Paul Annett is a Senior Designer at Clear Left. He’s spoken at a number of conferences about design and is the creator of the most popular magic trick on Google (Disclaimer: May not be true, but he’s near the top at least.). In this weeks episode Paul talks to me about his career to date, how the Duty Calls cartoon is him (According to Relly), and what he’s most excited about in the industry today.

Interview Transcript

Paul: My job title at Clear Left, as it’s technically written in the contract is Senior Designer. That’s not senior within the company, there’s no real hierarchy in the company other than directors and then the rest of us. It’s more senior in terms of the industry, as everyone that’s hired by Clear Left is normally senior level within the industry. So technically yes, I’m a Senior Designer.

Ryan: Ok, so how long have you been at Clear Left?

Paul: I started at Clear Left in 2006 (I think it was). The guys – Rich, Jeremy and Andy set up the company in 2005 and they basically worked from their bedrooms for a couple of months and when they set up their office in 2006. I joined them in the office as a freelancer, hiring some desk space and ended up contracting for them for pretty much most of the year, to the point where at the end of the year, one hundred percent of my work was coming from Clear Left – this was around the point where they offered me a full time job. James box and I were the first full time employees who weren’t directors.

Ryan: Right, so you have been with them pretty much right from the beginning then really?

Paul: Pretty much nearly, yeah.

Ryan: Ok, so how did you meet Jeremy, Andy and Richard; how did that relationship evolve?

Paul: I guess we had known each other online through the Brighton New Media mailing list. Not necessarily as faces to names, other than avatars – did we have avatars back in those days? I can’t really remember, but we knew each other vaguely through profile pages on the Brighton New Media (BNM) mailing lists, that kind of thing. They knew each other better than they knew me as they were very vocal and very ahead of the curve on the CSS front, so I was really learning from them in that respect from the mailing list. I would perhaps meet up with them on them occasional social event, but the web scene then in Brighton was nothing like it is now, its huge now and there are social events happening every night of the week. Back then, events were relatively few and far between. That’s how I knew them right at the start and we kind of worked together – well we now discover that Jeremy and I worked together as freelancers before we worked together at Clear Left. We didn’t know at the time, and it’s only from exchanging notes recently, that we discovered ‘Oh, I worked on this project and you worked on this project’ and that we were working on the same code and sending each other code. At the time we didn’t really know each other but now we say ‘Oh so that was you!’ But we both vow to never look back at that code as we were both learning back then and admit that we didn’t really know what we were doing at the time – so we’ll keep that just between you and I okay?

Ryan: Cool, so that’s what you’re doing now, you’re at Clear Left. So rewind a little bit and take me back to the beginning. Have you always been into design?

Paul: Yeah – I’m not formally trained as a designer, but I’ve always been into design and I’ve always been interested in how things work and working things out. I guess in 1992 when I was about fifteen or so, I was at school working on setting up and working on the community magazine and designing the first issue on an old acorn using some software on (pauses) I can’t remember what software it was on. I also, at about the same time had a part time job working on a newspaper – the local evening news in Portsmouth, basically designing classified ad’s as a side job, which beat working in a shop I guess. When I started at college in 1994, was my first exposure to Photoshop on a Mac LC2. I don’t know what version of Photoshop it was, but I remember using a black and white version on a classic – at the time, I didn’t really see the potential of it. It wasn’t really a photo manipulation tool; it was more something to draw squiggly lines on and then you could print them out through the printer – and then what did you do with it? I also did some work with Quark Express doing some desktop publishing there at college which was where I first got my feet wet with the internet. There was one PC up in the library that was connected to the internet, so I was very interested in going up there and working out how web pages worked, fiddling around with various software and stumbling upon ‘view source’. Finding out that if I changed this bit, then I could change how the website looks. Finding out that if I change this bit, that I could change the colour and finding that if I change this bit that the images don’t work. Thinking ‘what’s all that about’, fumbling my way around the markup and not really knowing what I was doing obviously back then. My course wasn’t really about that, there was a section on it, but it was just a general media course, so I was specialising in video production. From there I went on to study TV production in Bournemouth. I didn’t really have any online training there either, although I did sneak in some projects. Whilst I was studying and making films, I would be designing websites to go with those films, or making websites to go with our degree shows – that sort of thing. So although it wasn’t part of my course, I would be using the computer labs out of hours to teach myself the basics of web design.

