Where Your Creativity Takes Flight
FinesseFX

About

The Site

This site found its beginnings back in 2006, when I began desiring to provide a different outlet for content that I had been creating and distributing via the Adobe Exhange (once known as the Action Xchange). During this time period Adobe had merged with Macromedia and the Exchange (which I had loved and from which I had learned so much) was redesigned and began rapidly losing its community feel and quality, creative submissions.

In order to continue to fuel my own creativity and continue to share my content (which had, at the time, been downloaded over half a million times), I created FinesseFX.com. I continued to create new content and added the occasional bit of paid content which helped justify the time and money spent to maintain the site.

During the course of 2009 I started planning a redesign and restructuring of the site. I did this for several reasons. First of all, the old FinesseFX was pure html and css (and not enough of the css, I’m afraid!), and with the volume of pages and downloads, was increasingly becoming a bear to manage. A content management system was needed. In addition, having a CMS backend to the site would allow me to more easily expand the type of content which I was able to offer (such as tutorials, articles, textures, etc.). Lastly, the blog format provides a realistic opportunity to make some money via advertisments, rather than simply paid downloads. Should this come to fruition, both myself and the users/readers should benefit, because I can devote more time to creating content, and you all get more content!

For those of you tech geeks out there who are curious about the CMS —  its WordPress.

The Webmaster

And now for the gloriously self-serving corner of the website… 🙂 My name is Karl Sneath. I live in Kansas and work as a video producer and web designer. I was introduced to Photoshop and the wonderful workings of the world wide web when I studied as a Commercial and Advertising Art student in a local technical school. This was back in the days of Netscape Navigator, Photoshop 5, and $1 gasoline. If that doesn’t give you a little perspective, consider that in Photoshop, you had to type text into a box before it could be rendered on your document, and “layer styles” were strictly manual labor. Miniature animated gifs were all the rage, and Napster and MP3.com were the hottest places to download commercial music for free.

Okay, so enough of the “good old days”. Needless to say, technology and myself have come a long ways since then. That was before I got married, bought a house, and had 3 lovely children. Naturally, priorities have changed, which in turn makes finding time to sit around and create content harder to come by.

My passion for creativity and design have not diminished, however. Great designs and creative people still inspire and prod me to learn more so I can create better. Hopefully this website is a facilitator for some of you towards some of those same goals and desires. I look forward to this continuing journey, including discussing and collaborating with many of you creatively diverse individuals!

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