Joe MacDonald in Essex is equal parts coder and designer

Joseph MacDonald is a web designer from Essex, England in the United Kingdom who has enjoyed working with the web since he was 14 years old. Now 20 years old, Joe looks back on his experiences to date and says that he is glad that he took a more direct route to becoming a web designer. He has been designing websites professionally since he was about 17 years old and has been doing so for the last three years. Joe says that his passion is web development and that he loves seeing his ideas come to life online. He enjoys using Codeigniter, PHP and JavaScript in his projects but he is equally versed in Adobe CS4 and CSS which he uses to add a little flare to his projects. I had a chance to recently talk to the Essex based web design working in London and he had this to say…

Luc @ SWD: Joe, how did you first start doing web design work?

Joe says: When I was around 14 I became very interested in digital art and dedicated a lot of my time creating pieces for fun, during that time I picked up fairly good knowledge of Illustrator and Photoshop and decided I’d like to try and design myself a website where I could showcase all of my personal artwork. I created the design and spent the next few weeks learning about the key aspects of web development, I eventually got the site up and running and once I saw the final product in the browser I was hooked and have been building websites ever since.

Luc @ SWD: How long have you been professionally designing websites?

Joe says: I’ve been designing and developing websites professionally since around the age of 17, after 3 years of messing around in Photoshop and spending hour after hour staring at code I felt I had the necessary skills to put myself out there in the real world and hopefully get a job in the industry. I began freelancing to try and gain some commercial experience and boost my web portfolio, after a year of freelancing I landed a full time job as a front-end developer and haven’t looked back since.

Luc @ SWD: Where and what did/are you studying in college or university?

Joe says: I was never fantastic at school; I wasn’t interested in the subjects and had no real motivation to learn so instead of going to college and learning something that I wasn’t 100% enthusiastic about I decided to search for a more focused college course. I took a course that focused entirely on web development and management which then enabled me to come away with a good solid foundation to build my web career on.

Luc @ SWD: I see that you have a good amount of experience using PHP and JavaScript.  Do you consider yourself to be more comfortable with web design (designing) or web development (coding/scripting)?

Joe says: I would definitely say development, as incredibly geeky as it sounds I absolutely love to code. I really enjoy sitting inside TextMate going through lines and lines of JS or PHP. I enjoy being able to take a well thought out design concept and bring it to life online. I’d like to think that I have a fairly decent knowledge of design also and am able to judge between what looks good and what doesn’t but development is definitely where my passion lies.

Luc @ SWD: What tools do you enjoy using when designing a website project?

Joe says: As I’m currently a full time front-end developer it’s not often I have to use too many design tools however from a development point of view I love working with frameworks such as jQuery and Codeigniter. jQuery never ceases to amaze me at what can be achieved using it and likewise I find Codeigniter to be the best PHP framework around for smaller – mid size projects. I suppose the only other thing I use day to day would be TextMate, it’s in my opinion the best text editor available and I probably couldn’t function without it.