Web designers are a different kind of professional.  They are different in the way that they showcase their skills, their work and even the way that they network for career opportunities.

This got me thinking about something that I see a lot when I visit a web designer’s portfolio.  Their resume.  Now I understand that web designers use their portfolios and sites as a way to showcase what they can do, who they are, where they are in the world and what they know.

What surprises me is how easy it is to get a hold of a copy of a web designer’s resume.  A resume is a powerful tool in the right hands but should it be readily available to anyone with internet access or should it?

Show them some “leg” but not the whole leg

Some web designers currently prevent this issue by listing web design projects they’ve been working on with the skill sets and tools that they used to complete certain projects.  The good things about this is that it shows your skills specific to a project you worked on and makes you look like a rock star and it protects your identity a little bit more. Have a look at a few examples of this in action can be seen below…

But how can you have your resume online and collect information about the people downloading it?

Why not squeeze a name out of it?

In marketing, specifically web marketing there is a term called “Name Squeeze”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? The idea behind a Name Squeeze is that you offer something in return, from a document or report in return for your potential customer’s name (and other details about them). The benefit is that you have the information about parties who are interested in what you are offering and have the ability to email market back to them. It’s the “happy medium” in terms of offering your resume for people to download.

Because your portfolio acts as a lead generator this is a technique that serves a propose while providing interested potential clients vital information about yourself, your skills and talents and past work experience. This is something that not a lot of web designers take advantage of but should consider when they design a portfolio of their web design work.

If someone is interested in your skills send them a copy of your resume

One option that is always available is for people to request your resume when they are interested in your web design skills.  This way you keep your information safe and sound and can stop unwanted people from contacting you about projects or jobs that you may not be interested in or have the skill set for.

Keeping your resume publically available as a web designer while it seems like a smart idea really depends on you, how you’ve designed your site or portfolio and what you are looking for in terms of employment or how you want to develop your business. Giving too much information to the general public comes with some risks that you should weigh when you think about adding your resume to your portfolio.

Dan Lindop is one half of the creative force behind SureFire Media. Dan originally started doing freelance work and has recently moved away from freelance web design to starting a company. He has been involved in many projects including working for .Net Magazine on various projects. His work speaks volumes about the skills that he has acquired since he started designing websites during university and has progressed ever since.

1. How did you first get started in Web Design? And did your education help you get there?

I first got started in web design during my year out at University. I was on a placement at a telecoms company and they got me to develop their first website. This was during the late 90s so a lot of businesses didn’t have sites. Thinking back, that first attempt wasn’t pretty but it got me into web design.

Practically all of the skills I use day-to-day have been self-taught. I didn’t really find my University course useful to be honest. I’ve always found that the best way to learn a new skill is to use it in a project situation. For example, I recently taught myself WordPress whilst producing a new company blog.

2. I see that you’ve had a lot of success designing websites for various clients in the past. What made you decide to join forces and create SureFire Media?

I started Surefire Media with a developer who I’ve worked with at another agency for years. It just so happens that we’re really good mates too, so it seemed like the natural thing to do. I’d built up a number of good contacts from my freelance work and was getting a lot of new work in, so the time was right to take the next step really.

3. Do you still take on freelance web design work outside of Surefire Media?

No. As co-director of Surefire, I bring all of my freelance leads into the company now.

4. What are you in charge of at Surefire Media?

As we’re a small, young company, I’m in charge of all sorts of things from new business, to accounts, marketing and so on. My actual job role is mainly front-end design and development and online marketing. Andy Johnston, my business partner, takes care of back-end development work and technical jobs such as server management.

One of the things I like about running my own business is that you get to have a hand in everything from initial client meetings to delivery of the final projects. It’s a good feeling knowing you get to make all of the important decisions about your business. So if things go wrong, you’ve only got yourself to blame. You don’t get that working for someone else.

5. How did you get involved with .Net Magazine’s Build Off?

I was approached by the deputy editor and asked if I’d be interested in contributing to the feature. I jumped at the chance as it’s a great magazine and good publicity for me too.

6. What inspires you to design the website that you do?

Every website is different really. At the end of the day, a good design is one that solves a problem for the client or one that communicates their message successfully. With this in mind, the clients themselves inform the design to a certain extent.

As far as design inspiration goes, there are a lot of good designers out there producing some great work. The important thing for me is to keep getting better and producing better work. It’s a good feeling when you put a design together that you’re really happy with or that the client loves.

7. How do you usually price your projects for new clients? And do you have a different way of pricing ongoing projects?

We keep our pricing structure quite simple. Basically, we have an hourly rate for all of our work. When we’re quoting on a project, we work out how long we think it’s going to take us and then apply the hourly rate. We find this works pretty well most of the time. As we’ve built a lot of sites over the years, we’ve got a good idea of how long jobs are going to take.