Ryan: Okay, so at what point did you decide that the web was a career path that you wanted to go down and instead of doing that as a hobby that you wanted to do that as a career?

Paul: Well, when I left University, I went to work in a post-production facility in Soho, London at a place called Image Makers. It was a place where I did a work placement; they actually took me on as a post production runner, which was essentially collecting video tapes and making tea for the editors. But they also were quite interested in the new web scene that was happening – it was 1999 when I graduated and they wanted to get a slice of that action. Because I had a little bit of knowledge from doing this on the side at university, I set up their web department. That was really ‘in at the deep end’ doing some commercial websites, which I had never done before. It really wasn’t about being in a glamorous start up company with lots of money, but it was more about if they could undercut everybody and cash in by offering websites at a much cheaper rate. It didn’t really work out – I was consigned to a broom cupboard that I was working in and occasionally let out. It was not a particularly nice place to work, but from there I kind of accidently fell into the industry, because basically working in London as a post production runner at the time, I think the salary was something like nine grand a year. It’s only really possible if you’ve got relatives who live in London who can put you up, or if you can sleep on a friends sofa, that kind of thing – which I didn’t have. So I was trying to support myself on this salary and it was only by making the move into the web that I could afford to live in London. So from there, working half in the web, and half as a post production runner, I happened to fall into my next full time job which was working for Harrods in their web design team. Basically I was on a train with some friends of mine and we were sitting opposite this guy who was doing some work on his laptop and they got chatting to him. They were saying ‘it’s Sunday morning, why are you working’? He said he had some work to do as he ran the website for Harrods and they said ‘ah Paul’s a web designer’ and hinted maybe he could give me a job and we exchanged details on the train. A few months later I had a job at Harrods, so that was a very fortunate stroke of luck just bumping to that guy on the train. So it was there that I thought right okay, this is now what I’m doing as a career – rather than doing the TV thing, I’m now a web designer for real. I left Harrods after probably a year and a half and then I went freelance for three or four years until I joined Clear Left.

Ryan: Okay, what made you take the jump to freelance, from working for a company like Harrods?

Paul: There was a lot of internal politics at Harrods for a start. The web design team came underneath the I.T umbrella, so there was a lot of fighting internally as to whether the web site should be a marketing tool to get extra people though the front door of the shop, or whether it was supposed to be a sales tool to make direct sales instead of their catalogue. So there were people pulling our department in different directions and they had a very high turnover of people in management. It wasn’t that good a place to work even though it sounds really glamorous – and the shop really is glamorous, but I really didn’t enjoy working there a lot of the time. Also I was living in London; while I enjoyed living in London for a few years, I kind of felt that I had had enough of it. I had met Relly at the time and she had moved up to London temporarily. We were both thinking if we wanted to live in London or move somewhere else. Brighton seemed like the obvious choice, it’s like London by the sea – I can’t really remember the chain of events that brought us to live in Brighton, but we visited and it just seemed like a nice place to be, a nice place to live. There was also a burgeoning web design industry down here, so yeah we made the move. I actually moved down to Brighton before I went freelance and had a few months of commuting to Osterley which is near Twickenham. So it was in and out of London everyday as that’s where Harrods was – they had this big depot out there which was not very glamorous at all. That commute wasn’t very nice, I know some people do it every day, but I couldn’t. I know it’s only fifty minutes each way, but you’re looking at an hour and a half commute door-to-door each way. So yeah, I just moved down to Brighton and started freelancing.

Ryan: So how long did you freelance for before you joined Clear Left?

Paul: That was 2002 until 2005/2006, so three or four years.

Ryan: Do you miss freelancing – do you miss the freedom and the flexibility of being a freelancer?

