My name is Gabrielle Fitzgerald and I live in Edmonton, Alberta Canada. Pleased to meet you.

I’ve been designing since I was in diapers and have been creating professionally for about 7 years now. I work mainly on the web but have done numerous works in print and multimedia.

12strong is a strange animal - it started out as a school project (which, if I recall, got glowing reviews from my instructors.) The project was the final assignment in my web design class and I enthusiastically built a community web site where 12 artists specializing in different fields could showcase their works and collaborate on projects together. It was a great idea - I had high hopes for my site after school was finished.

Unfortunately while you are at school there is an abundance of people who are more then willing to showcase their talent, when you aren’t in school it becomes an entirely story and so the original 12strong idea gathered dust and was eventually scrapped in favor of a personal portfolio site for myself.

As a portfolio site it went through many different versions (as most portfolio sites are wont to do), varying design styles and emotions were used and it became increasingly more sophisticated as my knowledge and experience with web technologies grew.

And then something weird happened. I became a company.
How can someone become something? It’s an interesting question really. It all occurred one day when I decided to go legit. I thought that since I was doing freelance work, I might be more respected and get more business if I was a company and not just one person. And on my journey of becoming a company I redid 12strong and it became 12Strong WebSolutions.

For a year or two it stayed as 12Strong WebSolutions - I did the same work for many of the same clients but for some reason I didn’t feel as though I was myself. I felt as though I was trying to catch a train that had already left the platform - and the train was my own company! Constantly trying to keep up appearances is exhausting - if you’ve ever tried it you know what I’m talking about. I was expending so much energy pretending to be something I wasn’t that eventually I got a little burned out.

And so 12Strong WebSolutions stagnated and was purposefully ignored because I didn’t have the energy to keep up the appearances. It’s still there technically - I have all the right paperwork and licenses but it’s nothing like what it started out to be.

Which brings us to today and what you are viewing right now. An amalgamation of everything that has come before. An idea, a portfolio, a business and a person’s hopes and dreams.

So welcome to 12strong - welcome to my life and my work!

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