In high school, I participated fairly heavily in the Technology Student Association (TSA). A national CTAE/STEM education group, TSA promoted engineering and design education via various competitions. At the outset, I started with rebuilding my high school chapter's website multiple times, updating the layout yearly to keep things fresh. The websites below were early attempts to follow trends in website design: a gridlike pattern was devised around the time Microsoft's Metro design language was spreading, and a series of flexible columns was employed in the 2014 site, which featured sidebars that would snap to page bottom on mobile devices. Due to the rules and restrictions for these websites, frameworks and such were disallowed. While that meant these sites look much better in screenshot than in actual implementation, working on the code for these sites from the ground up was a good learning experience. 

Primarily, I competed in events that required a fair amount of 3D work, such as architecture and engineering design, and this leaked into some of the design work that I did. As the statewide organization aimed to promote these events, they asked me to design posters and publicity materials for conferences and classrooms. Their stylistic vision was, to be entirely frank, rooted in the turn of the century when digital design still hadn't lost its novelty, and glowing lines and shadows were still in vogue. It was a design language I did not entirely agree with, but work in that style helped me develop a sense for Photoshop's internal 3D tools in addition to the inner workings of each of its blending options.