About Flamora
It's the summer of 2009. A fifteen-year-old girl with an unfortunate haircut sits before her desktop, ignoring texts from friends and churning out mediocre Myspace content for hordes of teenagers. "There has to be more to life than this," she whispers to herself after teaching yet another apparently illiterate stranger how to install a layout. "But what?"
But what? A personal blog and portfolio. That's what! And so Flamora was born.
As of July 5, 2012, the blog half ceased to exist. The portfolio half, however, is still kickin'. Follow me on Twitter to find out about new artwork immediately after it's posted.
The Name
To come up with a name, I began listing things I like. I don't like much, so the list narrowed down to Harry Potter in approximately eight seconds. "Flamora" jumped right off the screen at me in the first online Harry Potter spell encyclopedia I found. "The spell to cast flames," it said. I didn't remember ever seeing this "flamora" in the books, but it was available, so I snatched that sucker up.
Turns out I didn't remember it because it doesn't exist. I reread the books and never found it. Then, when I went back to the encyclopedia, I saw this "spell to cast flames" was removed. So in my attempt to pick a name that has meaning for once, I ended up with a name that means nothing at all.
About Gabi Bernard
I suppose I've technically been designing since I was twelve. I don't think you can classify Xanga layouts with half-copied code and MS Paint-generated graphics as "design," exactly. But if I never started fiddling with poorly constructed layout codes back then, Flamora wouldn't exist now.
Since then, I've gone through many phases as a designer. I started by making layouts for sites like Xanga and Myspace. Once those markets died, I moved on to WordPress themes and resources for other designers. Now, six years after it all began, I focus on freelance work and my own growth as an artist. Through it all, my style has remained fairly consistent. I like bright colors, cute characters, and bright colors. Even though I don't own a single article of pink clothing, the color finds its way into the majority of my designs. I also like to use circles as details, which doesn't make sense since I'm 108% sure I have trypophobia.
Skills
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Paint Shop Pro, HTML, CSS, WordPress and Tumblr Theme Design
Education
Every fancy portfolio I've used as a reference has had an education section, and I don't want to feel left out. I have a high school diploma. That's cool, I guess. But as far as web design education is concerned, I taught myself through experimentation and the occasional online tutorial.