About Me

Hello every­one. My name is Chris­t­ian Coker and I am a graph­ics design stu­dent attend­ing prin­cipia col­lege in Elsah Illi­nois. I come from Accra Ghana where my roots in art lie. Grow­ing up, I used to doo­dle around the house any time, any­where and on every­thing for which I got in a lot of trou­ble. Then in high school, I met Nana Yaw, an amaz­ing artist whose illus­tra­tion skills was and still is top notch. He was a great source of inspi­ra­tion for me and my appetite for illus­tra­tion was ele­vated from that time onwards.

At the age of sev­en­teen, I had my first com­puter thanks to my brother‐​in‐​law who put it together for me and my sim­blings as a christ­mas present. The first and only thing I was wanted to do with the com­puter was to art. That is how I got into graph­ics design. At first I was just mess­ing about with sim­ple pro­grams like MS Paint which seemed amaz­ing to me at that time. Then I got into the more seri­ous stuff such as Coral Draw and Pho­to­shop.

High school palyed a huge role in my artis­tic devel­op­ment. I was a visual art elec­tive stu­dent in Achi­mota Sec­ondary School which is the name of my high school. There I learned the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of art and all the basic things any­body going into the art field should know. How­ever, I dis­cov­ered that I did not really enjoy the pro­gram in high school very much. There were too many strict rules and I just did not feel like I was able to express myself enough.

This expe­ri­ence greatly dis­cour­aged me from art and when I got to Prin­cipia Col­lege, I devi­ated from art and selected com­puter sci­ence as my major instead. It was an extremely poor choice on my part because I real­ized that there was absolutely no cre­ativ­ity within that major. Maybe it had to do with the way com­puter sci­ence is struc­tured at the col­lege but I just lost all inter­est in that pro­gram.

I used to doo­dle around the house any time, any­where and on every­thing for which I got in a lot of trou­ble

Finally I decided to go back to what I had once before enjoyed — art, graph­ics design to be spe­cific. The switch felt so nat­ural to me in that I felt more com­fort­able going back to doing what I loved. Dan Kistler, my graph­ics design teacher has been an invalu­able con­trib­u­tor to my growth in art. I have learned a lot about the indus­try stan­dard for mak­ing things and I have also learned a lot about pro­fes­sion­al­ism in this field.

My stu­dent job at Prin Web has also helped me to develop my skills a lot. All of the things I know about build­ing web­sites and mak­ing ban­ner ads and so on, I learned on the job. I also learned to uti­lize the power of the inter­net in lear­ing how to do new things and trou­bleshoot­ing. Prin Web has helped me to develop a rich port­fo­lio and has given me a good deal of pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence which will come in handy when I get a job.

I love graph­ics design because it chal­lenges my level of cre­ativ­ity and I love to observe the progress I make from project to project. Each time I com­plete a project, I feel like I have become a bet­ter artist. There is no feel­ing like it in the world.

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