The Dave Shea Interview

By admin

Are you into Web design? Then you might have heard of a little site by Dave Shea called CSS Zen Garden. By changing the look-and-feel, but keeping the same markup, Dave Shea and designers all over the world showcase the power of CSS as a design technology.

In my eyes, it was one of the sites that came out and destroyed any remaining pretense that HTML tables could rationally still be used for designing engaging, quality Web page layouts over a CSS-only approach (even as browser inconsistencies hinder development).

With Dave Shea’s eye for quality design, he cultivated the site for the best examples of CSS-enabled designs for his Zen Garden. 

But Dave didn’t stop at nurturing a Web site.

Several years later after the launch of Zen Garden, there was the book about the Zen Garden, of course. There are now happy clients of his own, a set of icons, a second edition of the popular Web Directions North conference, and much more, I’m sure, in the future of Dave Shea. 

Today, however, I’m happy that Dave Shea joined me for an interview to discuss what’s on his mind. We talk about design, clients, the upcoming Web Directions North conference and whether or not he considers himself a foodie.

Dave Shea

Christopher Schmitt: What’s your name and what you do?

Dave Shea: My name is Inigo Montaya, and you killed my… Wait, wrong movie.

I’m Dave Shea, and I do a little of this and a little of that. I still consider myself primarly a visual designer, web and UI being my specialties, but with things like Web Directions and the icon sets I’ve done in the past few years the question of what I do day to day is getting a bit murky.

CS: How would you describe yourself?

DS: Hmm, it’s been a while since I’ve done a Meyer-Briggs, but ISFJ feels about right. Otherwise, I’m happiest when either creating or exploring, and most of the stuff I do relates back to those two in some way. Cooking, coding, traveling, designing, and so on.

CS: What are some of the best places you’ve been? Any surprises?

DS: Well, I’m a huge fan of England, but I was a little surprised at how non-foreign it felt to me. I’ve been to plenty of former British colonial cities, so maybe that gave me an idea of what to expect. Still, when taking a train from Paris back to London feels like going home, it makes you wonder. 

Otherwise I really liked Australia, Melbourne in particular—maybe even moreso than I liked Sydney. And Reykjavik was a challenging city to visit; the landscape is like another planet, the culture is somewhere halfway between North American and European, and the food was either great or horrible with little in between—really good Indian, bloody awful Mexican. All the small differences added up to unsettle me near the end of my trip in some odd, undefinable way; still, I’d definitely go back. 

CS: What do you like about cooking? Would you consider yourself a “foodie”?

DS: The satisfaction of eating something I just created. The act of creation draws me to it, but having something immediately practical and pleasurable like food at the end of process, that’s just icing on the cake. 

I’m not sure I’ve quite reached foodie status, but it’s borderline.

CS: Did you have any jobs besides ones related to design?

DS: Haven’t most of us? In past lives I’ve worked in construction, sales, support, and burger-flipping.

CS: What did you you have to do for those jobs?

DS: In order: dig holes and carry heavy things from spot A to spot B. Sell people internet connections, then put on a happy face and tell people why their internet connection isn’t working, and then get it working. Flip burgers. 

CS: When did you work those jobs? Was it right after school?

DS: Pretty much. Some during, some after. 

CS: What was your first exposure to the Internet/Web?

DS: I was a bit of a late bloomer, I finally signed up for a connection around 1997. Okay, that’s earlier than lots, but given that I was big on the last dying days of the BBS scene in the mid 90’s, I still find it a bit surprising it took me so long. I’d known about the web for years, and actually built my first web page in 1996, but didn’t really get involved until I finally had my own connection the following year.

CS: Did building Web pages prompt you to get your own Internet connection?

DS: I’d say it was mainly for the communications side of things. Keeping in touch with people in other cities via email. Browsing web sites. IRC.

But building web sites probably did have something to do with it. I was doing a lot of single image graphics work at the time. Images rendered in 3D and Photoshop, illustrations, photo manipulation, etc. I was basically just learning the ins and outs of working digitally, so I thought a Web site would be a good place to put all of that. 

CS: What was your first Web site for? Was it for yourself?

DS: The very first was probably a class assignment, though I think it was pretty much your standard “look, this is my web page, there’s nothing on it, but here I am anyway” type of page. Later on, the first full site I built was the digital gallery for myself. 