Paul: Not particularly, as we get a lot of freedom at Clear Left – not as in completely flexible hours, but we’re cool as long as the work gets done and you’re there for the right amount of hours, then there’s some flexibility there. I definitely don’t miss doing loads of paperwork and sales and things like that, I much prefer being hands on in the project, as I am at Clear Left, also at Clear Left we’re getting a lot more higher profile clients than I would as a freelancer. So I’m enjoying much more the opportunities to be working on the kind of stuff that we’re working on now at Clear Left than I was working on the smaller stuff as a freelancer. So no, I don’t really miss it.

Ryan: Okay great, so what would you say your greatest achievement has been personally?

Paul: It’s great to work for a company that’s as highly regarded as Clear Left is, I do enjoy that. As I say, we’re about to start work on the re-working of the Radio 4 website. We’ve been doing some work for other big companies such as Ebay, which I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do outside of Clear Left. So it’s a real achievement to be working there, which I’m proud of and I’m really pleased to be doing – work wise that is my best achievement. I enjoy public speaking; I spoke in front of thirteen hundred people at South by South West last year and that was a real buzz – it was a real high and I really enjoyed that side of things. Other achievements that aren’t really work related are things like this silly Youtube video achievement. I’ve got this one minute Youtube video which has now got something like 14 million views – which is not work related and I didn’t even have to do anything to even achieve it, but from that point of view its quite amazing that that even happened. So little things like that.

Ryan: I didn’t hear about that, what’s the video?

Paul: Oh it’s a magic trick called ‘This and That’, which is a one minute magic trick of my hands doing a card trick, just filmed on a Lo-Fi camcorder type thing in the living room. Miraculously it was up there on Youtube in 2007 and it’s ended up getting 14 million views. It was featured on their home page, which I think had something to do with it. I can’t really explain it, but there are now hundreds of other people on Youtube doing the same trick, basically copying mine. Mine was adapted from a different card trick, but was the first one to be called ‘This and That’ – all the other ones that are called ‘This and That’ are subsequent to the one that I did. It’s quite nice to know that there are other people out there who are saying they can do the same trick and this is how I do it. Some of them are reviewing how it works, but not in a good way. They tend to teach really bad methods, so don’t get me started – if you’re going to teach how to do it, then teach the right way, else the other people who are learning how to do it will be learning from you, when in fact you are doing it wrong in your video and making it really obvious what you are doing. I’ve seen countless videos of people doing it really badly and I’ve just had to stop watching them. Have you seen the XKCD comic strip – the ‘Someone on the internet is wrong’ one? That’s like me – saying that I can’t come to bed as there are half a dozen people doing my trick wrong and I have to go and put them right.

Ryan: That’s the one that’s linked to so often now that they just say the comic number! So you’re very much into your magic then, that’s a hobby?

Paul: Yeah, I haven’t done any for a few years and I really, really should learn some new tricks to put on Youtube. Especially since now there is Google Adsense running on there and that sort of thing, but with having kids and work, I don’t ever have the time, but I really should learn some new tricks to put on Youtube. But there are only certain types of magic you can put on Youtube, they have to be tricks where there is no spectator interaction, I can’t really ask someone to pick a card, as even if I had someone else in the video to take the card, then people may assume that it had been set up. The beauty of the trick that is up there is that it tells a story and there is no interaction from the spectator, so it’s just pure sleight of hand. But it’s obviously a trick, you get some comments up there claiming that it’s not magic – I mean it’s not wizardry; I’m not casting a spell, it’s sleight of hand and a mystery, but that what magic is. I’m still interested in magic though, a whole bunch of us are going to see Derren Brown on his Enigma tour, next Tuesday evening, so that should be fun. Back when I was working in TV, I also worked on the second series of Derren Brown’s TV show, which was fun even though I was only a runner. I was only giving people directions and doing crowd control and getting people to watch his performance and that kind of thing.

Ryan: Did you get to meet him?

Paul: Yeah – which was cool, I learned a couple of tricks from him and that sort of thing.

