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Email: Interview with Designers


In order to understand how specific elements contributes to make an effective website when acting as a vehicle for showcasing personal information of your skills as a design practitioner.
I decided to search for designers whose website I found interesting and sent out more than 50 emails with brief Interview questions:

I was happy received eight replies, from the following participants:


  1. Kuba Zwolinski of http://oldloft.com/
  2. Jay Hafling of http://www.jayhafling.com/
  3. Clear Media of www.clearmediawebsites.co.uk
  4. Ryan Scherf of http://ryanscherf.net/
  5. Jon Hicks of www.hicksdesign.co.uk 
  6. Tom Carmony of http://www.bainbridgestudios.com
  7. Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31three.com
  8. Taufiq Ridha of http://taufiqridha.com



1. What made you think of designing your portfolio website in this style?

Like the cartoon style but never designed a site like this before
I am not writer, so I will reply shortly :)
This is 4th version of my website, previous version you can see in my portfolio or here: http://firefreebies.com/other-stuff/psd-of-previous-jayhafling-com-design/
Previous version was very successful and gave me a lot of traffic from galleries and smashing magazine publications, but in time I understand I need make something more serious.
New version was not too much successful in design communities, but clients like it more :)
Having previously seen a so-called "Grunge" website we liked the feel of it, and thought it would appeal to our target market.
Ryan Scherf 
At the time, illustrative & single page designs were just starting to catch on. My previous design dealt primarily with nature (a cloud, grass, dirt theme), so I knew I wanted to stick with that.
It’s simply what I wanted personally - how I wanted to express myself on the web.
For our current site design, I wanted something clean and simple but that had a bit of a workmanlike, vintage touch to it. We'd already established our Colors and logo and I specifically focused on adding in the vintage woodcut illustration in the page headers of each section as a means of bringing a bit of personality and offbeat nature to the otherwise simple UI.
To be honest... my previous host messed up a transfer and lost my website… so I gave myself a week to redo it. I didn't put a ton of thought into it… I just did what came naturally
 The first thing I love clean on design though previously when I just jumped into web design a couple years ago. I did explore my designs style; see some capture of my old site http://www.markosweb.com/www/taufiq-ridha.co.cc/ or just querying on Google with taufiqridha.co.cc. But after some years move up, I just ended up with clean and focused style; maybe it’s called the mature process of web design perhaps :)?

2. What methods/approaches did you take to promote/ establish yourself and your portfolio?

Web css galleries
3-4 years ago was more simple promote your website with free word press themes, this gave me many backlinks, you can Google: retro mania theme (this was most popular)
A short period of telephone sales was used to establish the company; the portfolio was built up from client work over time.
The best way to promote you as a designer is by designing a great site, and getting it added to the hundreds of CSS galleries that are out there. They bring you tons of traffic, and once you're visible there, you'll get picked up on other blog posts (mostly lists of "xxx designs that do yyyy"), and from there, the leads start pouring in.
 Mainly blogging. "Make stuff and post it" is the key for me. Taking part in community discussion (via blog posts) also helps
Not a lot. We've been fortunate enough that previous iterations of our site have been featured in a number of gallery sites and blog posts, so we get a good amount of incoming traffic from those links (even some that are years old). We promoted the relaunch of our new site across a couple of Twitter accounts (my own personal one and our studio's Twitter account) and we've also advertised on a few occasions in the Sortfolio directory (http://sortfolio.com). 
When I first started out, I used to blog more, and attempt to get into different online publications. Both of those helped immensely.
 Promote it's the hardest thing. Since as we know there is so hundred or million designer with same service. I have same method with any others. Social media, Blogging, etc.
oh and don't forget to revamp or just realigned your portfolio maybe third a year, or so, since on web industries technologies going fast to change and we must to face it. Another effective method by blogging, share what u experienced at to someone else, will make they think you're expert on this field, than maybe some of them require your service, who knows :)

 Another next level method is being famous, not means you must be a super star :) 
but perhaps try to makes some cool service to people, (another like twitter, etc.)  Once your service successful, your name will be up too.
If you find it hard for you to get noticed, why not become a guest writer for famous blog, and share what you expert at. It’ll up your name too. Whatever try to being famous my friends :) at least on your local state.