CS: What’s your view on design or graphic design? Do you have a mantra?

DS: Seems like there are have been an awful lot of attempts lately to define what design actually is. I feel pretty strongly that it’s changing; almost as long as I’ve been building web sites, I’ve been thinking about things like usability, accessibility, information architecture, interaction, and so on. Fifty years ago graphic design was mostly about assembling imagery and type on a flat piece of paper. I’m over-simplifying of course, but it just feels like there’s more “stuff” you need to get a handle on to be any good at doing this.

I still describe of myself as a graphic designer to laypeople as a way of avoiding lengthy discussions about the subtleties, but I think the terms UI designer, interaction designer, and web designer all equally apply. The latter might still be the best term for it, too bad about the leftover stigma from the late 90’s.

CS: At one point did you realize you wanted to be a designer?

DS: I used to do a bunch of programming. Nothing serious, just screwing around in Basic and later a bit of C. At some point I realized I liked doing the imagery and graphics for the programs I was building a whole lot more than I enjoyed the programming itself. So a flip switched in my brain and I realized design was the way to go. 

CS: What kind of training have you had as a designer?

DS: Not as much traditional training as I’d have liked. Fine arts and photography classes, design foundation stuff, a bit of business and strategy. The rest of it I’ve picked up along the way. 

CS: What are your design influences?

DS: That changes week to week, project to project. When I redesigned my personal site last year, I’d been flipping through magazines and noticing common design elements I really wanted to work with. I’ve come up with design ideas while out in nature, in a forest or on a beach. I’ve been inspired by design elements on various sites and used the ideas to come up with similar treatments. Sometimes it’s just a matter of seeing a site, studying what I like about it, and mentally filing that principle of design element it for later use. I’ll tell you right now that whoever’s behind all these fantastic Tennessee tourism sites better watch out, I’ve been scrutinizing their beautfiul new one for as many tricks as I can.

Tennessee Tourist Site

CS: What specifically about that site appeals to you? What are the tricks have caught your eye?

DS: I love how they’ve balanced the sheer amount of stuff they’ve had to cram in there with generous margins and removing bounding frames and boxes. It flows really well, with lots of breathing room. The type work is solid. And it’s rich with details — an evocative blue gradient background, drifting snow, white cutout landscape shapes in the footer, etc. etc. etc. 

CS: What aspect of Web design appeals to you the most?

DS: The job is different every day. Some days I spend the entire day working on page layouts in Photoshop. Other days I’m designing icons in Illustrator. I flip back and forth between various coding languages in Coda, be it PHP, a custom CMS template language, or even plain old HTML & CSS. I even get the opportunity to design logos and take my work to print from time to time. There’s no such thing as a usual project, they’re all unique. That keeps me interested.

CS: Your work has appeared in numerous publications and you won Best in Show in the SXSW 2004 Interactive conference. In your view, what separates mediocre web design from award winning design?

DS: What happens after you’re “done” the design. You could launch it, but you could also come back and put in more detail work, and spend time obsessing about the things others might take for granted. If you carefully plan your column layout and where elements will be placed on the page, your result will invariably be more polished than a design by someone who slaps a bunch of elements together and moves on to the next project.

It’s a tough balance when you’re working under deadlines, but I find the more time I make to refine a design after “finishing” it, the better the results. I’m working on one at the moment where I’m well into the 4th revision because I wasn’t happy with the previous versions. I think I’ve finally got it, but it’s been stressful. Usually I get better results quicker, but some designs need that extra attention.

CS: That raises an interesting question: How do you know when you are done or “finished” with a design?

DS: I think that’s learned. There’s no way to quantitatively measure it, you just keep working at it until you’re personally satisfied that the design you’ve come up with is the best to match the criteria of the project. 

CS: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in doing projects for clients?

DS: That it’s give and take. I’m being paid for my skills and my ideas, but also my guidance. Clients often ask for things they don’t really need or want, things I feel would ultimately work against them. Those are the ones where I sharpen my rhetoric skills and tell them precisely why they’re wrong.