Ryan: Cool! I’ve forgotten where we were at now with the questions; I think I asked you about your greatest achievement, are there any regrets – any career regrets? Is there anything that you’ve missed up on, or anything that you wished you’d taken or anything like that?

Paul: One of the last things that I did before I joined Clear Left was joining a company in Oxford as a Creative Director. I don’t really regret this at all but, the company that I joined were very immoral and quite deceitful to their clients, so I got out after six months as I just didn’t agree with their business ethics. It was probably an experience that I could have done without, but I don’t think that it did me any harm. I guess that if I had my time again, that I wouldn’t go and work for them again for that brief period. But apart from that, no major regrets really, except for maybe when we hand work back over to web clients, that seeing as we don’t have any retainer, as we hand things over to the web team when we’re finished, that we don’t really get that feedback from users. We don’t see projects in a live environment; we build it, we design it, then we hand it over and we never really get people bouncing ideas back and saying things like ‘it was great and I love this stuff’ or ‘I don’t like this or that’ and then having the opportunity to react on that, which is a shame.

Ryan: That’s interesting! So of all of the things at the moment that you are involved in, with your view of the industry, what are you enjoying the most?

Paul: It is work related, but at the same time it’s not work related, but I’m really enjoying the way that the web and technology is becoming a part of not only our lives as geeks, but the people who always look at us a bit oddly and say ‘why are you doing that?’ – It’s now becoming a part of their lives too. I remember when I was at university and still figuring out how the internet works. People thought I was just wasting my time, but now they’re on Facebook all of the time. I can see the Ipad becoming – and will become I’m sure, a part of my parents lives, because they’ll be able to video chat with our kids. There’s always been this big hurdle that basically the user experience and the usability have been so bad, for technology so far, that there has been no way that people such as my parents could interact with devices that use the web. This is because they use mouses and browsers – my Mum has been on courses and she still can’t figure out how to move the mouse in relation to the cursor on the screen in particular, it’s a big hurdle to get over. So I love the fact that this new stuff is becoming a part of peoples’ lives as new technology comes along. It’s really interesting to see, that we have a three and a half year old boy and whereas we grew up with things like cassette tapes – I mean it was a few years ago, I think about telling him about that. What a strange concept it would be, that to listen to music, we had to have a little tape that we had to put into a machine – that would be a really odd concept for him to think about. Actually when he grows up, it’s going to be a really odd concept for him to think about using screens that you couldn’t touch. But he’s great at using the touch screen on the Iphone – he’s really speedy at that. He’s also great at using a mouse too, considering he’s only three and a half. So at the moment I’m really enjoying seeing technology coming into peoples’ lives like that. We had this instance the other day of him saying ‘Oh, can I watch such and such’. So I pick up the TV remote and say I’d see if I could find it and he was saying ‘No no Daddy, not on there, on Cbeebies website’. So I say ah I don’t think that shows on the Cbeebies website, and he says ‘No it is’. Then he goes over to the computer and picks up the mouse and navigates through the Cbeebies website, to show me that actually it is on there and that he can find it, but I can’t.

Ryan: It will be interesting to see what he’s like in ten years time when they’ve grown up with this technology. My son is only fifteen months now and he knows to touch my Iphone to play video and that’s just weird. I’ll hold it there and he’ll touch it to watch a video of him that I’ve recorded. There’s this aspect, that to them, their whole lives are recorded from day one, where we had old photos and things like that to look back on. They’re going to have their lives documented from start to finish.

Paul: This isn’t to do with my career, but I also regret not taking many photos when I was a teenager, or in my early twenties because there weren’t digital cameras. There are some of my old friends that I don’t have photos of, who I’m still in touch with now, but today I wouldn’t not-have photos of them. I don’t know if you have heard of it, but there is this Iphone app called ‘Bloom’. Bloom is this Iphone app which essentially turns the Iphone into a surface which is just a musical instrument and if you tap it, it makes nice calming noises – look it up its really good. I’m not sure yet whether my son knows that by touching it, that he is making the noise, but it’s an interesting process to keep on letting him have a go while trying to persuade him not to put it in his mouth and to try and make some music.

