In A Nutshell.

Self-describing myself is not what I excel at. I'm not good at egoboosting. But since this space needs to be filled up with something, I have to give it a try.

I am a graphic designer by college graduation and a helpless geek by association. While majoring on my career at the University of Costa Rica, I discovered the Internet back in 1995, first in magazines and then in live form. The moment I was first able to log in, somewhere in October of that year, little did I know it was going to shape the future of my professional career. While I thought at first about web design as "a 2-year stunt, at most", it proved to last for the better part of 13 years.

Before the web, I dreamed of making it in animation, as in hand drawn animated cartoons and films. However, impossibly expensive college fees and the unlikely odds of making a living on it locally forced me to be more practical in my career choices. Which was probably the best decision, after watching the sad landslide decline of the hand drawn animation market in favor of computer-generated animation. On the current version of this site, I'm trying to recapture that spirit by focusing on comics - making this site more like a virtual sketchbook, to recover my drawing habits from college days and to scratch a very old itch of mine.

More than a decade spent on web design brought me work for countless clients, and made me know and meet many of the pioneers and trendsetters in the field, as well as deep knowledge on all of its aspects, from planning to design to code and even a good bit of programming, which is odd considering I barely passed Math in high school. In short, I grew up as a person with multiple skills and interests which make it hard for me to typecast myself into a single role.

In 2004, I began a career switch to user experience design, as I wanted to have a bigger influence in the way people interact with web sites and applications. I started at a small shop called Metodus in Costa Rica, and since 2006 I am part of the User Experience team at the Costa Rican branch of Schematic, one of the greatest media agencies in the U.S.

As it turns out, betobeto.com pretends to be something like a showcase of all the skills on very different disciplines that I have achieved over the years, all mixed up. Much like what my life has been so far. Hope you like what you see here too.

Why “Beto”?

Beto is simply a common Spanish diminutive of Alberto, which is my name. Prior to this I tried a bunch of vanity domain names but none could stick for long. Then one day I thought "Why don't simply use my own name and go with it?" And since beto.com wasn't available (and still isn't), then I remembered the site of a indie band called Titan, who made this play of sorts repeating their own name on their site. Thought it would be fun, and so betobeto.com stuck.

The biggest problem with this name has been that of many people calling me like that, to which I often respond that a single "Beto" for a greeting is good enough. :)

The Ego File.

Follow me.

• Twitter. I tweet, you tweet, everybody tweet!
• Last.fm. Rock to my tunes.
• Flickr. I got pictures!
• Del.icio.us. Visit cool sites.
• LinkedIn. Connections this way.

Contact.

• USA/Europe:
  Alberto González
  #SJO 26324
  1601 NW 97th Ave.
  Miami, FL 33102
  USA
• Rest of the world:
  Alberto González
  Apdo. Postal 1-3005
  Heredia, Costa Rica
• Phone: (00)(506) 8828.9852
• Email: hello at betobeto.com

Colophon.

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