But there’s a balance. I’m not going to win every time, and sometimes my ideas are born out of assumptions that prove to be wrong. I have to remain open to that sort of feedback, and sometimes kill the ideas I’m particularly attached to. It’s hard, but if they don’t ultimately fit in the design or meet the needs of the project, they need to die.

CS: So this, what would you call it, “managing client relationships”, the most important thing? Not letting designer’s own views override the goals of the project or sour the client-designer relationship?

DS: That’s a pretty good way of summarizing it. When I first started out, I was personally attached to everything I did. I was always right because I was the designer, it must be the client who’s wrong. Time passed, and now I realize that a healthy design process involves ample opportunity for stepping back and assessing the project with a detached view; it’s surprising what you’ll discover when you set aside your preferences. 

That said, I’m still often the one making the call in the end. Not every project results in work I’d want to showcase, but it’s up to me to make sure it’s at least competent, and that involves arguing it out with the client from time to time. 

CS: What would you say is the project has given you the most satisfaction?

DS: Hmm. I have a few to choose from here. I’ve really enjoyed working with Lou Rosenfeld on Rosenfeld Media over the past few years — we’ve tackled a lot of diverse challenges, and I’ve had to stay on my toes to keep up with it all. It seems every new project we work on adds new tricks to my toolbox.

Then there’s the icon family I’ve been working on. It’s been gratifying having high-profile companies buy them, there’s a sense of legitimacy when that happens. But more than that, it’s the sense of accomplishment of having created that many custom pieces of illustration. I said one day hey, I’d like to start doing some illustration again, and a year of off-and-on work later I had 700 icons.

But I guess the one I’d pick if I had to pick any would be, inevitably, the css Zen Garden. Even 5 years later, I’m still amazed at how far its reach has been and how many people have been influenced by it.

CS: Zen Garden has and is in still having a huge impact. When I speak on CSS at workshops or conferences, people still mention that site as having a profoundly inspiring. And like you mention, it’s been years since it’s been around. Do you still get submissions? If so, how often? How do you manage the site?

DS: Yep, I might get anywhere between 10 and 20 new submissions a week. Even after five years. I’ve recently made a few changes to get the queue moving again since it was hard to keep up with.

All designs submitted go into a database. I built a lightweight publishing system on top of that which allows me to adjust submission details if I need to, grab the files, and automatically generate the files for publishing. There’s a bit of manual work involved in grabbing the files and FTPing them up to the server, but that’s not much work. 

CS: In early next year, February, it’s another year for Web Directions North, a web conference in Vancouver which you are integral in putting on. Can you tell me about the conference and how it came to be?

DS: This could have also been an answer to the previous question; I’ve been really proud of the work the four of us running Web Directions North have been doing, the feedback after last year was fantastic, and it was a really fun time. I don’t want to say something obviously biased like it was in my top 3 conference experiences of all time, but, well, it was.

So, how it all started. Back in 2004 John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin helped put together Sydney’s first web design and development conference, and I was invited to come down and be a part of that, which is where I met them for the first time. Derek Featherstone went down in 2005 and 2006, and of course Derek is a fellow Canuck so we had previously connected as well.

When John and Derek started talking about possibly doing an event in Canada, I was looped into the conversation and somehow we came up with the idea of doing it in my hometown. I think I was of the feeling that it would have been fairly simple to run something in Toronto, since most “big” events in Canada will naturally default to the city with the most people. But when we decided to do it in the winter, Vancouver seemed like a better idea with Whistler just around the corner and all…

This year since the label “Web Directions North” allows a bit of transience, we did consider moving it to another city. But Whistler was such a great experience for everyone that came along, it seemed inevitable that we’d do it here again. And so we are.

CS: What goes on in planning and behind the scenes in order to put on this conference?

DS: We started this year back in June. Our entire to-do list ends up looking something like this: Find out where to hold it. Contact a bunch of venues with our needs, find out if they can accomodate us, work through the details about how they’ll meet our needs, and select the best of the bunch. That’s just an entry point really; once you have the venue, you then have to have a whole lot of conversations about room usage, technical setup, catering, guest rooms, etc. 

Figure out what topics and speakers you want on stage. We build our program on content; we chose subject matter first then figure out who fits the bill. Then you’ve gotta start contacting them. And picking alternatives. And contacting them. And getting bios and talk information. And work out flight details. 