3. What principles did you take into consideration when designing your site? E.g. colours, layout etc.

Get the key visual and work on the rest, matching the key.
Typography and Modular grids, most important things.
High quality design and very good quality code. Our business is based on providing good quality code to graphic design companies.
With the current design I wanted the main content to appear first (on the left) and sidebar content and navigation to secondary to that. I also wanted a responsive design that was fluid and took into account different screen resolutions/viewports. (http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/finally-a-fluid-hicksdesign)
The overall focus was on a clean UI, simplicity and a focus on the portfolio samples (rather than the UI itself). 
If you're referring to design principles… hopefully all of them however they're not something I think about though when I'm actually designing.
Talk As Human. Not as Robot. that's it
when designing your portfolio try as much as possible to represent your personality, not only design, but the content, try to being personal as much as possible, so your client know he's talking to you not with your site (or robot).

3. What techniques/software's did you used to develop your site?

Photoshop + illustrator + text mate
 Photoshop/Dream viewer
PHP5 / CSS2 / XHTML / JavaScript - all hand coded using the MVC design pattern

The UI was originally designed in Photoshop, then converted to HTML/CSS in Panic's Coda editor (we're a Mac shop), and then finally converted to a Word Press theme in Coda. The site runs on the latest version of the Word Press content management system software.
Photoshop and Coda.
Taufiq Ridha
 Same like others:

Design:
Photoshop CS5 
Illustrator CS5

Code:
Espresso
Text mate(sometimes)

FTP:
Transmit

Local Server:
MAMP


5.Do you have an Inspirations?

 Many css galleries entries
Yes, many :) 50+ sites, looking in the galleries like web crème, Bestwebgallery or CSSmania
Chris Spooner is very good (he actually designed our website) but we're a code-shop mostly so our inspiration is usually programmers - not so relevant perhaps?
Lots of them. Jason Santa Maria (http://jasonsantamaria.com/), Naz Hamid and the crew at Weightshift (http://weightshift.com), the designers at Apple (both their online presence as well as Jonny Ive and their product design team). A local designer here in the Seattle area that we love and that does some AMAZING work on restaurant designs is Geoffrey Smith (http://www.lookatlao.com/).
Yup this is the important thing when i redesign my site since before used taufiqridha.co.cc.
Now, i looked for some client on next level, bit more big clients. Therefore i setup http://basedidea.com as my brand portfolio and http://taufiqridha.com as my personal site.
Both ‘basedidea’ and ‘taufiqridha’ site has clean, professional looked than my old site (taufiqridha.co.cc) that's designed for targeting our some big fish client :)
6. When creating your website who was your target audience your were aim at?

 People looking for an inspiration or designer in css galleries.
My target market: people who know about word press but not too much know about website development. Small business.
Graphic designers
Other designers and potential clients. It's important for your potential clients to be able to envision their site in your portfolio
Audiences - potential clients and the general web community. It's also a means of personal expression, as much as any marketing or promotion tool.
We've never really focused on a particular target audience, other than those willing to spend a fair amount for quality work (we do our best to avoid really small budget work, as we've found those types of projects are typically more trouble than they're worth.
I wanted to focus mainly on working with developers… as opposed to end clients. Developers already speak the same language, and little to no education is needed.
Of course there are so many designers that inspired me, Matthew Smith, Jesse 31 three, Jon Hicks, Elliot Jay Stocks, and many.
For Indonesian Designer i Loved Harry JH works, he's my gurus, and friends, (i think he's more than welcome to answer this thesis survey too :)) see his site http://harryjh.com/


6. Has your site been successful in targeting clients?

Small clients, yes.
Yes and still successful
Yes
Yes, very. I do not do any type of marketing or promotion, and I'm able to keep a steady freelance stream that keeps me as busy as I want to be.
Yes, although I'm not sure I 'target' them necessarily. It’s more just a means of showing my work easily.
Given the relative lack of effort we've put into directly targeting particular potential client segments, yes. The majority of our work comes through referrals, but we have experienced success in leads driven exclusively from the website. 
Yep! :)
Fortunately yes, recently we got some good client and bit bigger than old client we had.

7. How are you monitoring the success? E.g. are you using SEO, social media networks, publication? Please give a detailed answer.

