My name is Nicho Valadez, welcome to my online portfolio. I gathered together some of my most recent work for you to have a look at.
A little bit about me, I won’t bore you with too much, just enough. We can begin with how I got my start. I grew up surrounded by art as my father is a traditional artist. Art heavily influenced my upbringing and provided me an outlet for expression. I remember drawing pictures and creating and building things from a very early age and I don’t think much has changed, except for my height and maybe my beard is a bit fuller.
I had a fairly poor upbringing so financially, traditional schooling was never really in the cards for me. But I always thrived outside of traditional learning so this was not a problem. I remember being a bagger for a grocery store and knowing that I wanted more out of myself and what I thought I could be capable of. I knew a few people who had graduated with degrees in fine arts and design and I remember thinking to myself “I could do that,” but that I could also do it better. So I decided I would learn by any means I could. The grocery store where I worked happened to be next to a bookstore and this bookstore became my new home on my lunch breaks. I read anything and everything regarding design and development I could get my hands on.
After this job I began working at a coffee shop, which was also across the street from a bookstore. So my “education” continued for the next few years. I finally saved up enough money to get my first Apple PowerBook and began getting my hands dirty- messing around with design applications and code and I picked up my first freelance gigs a few months later.
Since then I have been working in the industry as a User Experience Designer/Developer for over 13 years now. Life has taught me to be resourceful and this has always been an asset to every position I have held. I have been able to help the companies I work for achieve a lot even with limited resources. I’ve been the team when there was a lack of resources for an actual team. I possess the skills to design, development, and also QA a project to completion. I also play well with others; I have project managed across multiple departments and enjoy collaborating to find solutions. I have been involved in projects where there was nothing more than just a sketch on a piece of paper, an idea in someone’s mind that needed to be fleshed out, or an existing project that hadn’t quite reached its full potential. I’ve also had the chance to lead projects where I was the idea man behind them and been involved in legacy projects that required getting preexisting code and elements up to current standards.
I’m a problem solver at heart. I pride myself in being able to take a small amount of information about a project and finding a solution. I also truly enjoy speaking and conveying messages through design; from creating marketing copy that speaks to a specific audience to designing an intuitive interface that gives the user a sense of ease when being used to crafting a visual that conveys a certain message.
Thanks for taking a look at my portfolio, please contact me if you would like any more information.