Build supporting materials. Registration, web site, printed stuff like the program and name badges, etc.

Get the word out and sell tickets. This is hard. Really hard. Of everything, I’d say this is the hardest part. There’s a seriously big sales and marketing commitment in running a conference, which is something I didn’t understand before I got into it. If you don’t have a huge advertising budget, you really have to work to fill seats. 

Line up sponsors. Arrange evening and extra-curricular activities. Answer incoming inquiries. 

There’s a lot more I’m glossing over, but that gives you a good idea of the wide variety of stuff you have to bring together to pull off a conference. 

CS: Seems like you are doing a lot: books, icons, conferences, client work and so on. What do you feel most comfortable doing?

DS: I don’t really think about it like that. I know my limitations; I’m a crappy programmer and I’m not a salesman, so those are a couple of things I stay well clear of. Otherwise I just try things out to see if they fit, and if they do, I’ll run with them.

CS: You’ve stated perviously that you’ve switched to Mac as your platform of choice. How was that transition? Was there any problems in how you work in one operating system?

DS: That was quite a while ago, five years maybe. The big things were not much of a problem; most of the apps I run are cross-platform, and the Finder wasn’t hugely different from Explorer, so actually getting work done didn’t involve much of a transition.

It was the little things that got to me though. I’m pretty big on keyboard shortcuts and time savers so learning to use my thumb instead of pinky for everything (Cmd vs. Ctrl on a PC) took a bit of effort. I’ve still never really adjust to the idea of a personal home folder, I create a separate partition for my data and throw everything on that. Though to be fair, I was never using the Windows equivalent of a home folder either.

CS: What’s your setup like? What kind of hardware do you use?

DS: I go back and forth between an iMac and a white MacBook. I’m over the G5, I want Intel everything at this point, so the iMac may not last much longer. It’s tempting to replace both with a single MacBook Pro and external monitor, but my previous Powerbook ended up corroding; my body chemistry and aluminum are not friends, apparently. 

CS: I imagine you couldn’t part with Illustrator or Photoshop, but what other tools do you use?

DS: InDesign quite a bit. I do enough printed stuff and PDFs that it’s pretty indispensable.

Otherwise I’m a big Coda fan. Coda for developing, Firefox+Firebug for testing. I use Camino as my primary browser, but I develop in Firefox. 

CS: What you would like to see happen in Web design in the next couple of years?

DS: Tech-wise: IE6 dying a quick death. CSS3 getting finished and implemented. All mobile browsers going the Safari route and running capable rendering engines.

Design-wise: cross-browser vector would be nice. Font embedding too, but it has way too many licensing issues to ever take off. As a compromise, it might be nice to have two or three large companies sponsor the creation of widely-available, free web fonts, ala Microsoft of 1995.

CS: There are plenty of free fonts out there–granted some are of varying quality–but would the concern be more about having the fonts be pre-installed on copies of Windows and Apple operating systems?

DS: Without embedding, yes, that would be critical. No way you’ll get end users to install a font. With embedding it’s less relevant an argument, but it would still be nice to have a wider variety built into the platforms. 

CS: How do you feel about sIFR being a substitute for font embedding?

DS: I’ve played with it quite a bit, but I don’t think that I’ve ever actually deployed it on a real site. It’s a clever hack, and you can count me as a fan, it just never worked its way into my standard toolbox. I’m also not sure it has lasting power as an alternative; even if we don’t get an official way of doing embedding any time soon, will people still be using sIFR in three years? It’s been a few years since it came out and as a general rule, it’s not being used a lot more than it is being used, right? 

Still, it’s nice having alternatives that actually work today.

CS: Indeed! Thanks, Dave. I appreciate you taking the time to talk.

(Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Adapting to Web Standards Book Contest

By admin

With copies of Adapting to Web Standards hitting the bookstores, I decided to follow Dan’s book giveaway contest and have another one of my own.

How to Enter

The idea is that three winners will be picked randomly from the list of comments to this very blog post. Please note that anonymous comments don’t count and only one comment per person.

How to Win

I’m going to generate a set of random numbers and match them to the comment number for this blog post. (Note that comment numbers are generated automatically and sequentially.)

If one of the generated random numbers equals the number of your comment, you win.

