Post by urbancinderella on Jun 2, 2007 21:54:06 GMT
Interview with ~unfluxdeviantART - Web Design
Administered by voice & urbancinderella
Tell us the basics:
Name: Bryan Gettman
Age: 31
Sex: Male
Occupation: Web Designer, Web Professional
Your Website (if any): www.unflux.com, www.unflux.net, & www.driftingalong.com
What you enjoy doing for fun:
I love to watch movies, work out, photography, and just chill. I'm a big proponent of just having time to sit and relax. I think it's good for creativity and clearing the mind.
Guilty pleasure:
Food! I love to eat, it's such a shame. I love to pig out on a sandwich and Doritos at 2am...simply not good for the body but it's soo good! Sometimes it's what I need to get over the creative hump if needbe.
Any juicy details of your life that we can taunt you for:
The irony of how life goes! I started out in college as a Business Administration major, and failed Accounting in the first semester, then again in the 2nd...and again in the 3rd. It's the only F i have on my entire college transcript! So I switched majors to something I knew a lot about: Sports. More specifically, sports medicine and exercise science (physiology). I have always loved health and the human body and always said since I was 3 that I would be a doctor.
Well guess what happens in life? that's right...it can go full circle. I'm not working at all in that field any more. Now I run 3 different businesses and do accounting all the time! Funny how that happens...I fail at something so horribly and it eventually becomes my life.
I understand you own your own hosting service. What's it like?
Hosting was secondary to designing, but it's over the past year grown to a public service that anyone can benefit from. The service is well established and it's own right, it's very good. We've been doing hosting services for ourselves and our design clients for the better part of 6 years, so we're experienced and knowledgeable. We simply offer a service that is worth the money.
You get what you pay for, and these days with so many hosting packages and deadbeats and posers out there, it's nice to hear all the postitive feedback from our clients on a daily basis. This is pure pride for us. Especially since we have a personal investment in it as well, all of our own sites are hosted there as well, so why would we want to let it go down?
For the most part, we don't do much by way of technical support because we simply don't have a lot of issues and problems. That makes it both easy and fun to offer such a service. It doesn't take up our day so we're able to design and develop as we want. It's a great business to be in once you're established, that's for sure. It's got a wonderful, instant gratification to see all the sites you host load in an instant, and the virtual smiles you get from your clients by never hearing from them.
Is it hard to get started/set up?
Simply put: Yes. You need to know and have so many things to be able to open and maintain a good hosting service. Many things need to be in place, though anyone can get a server and call themselves a host.
In our case, it took years to gain enough confidence and experience to offer a service to anyone and everyone. The fact you can lease a server means squat if you can't manage it, manage the clients, and take care of issues immediately and securely. All these things come with experience and knowledge, which we've been able to gain from direct experience in the market through our design clients and our personal projects.
Sorry that sounds so boriing, but it's the truth! there's too many posers out there now.
Do you see a lot of customers?
we see our fair share, but only being less than a year old to the public it's not huge by any means. We are financially stable and establsihed to be around for a long time to come.
I also know that you are a webdesigner. What are some of the clients you have dealt with?
Our most recent client, and largest to date by all accounts, is a nuclear services company in Pittsburgh, Alaron Corporation - www.alaron-nuclear.com. Their site just went live on Monday, May 9. It was so much fun to do! Some of the others we're most proud of are www.jimmessenger.com, www.seo-guy.com, www.johnnygereny.com, and www.poisonwhiskey.com.
Do you have a favorite client to work with?
Poison Whiskey has to be the best, they're so much fun! They bring us out to shows all the time and party with us like we're a part of the band. We've been working with them for more than 3 years, so we've become good friends. Those guys are great. Speaking of...we're due for another party soon! It's great to have relationships like this with business people as well.
When you are putting together a design for a company, what kind of steps does it involve?
There's so many things, but the basics are simple and common sense really.
First, you need to know what the client wants. I can't stress enough how important it is on your time and schedule to know what they want. If they don't know, how are you supposed to design anything? Too many times I've been given the green light, just do what I want, and they hate it. So an interview of sorts is always done to be sure we find this info out. The other, is to be sure you have all the content necessary to support the site's purpose. A site without content isn't a site.
Then from there, it's just a matter of organizing it in a way that the client wants/needs it to be displayed, but also for the visitor to be able to navigate easily. We like to make usability a priority so visitors can find the information without having to click too many times getting there. All the while, providing an atmosphere and experience within the design itself.
As for the design, everything above is critical to my creative process. If I don't know or have these things, I simply can't design a site. If the pieces to the puzzle are there, I can go into creative-mode and start painting the canvas. And I do look at websites like art, it takes the same creative process for me to design a site as it does for an art piece. This is different for everyone of course, but for me it's just as much art as it is technical.
When did you start designing, and what led you to start?
I started way back in 1998 when the band I was in needed a website. So I volunteered to learn and put something together. It wasn't long after that, the hobby became a passion.
What's your favorite program to use?
I don't have one in particular, but my tools of the trade are pretty standard: Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop CS.
Any advice to those who hope to become a professional webdesigner?
Like anything you want to be good doing, practice practice practice. Experimenting and going through tutorials is the best way to learn, at least for me. I can't do the book thing, I have to get my hands on it and try it out. I have to learn on the job so to speak, and this is what I recommend to anyone wanting to learn. You just have to get into it and learn it.
The only other thing I like to say, is try your best to come up with your own voice and style. There's a lot of rips and copycats out there, and it seems very trendy to borrow styles and ideas from other designers. I do this as well, but mostly at a client's request. This is very tough sometimes, because the request is very specific. But in that same vein, I do my best to put my own spin on the idea making it mine. The hardest thing to do as an artist and designer is to be original because it seems everything has already been done. Well that's true to a point. Just because it was done before, doesn't mean it can't be done by you...make it yours, whatever the project may be, make it original.
Any last words?
Thanks so much for this! I like to share knowledge and experience when I can. I like to think i'm approachable, but that may not come across sometimes. I hope that's not the case. A lot of designers want to keep what they know and do to themselves. Personally, I think it's great to share and learn from each other.
