SpicyWebDesigners.com by Luc Arnold

Levon Gravett is a web and more importantly a multimedia designer from Ballito in South Africa. He has been designing websites since 1997 but it wasn’t until his second year of college that he began working for a small agency in Pinetown. He studied at Damelin College in Durban for Multimedia design.

1. How did you get started in web design?

I started “designing” websites back in 1997 when I was 12. All the sites were of personal interest to me. I had a friend who had read a book on how to do HTML coding and just watched what he did and I seemed to pick it up quite quickly. All the graphics were designed in paint, so you can imagine what the websites must have looked liked.

The one thing that I am extremely grateful for is that I learnt to code using Notepad from the get-go. No software editors or anything like that. I believe it really helped me in the long run, as I now code all my sites by hand.

2. When did you start designing websites?

I really started designing real websites in high school. I would do them for friends and family. I can remember my first real paying gig, I think I got paid about R500.00 in total I was in college studying a BA, dropped out and began working at surf shops around Durban, South Africa and sort of let the website design fall by the way side. When my first year of school was up, I picked up a copy of Photoshop and began playing with it and realized that I could actually make a living doing this. I decided to go and study a Multimedia course, simply to get a diploma for my CV.

During my 2nd year of college I began working at a small agency in Pinetown. I owe a lot to them. They allowed me the time to handle my studies as well as gaining that all-important 1st year agency experience, so thank you Martin and Rinda from RM Web Studio. All my designs at this time were coded in Dreamweaver and Web 2.0 was the in thing. Martin taught me a lot about CSS and PHP and that’s basically where I began to take a serious interest in website design and development, began reading as much as I could, doing plenty of tutorials and fiddling late into the night. I was fortunate enough that my parents were able to buy me a Mac Mini and pretty much whatever I needed to get this far in my career, so a HUGE thank you to them.

3. What are the biggest challenges that you face in web design currently?

IE 6 (I hope I can mention it without getting in trouble) without a doubt, I think it is the bane of any designer/developers life. I find that I can code a site fairly quickly and then spend hours squashing a minor bug all to do with IE 6. I just find that with the lack of CSS support, it just makes developing the sites more tedious.

I also find that clients do not understand the time and effort that goes into designing and developing a website, they want all the bells and whistles for a fraction of the price. Especially here in South Africa it seems to be a trend.

Time is also a bit of an issue. I find it difficult to balance work and personal time. I work best from around 1AM onwards and sometimes this can be an issue if you have a significant other, fortunately mine is extremely “understanding”.

4. Do you ever refer to yourself as a Front-end developer or a web designer? Do you code any of the web sites that you design currently? If so, what language(s) do you code in?

I don’t like labels but as it says on my portfolio site, I am a multimedia designer. I am sort of a one stop for all your digital and multimedia needs. I take a project from conceptualization, through design, development, testing, and publishing. I have also been touching on SEO, so am trying to incorporate that into all my sites as well.

I believe that is very important to be able to do both the design and development work. They go hand in hand. Without knowing the limitations from the development side, how can one be sure that the design they put forward to a client can actually be achieved?

That being said, I do have times where I favor one more than the other. If I have been doing a lot of design work, I will want to actually switch off the creative juices and get stuck into some coding work, and vice versa.

Currently I code all my sites using CSS table-less layouts. I also use PHP for all sites. I like to use includes for navigation and menu items, as well as footers. I have been fortunate to have a co-worker who has been patient enough to teach me quite in-depth PHP code as well as JavaScript. I am slowly catching on and am beginning to add CMS’s to all my websites. I have also been reading tutorials and trying different things. I really like jQuery and AJAX although I do not get the opportunity to use them as often as I would like to due to client budgets. I also do a bit of flash and ActionScript.

5. Where did you go to school and has it helped you become a better web design professional?

I studied at Damelin College here in Durban. I honestly do not feel that it made me a better designer or developer. I believe that you have to have the drive and passion to do what we do. It is a constant struggle to keep up with trends. There are new technologies coming through every day.

6. Since you first started how has the web design industry changed? Has it changed for the better? If so, how? If not, please explain?

It is always changing, that is what makes our industry so exciting. Things that we never thought possible are now the simplest of things.

I certainly believe that things have changed for the better, especially with the introduction of web standards. Usability is a major issue and at least this is becoming easier every day.

7. What are your favorite tools to use when designing a website? Why are they your favorite tools?

I use pretty simple tools actually.

• Photoshop – For all design
• Coda -One of the best programs ever invented
• Fetch – For those big site uploads
• Freehand – for any vector artwork

I also use a lot of websites that offer free vector art. As I am in no sense an illustrator, therefore I rely quite heavily on all the royalty-free artwork out there.

For hardware I use a 17″ Macbook Pro with has been slightly upgraded.