Comments need to be posted before 11:59am ET by Friday December 21st. After that, the comment thread will be closed and the drawing will commence.

The Prizes

Each winner gets the following a copy of Adapting to Web Standards.

After the numbers are picked, I will follow up with the winners directly to get a mailing address to send out the prizes.

Sounds good? Best of luck!

Adapting to Web Standards

By admin

One of the items I agreed with Ethan Marcotte in our interview was the need for comapnies to include Web standards in their workflow. Over the past year, I’ve worked with some amazing people on a book that specifically addresses that need.

Adapting to Web Standards cover

Adpating to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites features a stable of talented people to help Web agencies and large companies with their own Web teams learn how to incoporate Web standards into their workflow.

Published by New Riders in December 2007, the book is divided into two parts: the theory and the pratical case studies. The first part covers chapters by Rob Cherny and Kimberly Blessing on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Web Applications and Web Standards Worflow. The second part by Meryl K. Evans and Kevin Lawver covers Tori Amos’s official Web site and AOL.com.

Bonus Material

After you’ve rushed out and bought your copy, be sure to register your copy of this book at peachpit.com to download a bonus PDF containing an interview by Mark Trammell with Jimmy Byrum, a Web designer at yahoo.com. To get the interview, go to this Web site and click the “Register this book” link. You’ll be prompted to log into your peachpit.com account (or create one if you don’t already have one). After logging in, you’ll be taken to the “Register a Product” page, where you should enter the book’s ISBN number (found on the back cover of the book or, perhaps, on an online bookseller’s Web site) in the field provided. Click Submit and you’ll be shown a list of all of your registered products; find the entry for “Adapting to Web Standards” and click the link “Access to protected content” link to be taken to the download page. 

Freelance Hourly Rate Determined

By admin

Cash money

One of things I learned early on in my career as a freelance Web designer is the nausea that comes with determining an hourly rate. It’s a gut-check that makes you think about how much you are worth and what others think of your work once you tell them how much you charge. 

Determining Your Rate

The first thing to do when determining an hourly rate is to start with a goal. For the sake of demonstration, let’s say you want to make US$40,000 per year. 

Now, we need to figure out how much time you want to work for that year. The first step is to realize how much time you  do not want to work. What do I mean by that? 

Actually, I mean a couple of things by that. The first thing is  figuring out vacation time and realizing that not every waking moment on this earth is billable. In America, we  typically take two weeks of vacation. That’s 50 weeks you will be working per year. 

Another time factor to think about is your weekly schedule. Let’s not forget to exclude the weekends otherwise chores aren’t going to get done. 

So, that gets us 50 weeks with five days of total work per week for a total number of  250 work days:

(50wks) x (5d) = 250days

Hours in the Day

Now that we have the number of days figured out, we need to move onto the number of hours of actual work done in a day. 

It’s no secret, anymore. Not everyone actually works a full work day. Even if you are the best and most efficient freelancer, there’s going be time that’s not billable. You’re  going to need to make time to deal with taxes, internal management of computers, time to make the coffee (and the doughnuts), long phone calls to whomever about whatever, and then consider those trips to the office supply store, and so on.

Even salaried employees don’t work a full day as they have to have time at the water cooler to discuss important topics like Britney Spears or the Patriot’s winning season. 

For the sake of argument, let’s say that every day you are able to bill 60% of a typical work day. If we assume an eight hour work day, that comes to about 4.8 hours. But let’s round that up for five hours to make the math easier.

Hours in a Year

Now, to get the full number of working hours worked in a year, we multiply the five hours in a day we would work by the number of days. So, that comes to 1,250 working hours:

(5hr/d) x (250d) = 1250hrs

Since we now know how much we want to make and how many hours we are going to work, finding the hourly rate becomes a simple matter of division. Take the amount you want to work and divide that number by the number of hours you are going to work in a year.

($40,000) / (1,250hrs) = $32/hr

What’s Your Hourly Rate?

Now, you don’t have to stick with the salary I did. While we started with $40k/year, feel free to try different amounts and work your way backwards. Also, feel free to adjust the amount of hours you work in a day. 

Need a calculator to figure out your hourly rate? Well, chances are you already have one handy if you use a Mac or Windows OS. Dig around your applications folders or you can use one of the many free caclulators online.