8. Outside of designing some amazing websites what else do you like to do with your time?

Lots of stuff! I like going to watch live bands, going to the cinema, reading, watching Crewe Alex (even though they’re awful), going out for a few drinks with my friends… Like most people, I don’t get as much spare time as I’d like though.

9. Do you listen to music or do anything to charge the creative juices when you are sitting down to design?

Yeah. I pretty much always have the radio on or iTunes. One of the good things about working from home is that you can listen to whatever you like whenever you like.

I just wanted to write a post about two more great web designers that i am getting the courtesy of interviewing in the next little while.  The first is a guy that i a lot of web designers and web design lovers know as the “WordPress RockStar”, Adii out of South Africa.  The second is Veerle Pieters who is an equally excellent web designer that has the skills that pay the bills!  If you are reading this and you think your web design talents are out of this world then please contact me.  Stay tuned for more web designer interviews and keep on building those sexy websites that we all love!

Luc Arnold

founder

SpicyWebDesigners.com

Saeid Mohadjer is a web designer from Vancouver, British Columbia. As a Canadian web designer Saeid has established himself as a strong, independent and knowledgeable source when it comes to web design. Originally from Tehran, Iran and working as a multimedia design, Saeid eventually moved to Canada in 2005 and has been designing websites for the past 10 years.

1. Where did you start your web design career? As a freelancer, an employee or something else?

I started around 10 years ago back in Tehran, Iran where I worked as a freelance multimedia designer and 3D animator. I never worked as an employee in Iran partly because the salaries weren’t that exciting back then and partly because there weren’t too many companies around that I wished to work for. After three years of freelancing, I moved to Germany where I worked for another three years as 3D animator in computer game industry and finally moved to Seattle in 2004 and immigrated to Canada in 2005.

2. Is there a tool you use for designing websites that you cannot live without?

For coding there isn’t really any tool that I can’t live without, though Firefox Web developer toolbar and HTML-Kit (both free to download) come close. HTML-Kit allows validating inside the editor as well as comparing Firefox and IE renderings side by side which are neat features. For design, Adobe Creative Suite is all that I use. Some other tools that I like and use often are CutePDFWriter, Basecamp, and Filezilla.

3. Do you follow compliant CSS and XHTML design standards?

Definitely. I’m a big fan of W3C standards and always validate my markup and CSS both during the development and before the final delivery. I try to avoid CSS hacks and keep the markup semantic, though it’s not always easy or even possible. I also offer free lifetime warranty with the Websites that I build, so by following Web standards in a way I’m saving my own neck as it’s less likely that future versions of browsers will break the Website.

4. If you could tell a potential client that may be reading this interview what your pricing is like for projects what would you tell them?

I estimate the number of hours it will take me to complete the project and then multiply it by my hourly rate which provides me with a figure that I refer to as the raw quote. To make the raw quote as accurate as possible I make sure there is nothing about the project that is not crystal clear to me. After I have the raw quote, I go over a list of things that could affect the price and adjust the quote accordingly before submitting the final quote to client. For example the timeline available for project can affect the cost, the tighter it is, the more expensive it gets and vice versa. Also how interesting the project is to me, does it have any educational benefit, can I reuse the code I write in future, have I worked with client in the past or not, etc. All these can have an effect on the final quote.

5. How did you get involved in designing Panago Pizza’s website? And what challenges did you face designing a website for an established brand like Panago Pizza?

I was only involved in Flash development of Panago’s Website. A friend of mine knew the creative director at Mercer Group which does all the branding and design for Panago and recommended me when they needed help to build the Website. One challenge was that we had to build the Website based on InDesign mockups rather than Photoshop or Illustrator mocks. The lack of pixel measurements in InDesign was frustrating at first and we had to follow a tedious process to reproduce the mocks in Flash that involved grabbing screenshots from InDesign, taking them into Photoshop for resizing, and then dropping them in Flash as semi-transparent layers so we could follow the kerning and placements accurately. Also integrating Google map into Flash was challenging since Google had not released their GMap API for Flash at the time.

6. What are the most important aspects of a web design project to you?

It depends on the project, for example search engine optimization may be an important aspect of one project and not even considered in another project. It’s very important to know the users of the Website nevertheless. Perhaps what matters most to me is how useful a website is to the end user and how does a user emotionally respond to the Website. I try to consider these in every step of the design process. One thing I avoid doing is to compromise the usability of a Website for pure aesthetic reasons. I read this quote once somewhere that said “don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful”. I think that quote sums up my approach to Web design pretty good.

