tutorial and try to produce something equal or better to what I did with the tutorial. A memory-span like mine is horrible for such a thing but it only resulted to awesome practice. This way, if I ever skipped a step in between, I would go back to the tutorial, start again, and then challenge myself by shutting it off and doing it without the tutorial. Pretty damn hectic.

I love colouring. I consider myself an unofficial Colourist. I will literally re-colour anything there is; old photographs, sketches…anything! To me, it seems like I am blowing life into that work of art by colouring it. It seems pretty creepy, to be honest, but it’s extremely fun to do if you have the right tools.

There is no secret behind who Ayya and Bulley are. Hasan, who is the oldest brother out of the three of us siblings, is called Ayya by me. When I was a lot younger, I had a hard time saying ‘bhayya’ (‘older brother’ in Urdu); all that would come out of my mouth would be the last four letters…’ayya’. All my life, it’s been unchanged. Bulley is a nickname for my sister who is only 2 years older than me but acts like she is 5 years younger. Her name is Batool and I honestly couldn’t come up with anything better for her name…

That’s pretty much everything my brain can generate for now. I will update this once I develop a more interesting hobby…