(Photo: AMagill)

Ethan Marcotte Interviewed

By admin

Ethan Marcotte specializes in making the code that runs some great designs on the Web. While the designs are impressive, his approach to HTML and CSS is inspiring. For me, the code often outshines the design when Ethan is on a project. It’s one of the main reasons why I asked him to co-author Professional CSS and it’s a reason that savvy Airbag industries snatched him up.

Ethan Marcotte is humble, diligent and works hard to excel in his passions. Quite frankly, we’re lucky that he has chosen to be a Web nerd instead of a literary academic.

Ethan Marcotte header

Christopher Schmitt: What’s your name and what you do?

Ethan Marcotte: My name’s Ethan Marcotte. I work as a UI developer for Airbag Industries, and my blog’s URL, unstoppablerobotninja.com, can beat up your blog’s URL.

CS: How would you describe yourself?

EM: I’m a lover, not a fighter.

CS: The unstoppable robot ninja is a lover, not a fighter?

EM: Everybody could do with a good hug now and again.

CS: You’ve stated, at one point, to owning 98GBs of music. What is the size of your music collection now?

EM: Ninety-eight? Damn…I don’t know as it’s ever gotten quite *that* high. My iTunes library’s currently hovering around 59 gigs, but I suppose the year’s not over yet.

CS: Maybe it’s not 98Bgs, but a metric fuckton. Must have lost a decimal point in the conversion.

EM: If you asked Ryan Sims, he’d tell you that 58 of those gigabytes are They Might Be Giants tracks. I say that Mr. Sims can bite me.

CS: What’s wrong with nerdy alternative rock?

EM: I couldn’t tell you. Your music might be nerdy, but mine is composed solely of Pure Awesome™.

CS:That is still a lot of music. How do you manage that large of a collection? How do you back it up?

EM: I use iTunes for the listenin’ and the organizin’. As for backing things up…yeah. I should probably get on that.

CS: I find it hard to believe that you don’t have a backup process in place for recovering your work. Do you have anything setup for backing up your work?

EM: Well, my non-music files are backed up religiously. At Airbag, we use SVN to back up all of our client work, whether it’s PSDs, static templates, or the source code for a super-awesome application we’re working on. My personal stuff is actually mirrored between my MacBook Pro and my G5 by ChronoSync.

My iTunes library doesn’t fit on my laptop anymore, so it’s exempted from the syncage–hence, it doesn’t really get backed up at all.

Which is, as the kids say, stupid.

CS: What musical artists are you into now?

EM: It sounds pretentious as hell, but I binge on music: I’ll play the hell out of an album when I first get it, then drop it cold and pick up something else. And what I listen to is pretty circumstantial, too. I mean, I’ll put on something melodic when I’m working on comps, but I prefer something a bit more jarring and mechanical when I’m coding.

Anyway. Lately, I’ve been playing quite a bit of Interpol, The Futureheads, Mobius Band, Bloc Party, Magneto, some Art Blakey, and a bit of Tracey Thorn’s new album. And the usual dose of classical music. Oh, and Soul Coughing’s Ruby Vroom. Always Ruby Vroom.

CS: What’s your academic background? Is it related to having four copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost?

EM: No, I’m just addicted to pointlessly long poems.

So yeah, I was a literature major in college. It was fun, in its way: I learned a hell of a lot, especially during my last year at school, but I was a bit ambivalent about pursuing anything beyond that. I figured I’d give myself a few years off, and see if I missed the books enough to enroll in, say, a PhD program.

I’m coming up on year nine of “a few years off,” so I think I’m probably getting by okay. *grin*

CS: Did you start off in Web design after you left college?

EM: Professionally? Yeah, basically. Right after I graduated, I managed to get a random job working for a dotcom outside of New York City. It was more or less the worst place I’ve ever worked at: long hours, horrible management, and bad projects. Still, the company somehow managed to attract some really incredible, talented people; they’re largely responsible for starting my education in working online.

From there, I got a job working for the Boston arm of a Manhattan-based studio. I worked as a lead front-end developer for a small team, and again had the opportunity to work with a small army of insanely bright, funny, talented individuals. Which I suppose is the best thing about this industry: there’s no shortage of rockstars to learn from.

Not to get all Hallmark on you or anything.