Finished projects
 No, i don't. Maybe before, but not now.
Sales / Turnover we don't use SEO in particular as we've never needed to. With social media again we've never needed to (but probably ought to). The best thing for us has always been getting on the telephone.
I feel success when I have a happy client. It isn't about fame for me. It isn't about getting published or others recognizing you. I want to be able to generate enough leads that I can freelance full time.
SEO is just writing good copy. I use social networks like Twitter to occasionally draw attention to particular blog posts, but that’s it. The success is that I get in regular work of the kind that I want to do, so as long as that continues, it’s being successful
The only real monitor for success is the bottom line. How many projects are we bringing in each quarter, each month, and how big are those projects? We do monitor SEO and our rankings against certain specific terms, but we don't specifically employ an SEO campaign, per say. We track traffic and searches via both Google Analytics as well as Shaun Inman's Mint stats app (http://haveamint.com). 
I monitor success based on the amount and types of inquires I get for projects. Right now I'm getting really good opportunities, so I'm not in a huge rush to redesign my site (even though I'm not really partial to it).
Primary tool that i used is Google Analytics, from here you can fully monitoring your site, what was happened, who's come, etc.
even from there you also can decide too what next strategies you'll plan. Try it there are free :)
Other thing I also used Mail chimp for email marketing, same as Google analytics they have fully report about your campaign.

8. Do you have a mobile app?

No
No
No
No, my design is responsive in nature that it should scale nicely on a mobile device. No need for a real mobile app.
No, don't really need one! The site adapts to a mobile view (although it needs work to remove large images that load slowly on mobile)
No. We do plan on implementing a responsive design for our next redesign, which will dynamically accommodate to the screen size of the browser, but we won't be employing a mobile app or a mobile-exclusive site anytime soon.
No
Not for now, but we're on going to make this one.

9. What promotional materials did you use to establish yourself and your website?

Facebook & Google ads 
Free word press themes.
Website was linked on CSS showcase websites and other social media websites.
As I mentioned above, mostly CSS galleries and blogs.
The only promotion was the website itself (particularly the blog), and word of mouth recommendations from clients.
In years past, we've done promotional print brochures and we've done a couple of postcard mailings to promote the site or specific projects we've launched, but we haven't utilized anything like that in at least 3-4 years (there never really was much of a return on investment for those). We could print and carry business cards, but that's about the only thing we do use (aside from occasional paid placements on the Sortfolio site, which is our only paid advertising).
I did the usual business cards, and some local advertisements. But none of them really brought in much at all. All of my starting business came through word of mouth.
For now I’m just using digital promo, not yet thinking others (Print, etc.).

10. Any advice you could give to your fellow young designer?

Have fun from working and do what you really like :)
Don't afraid trying something new, and make and make again work on your errors.
Keep up to date with the latest trends, if you're doing web design get an understanding of human-computer-interaction and user interface design, build up a good portfolio as quickly as possible even if it's not commercial work.
Ryan Scherf 
Design everything. Pick a popular site that sucks and redesign it. You don't have to publish it, but the practice is pure gold. If you choose to publish it, don't take the feedback to heart. People will blast you for doing an unsolicited redesign -- it doesn't matter. You did it for yourself. Also, get involved with the community. Designers have one of the best online communities in the world. So many designers are very willing to help.
Jon Hicks
Make it as easy as possible for clients to see as many samples of work as possible. Keep detail like case study hidden, or secondary, to the samples. If they're interested, they'll spend longer on your site and want to read more, but if samples can only be viewed by some clever, but time-consuming, navigation, they might not bother.
Tom Carmony
I would just say try to keep the design relatively simple, so that the focus for the viewer is on your work, and less on the portfolio's UI itself. 
Also, if you can, give descriptions and context to your work; write about the different skills involved, what your design process was, etc. I think a few such "case studies" go a lot further in communicating your skills as a designer than simply focusing only on how the designs look. 

This is actually a shortcoming of our own site right now and something we specifically want to address in our next redesign.

Make sure you set a rate (whether you work for fixed fees, bill hourly, etc.) that is fair and will properly cover your expenses. It's so easy for young designers to call into the trap of doing work at cut rates just to get gigs, but once you've gotten yourself into a particular price point or market, it can be tough to raise rates. 

Also, we pricing fixed-rate jobs, make sure to always add in at least 10-20% "padding" above and beyond what you think the project should take to complete. There will almost always be overruns and delays, and you want to make sure that you're protecting yourself against these.
At the start of your career (and all throughout for that matter) focuses on doing excellent work. Even if you're losing money on a project because you need to spend more time on design… do the best work that you can. Building your portfolio is critical.
Taufiq Ridha
Don’t copy others work (of course) :) 
don’t talk as robot, try to being personal as close as possible.
Define your target first, thence you'll be know what portfolio will be.
In this industries there are so many competitors we have (of course you will be next our competitor too :)) and if u just follow what trends up right now, let’s say WEB 2.0 style.
What makes us difference with others. Web design is not only 2.0 styles. There are so many thing to consider Typography, Imagery, Color, etc.
Whatever you must have solid design principle first than make yours style. original style, thence you'll be got your own style on designs, further client know who's the first contact when he want designing some particular style.


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