7. What type of educational background do you have and did it help you get into web design?

I don’t have any academic education in web design or related fields. Most of what I learn comes from everyday experiences, books, magazines, DVDs, and online resources. I visit Vancouver library almost once a week and check out galleries or art exhibitions regularly. I just returned from Paris where I spent a month visiting the various galleries and museums. Studying the work of people whom I admire not only is a source of inspiration for me, but also helps me to educate myself.

8. Do you like listening to music when you are designing websites? If so, what do you find yourself listening to lately?

I don’t listen to music when coding, but when sketching or creating mockups I don’t mind listening to some music to get the creative juices flowing. I don’t have time to follow the music industry closely and most of the stuff I listen to are pretty old. I like listening to jazz or classic music too as they are not as distracting as the music with lyrics.

9. I see that your portfolio lists a lot of agency work. Do you work with agencies exclusively? Or do you accept new clients?

I accept new clients, but my clients are mostly design or interactive agencies. There are advantages in working with agencies such as one can count on continued supply of work and the opportunity to work on diverse projects. Also, I prefer to spend my time on design and development rather than looking for clients. Establishing good working relation with couple of agencies means no more wasting time looking for clients.

10. What are your future plans for your web design business?

Future doesn’t usually unroll according to my plans, so I think it would be wise to skip this question.

11. How long have you been building websites?

Off and on I would say ten years, but it’s only the last four years that I’ve focused solely on Web design and development.

More about this Web Designer

URL: SaeidMohadjer.com

Email/Contact: saeid@fastmail.fm

Phone: (+1) 604 683 9665

Skype: (+1) 646 797 3163

Claudia Adler is a web designer from Montreal West Island, Quebec Canada who we recently interviewed. She is a designer that uses WC3 standards to develop and build some exceptional websites but also does print design as well as web design. After interviewing she had the following to say about web design…

1) What is the most exciting web project you’ve ever worked on?

The most exciting web project I’ve worked on is Powerwatts. It is the product of a very fruitful collaboration with a group of bike racing Pros. They were completely open to my suggestions concerning design, development and SEO which allowed me to use technology that I felt worked best i.e. DomScripting for the Header animation rather than Flash, collapsible and tabbed panels and a WP-blog ….

We just launched the site in August.

2) Do you find a lot of your clients who’ve had a bad experience hiring a web designer before? How do you deal with that when the topic comes up in conversation with a potential client?

Actually I only had one client having a hard time with the web team they hired from India. They felt that they were not getting what they wanted, a communication problem working with a large team.

But there is always 2 sides to a problem, I try to be diplomatic when it comes to work of other designers. But information is key, I try to supply as much as possible so that the client has everything in hand to take their own decision, no pressure.

3) How did you first start in web design?

I started as a graphic designer working for a large international consumer products company in Montreal, when they were sold and moved to Toronto we all got compensation and I went back to school to learn web programming.

4) Where did you go to school and did that influence your choice to become a web designer?

When I first studied Graphic Design at University of Quebec in Montreal in 1990 there was not much going on in web design, things started to happen a bit later when connection speed picked up and browsers were able to display formatted pages.

In the early days web design was excessively ugly. As a graphic designer I got interested when Flash came out because it allowed you to actually “design” a web page.

When I went back to school in 2002 I wanted to catch up with the technical aspect of web coding, I like to know how things work, WYSIWYG was out of the question for me. I like to use Dreamweaver to spead up the process but write my own code.

So I went for the real deal JavaScript, XML, PHP, HTML, CSS. With the web you never stop learning I am upgrading my skills constantly.

5) Are you working on any interesting web design projects at the moment?

Yes, but its to early to talk about it.

6) Do you have any other creative talents that you like to pursue outside of designing websites?

Mostly photography, I carry my camera with me all the time. I sold a few images and some of my photos are used in web sites I created. I also like to draw and paint but rarely have time.

7) Have you ever worked with a creative agency on web design projects?

I used to work for IATA as a senior graphic designer and HTML specialist, I created HTML email campaigns and Flash animation. When we got “restructured” I decided it was time to go solo as I had enough background to do design and coding.

How do you usually become involved with new web design projects? Word of Mouth? Agency? Advertising? Etc.?

It may be luck but usually clients find me via the web or word of mouth.

In the beginning I bid on projects on GAF (Get a Freelancer) and GAC (Get a Coder), occasionally I still do. I also design for print. Being versatile definitely is a plus. Many of my clients come to me because I offer both, print and web design.

More about this Web Designer

URL: ClaudiaAdler.com

Email: info@claudiaadler.com

Phone: Not Available