CS: Your own story is a path of someone not following their traditional education,or training if you will, and pursuing a different field. Do you find that learning for our industry is better when it’s done online than a traditional college experience?

EM: When I entered the industry, there wasn’t anything in the way of established curricula for web design. The dotcom era changed that, of course, but at the time my only option was learning online. So I can’t really speak with any authority as to which is better: some of the most talented designers I’ve met came from science backgrounds, and some of the best developers I know are trained artists or musicians.

CS: Were there any other jobs you tackled?

EM: After school? No, nothing really outside the industry–I mean, I’ve had some writing gigs, but so far everything’s been tech-related.

CS: What was your first exposure to the Internet/Web?

EM: Well, that’d probably be a high school BBS some student tech wonks set up when I was a sophomore. Dialing in to a FirstClass server to trash your English teacher on a bulletin board wasn’t exactly most compelling first encounter with the wide wonderful internets, but it did the trick. I was hooked.

CS: How did you first get involved with Web design?

EM: I first admitted this to the world onstage during AEA Boston this year, but it involved madrigals.

That’s right, madrigals: the D&D-playing dork of musical genres. I was part of an a cappella madrigal group in college—shut up—, and when they asked for volunteers to build their website, I guess I didn’t step backward quickly enough. So most of my initiation into the realm of web design involved a *cough* not-so-legitimate copy of Photoshop 3, and copying/pasting some other site’s font-und-table markup until I figured out exactly what all those little angle brackets did.

And yes, the site’s still online; no, you can’t have the URL. Trust me on this one.

CS: When did you develop that Web site? What did you do after that first Web site? How did you learn to Web design afterwards?

EM: I launched that site in 1996. Leave your DOCTYPEs at the door.

After that site went live, I did a couple freelancing gigs. Nothing especially sexy, mind, but I learned a lot. Though honestly, I’d say I got most of my education after school: on the job, and by trolling various web-related sites like Surfstation, k10k, and linkdup.

CS: What’s your least favorite CSS bug?

EM: Does “Internet Explorer 6” count?

I’m not sure I can pick just one, honestly. I’d have to say that IE’s “expanding box” model is pretty damned frustrating to deal with–at least, more so than the average rendering bug.

But in general, I have a lot fewer problems with CSS bugs than I used to. Part of that’s knowing where certain “trouble spots” lie in browsers’ CSS implementations, and using alternate methods I try to recommend that folks read up on something Molly Holzschlag called a “surgical correction strategy”. By using conditional comments in conjunction with separate files that apply browser-specific CSS patches, Airbag’s drastically reduced the amount of time it spends debugging.

CS: How do you feel about Web development now than say five years ago? In some ways it’s easier with the release of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows, but what challenges do you currently face in building Web sites?

EM: Well, I don’t think our largest challenges are technical ones. My workflow hasn’t changed significantly in the past couple years, and I think that most of the issues we were once faced with–browser compatibility, workflow questions, perceived shortcomings in CSS–have been overcome by now. If anything, I think we’re all just waiting to see what’s next: CSS3, HTML5, and keeping tabs on stuff like Silverlight and AIR. Which makes the “now” feel like a bit of a transitional period.

That’s not to say that there aren’t battles to be fought right now: we’ve got plenty of people slinging mud from both sides of the validation issue, discussions over what this whole “web design” thing actually entails, and there are still a fair number of companies that are just now learning how to incorporate standards into their work.

Anyway. It’s not a boring time to be working online, by any stretch of the imagination; it just feels like most of the big technical battles have been fought and, for the most part, won.

CS: What are your thoughts on HTML5 and CSS3 specification?

EM: It feels a little early to pass judgment on HTML5, frankly. The spec authors mention that work on the spec will be ongoing for years, possibly a decade or more. So while certain features currently being discussed make this markup junkie a little wary (Client-side database storage? Really?), I’m excited the HTML spec’s being revisited. Can’t wait to see what the end result is.

As for CSS3, let me at it. Can’t wait. Multiple background images? Want it yesterday. Flexible, multi-column layouts? As the kids say, yesplz.

CS: Have you had taken a look at or worked with Adobe AIR? Over at Heatvision we are building our first application with AIR-and it’s been fairly successful where a typical web application wouldn’t work.

