I was steadily becoming addicted to a community on the site, and I wanted to be able to contribute. It started out with guild banners slowly drawn on MS paint. These were carefully composed gif images that were all drawn hand-to-mouse with shading and texture slowly added by hand.
My first html was copied from pre-designed user lookups. I learned by trial-and-error. Copying, pasting, modifying, previewing, modifying, previewing, modifying... It was painstaking, but I was learning. Soon I knew how to upload my gif banners to photobucket and then embed them into profiles and guild layouts.
My break-through was learning how to make text-boxes. Then I could fully design my own layouts and align them over custom-made backgrounds. I had a program called drawplus4 that I had downloaded, and I could actually edit other people's images. It brought the quality of work to a new level.
At this point, other users began asking me for custom banners, backgrounds, user lookups, guild layouts. I was gaining a reputation. Custom design was a valued skill and so my account was gaining virtual popularity. At fifteen, I couldn't have been more thrilled.
Then I got photoshop. I would spend hours after school taking screenshots from flash games and comics to layer into elaborate graphics. I was good at it. And my coding had long advanced to css. I was getting more requests then I could keep up with and had developed a solid reputation.
But then when I was 17, the community I was a part of started to break apart. Neopets had been bought by Nickelodeon, owned by Viacom. It was becoming increasingly corporatized and increasingly geared towards younger kids. My online friends were having their accounts frozen for talking about politics. Many people were leaving, either out of frustration or because their offline lives were changing.
And that was when I stopped learning web design. It no longer had a purpose. I had a skill that couldn't be applied anywhere. But sometimes I wonder if I should have kept it up...
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