EM: My experience has largely been as a consumer. I’ve read quite a bit of the literature, but the most I’ve actually done with AIR has been toying with applications like Pownce’s client and Snitter. So at this point, AIR’s just yet another framework I wish I had more time to tinker with.

CS: What do you think of Microsoft’s Silverlight? Any thoughts in its relation to Adobe Flash? You’re not obligated to use the phrase “Flash Killer” in your answer.

EM: Well, my MacBook Pro doesn’t actually meet the installation requirements, so I’m again on the sidelines with this one. If they can really smooth out some of the cross-platform woes they’ve been having, then Silverlight could really get some traction in the next few years. But right now, it’s too early to tell.

CS: I totally agree with you about companies needing to incorporate standards into their workflow. I feel there’s challenge out there for companies to embrace standards based workflow. Have you seen that in working with other companies or in your brief stint so far with Airbag?

EM: Absolutely, and I think it’s one thing we could definitely improve upon. Working in a client- and deadline-driven industry complicates the matter, to a certain extent; when a client’s worried about ad revenue, industry regulators, or the size of their logo, it’s hard to sell them on the business case for having standards-compliant code stay standards-compliant.

It’s just not a discussion we’re used to having, which is part of the reason I wrote that article for ALA last year. Rather than simply leading with benefits like SEO and accessibility, we need to introduce the benefits of–well, standards early on in the sales pitch. Hopefully we’ll develop the language in time, and our clients will start to ask for it by name. It’s not uncommon to see DOCTYPEs asked for by name in RFPs these days, so maybe we’re not far off.

CS: What’s your set up look like when building a site or template?

EM: All my coding’s done in TextMate, which is the program I’ve liked the best among the other OS X coding applications (despite the horrible, horrible single-character undo). I’ve got a directory called “-default” that has a stock directory/file setup I use for all my projects. So when I’m starting work on a new site, I just need to clone that directory and open up the TextMate project file.

I build everything in Firefox first, then test on Safari/Opera. Assuming everything looks good there, I use VMWare Fusion to check how things are looking in Internet Explorer, your dear friend and mine.

CS: For a while you were running the operation of Vertua Studios. How was being your own boss? What lessons did you learn?

EM: I ran Vertua for about two years, and had a blast doing it. But yeah, it was a bit of a learning experience. In working for myself, the biggest hurdles I had to overcome were my time management skills–or lack thereof. Client deadlines and face-to-face meetings can shape your day only so much; the real trick for me was staying focused when the schedule quieted down. I’d get distracted much less easily if I established little milestones in my day: email for a half hour in the morning, four hours of work, then a half hour lunch, and so on. I think the only way to become better at sticking to a routine is to force yourself to become a slave to one for awhile.

CS: Now you work for Airbag Industries. How was the transition?

EM: Airbag and Vertua merged in April of this year, and it’s been just stellar. There hasn’t really been much of a transition to speak of, as more and more of my work had been coming from Airbag during Vertua’s final year. So when Greg offered to formalize things a bit more, it seemed like a great fit.

And so far, it’s been great: the team is excellent, and we’ve been working on some really killer projects (with some more in the works). I saw joining Airbag as a chance to work with some of my favorite people working online today.

I mean, I’m not a trained designer like Rob, Shaun, or Jason, and definitely not a Photoshop savant like Dan, or Ryan. So as someone who enjoys designing the odd website, working with someone like Greg’s been a stupidly great learning experience. Ryan Irelan is that rare breed of back-end developer: he’s got a deep technical knowledge, but is very good at clearly communicating complex concepts to clients or to stupid UI guys from Boston. And Russ Casenhiser, the newest member of the team, brings a business development/project management acumen to the team that is nothing short of badass.

So yeah, I’d say things are good. I heart this job.

CS: Airbag appears to be a virtual company with all or most of its employees in remote locations. Do you still keep up with the routine or routines you developed while working for yourself at Vertua?

I try to, yeah. The only real difference has been that instead of setting the project timelines myself, I’m working with the rest of the team to establish them. Other than that, the routine’s basically the same: keep a strict schedule in place so that Ethan doesn’t run off to chase something shiny.

CS: Thanks for your time! It’s always a pleasure, Ethan. 

(Photo: Brian Warren)