Ryan: That sounds really cool! So, just to wrap up, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Paul: Um. On a desert island somewhere.

Ryan: Everybody says that.

Paul: Ha ha, so original. I don’t know – Definitely doing some kind of creating technology content, stuff. It probably won’t be websites in ten years time, I don’t know what it will be, but I enjoy doing what I’m doing. I’m actually getting more and more interested in – well I’ve come from working as a visual designer, so working at Clear Left has exposed me a lot more to being a UX designer and not necessarily opening Photoshop and getting started. Obviously that’s not how we work, there is a lot of sketching on paper. Not illustrative, or fine art, I mean just rough sketching – will this work/won’t it work/try something else out, opening Omnigraffle and wire-framing stuff up in there, printing those out and actually seeing people using them. So I’m now becoming much more interested in design as it actually is, which is not necessarily designing to make things pretty, which was perhaps my mind set ten years ago, but design to make things easier to use for people, which again brings me back to my parents using the Ipad and the kids using the Iphone. Just making it so easy and intuitive – don’t just chuck stuff in there to make it look better, chuck stuff in to make it easier to use. So I want to head more in that direction, it’s really interesting for me.

Ryan: Ok great! Well thank you very much Paul for taking the time to talk to me.

Paul: It’s been a pleasure.

Ryan: I’m sure people will enjoy that, you’ve had an interesting career and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Paul: Cheers, thanks Ryan.

Thanks goes to Blake Williams for transcribing this interview.

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Richard Rutter is one of the co-founders of Clear Left and is also heading up the highly anticipated FontDeck. Richard started out as a Chemical Engineer before turning his hobby of building websites into a career. In this weeks episode he takes me through his career so far and what lead him to establishing one of the most respected agencies in the industry.

Interview Transcript

Richard: My job title is Production Director, normally. I wouldn’t say that was what I’d call myself to anyone, other than perhaps at the bottom of an email sometimes – don’t think it even goes there nowadays but, we had to come up with something.

‘Director’ because, well, I’m a Director of Clear Left and ‘Production’ because, back in the day – when we started five years ago, I used to be called a Producer or Web Producer, which was a term that I guess got carried over from from television. But it just means, and always did, User Experience Designer and Information Architect, those kind of things.

Ryan: Is that what you focus on most of the time at Clear Left?

Richard: Yep, that’s primarily what I do, I was about to say that I do a bit of front end coding, but that’s not really true – apart from on Fontdeck, which I built, so anything that’s ropey with that is entirely my fault and not our proper front end staff. So yeah, it’s mostly User Experience Design and the odd little bit of training, workshops and things like that.

Ryan: So, what’s an average week like for you?

Richard: An average week, the sort of division is that I need to spend the best part of a day a week, on average, doing company stuff. Whether that’s proposals or managing in one way or another – when you’ve got ten people you need to do some kind of managing. Then there’s User Experience Design, in one way or another, which is talking to clients, which is doing research, which is getting my hands dirty with interactive prototypes or OmniGraffle. A lot of time is spent with pen and paper, we use a lot of pen and paper nowadays and Post-Its and stuff like that. It’s a very efficient way of designing we find, particularly early on.

Ryan: You mentioned Fontdeck, you’re leading that are you?

Richard: That’s right, that takes up a lot of my time at the moment, which is no bad thing because I really enjoy doing it, it’s my baby as it were. So I spend a lot of time on that at the moment as we’re still going through doing improvements and bug fixing, which like any web project will be an ongoing process – just mainly the last few bits and pieces, getting it working better and improving the UI as we get more people testing it and more feedback and reaching out to more and more foundries. We’re getting a lot of interest from foundries and we’ve got quite a few signed up, some haven’t made it into the beta yet but we just need to get a few things signed and sealed with them – so it’s looking very exciting. It’s going more slowly that I would have hoped but I guess that’s the nature of these things and we’re still looking to get a public launch very soon, we certainly want to be out there before South By South-West which is coming along very quickly indeed and is four weeks away now, if that. I think I fly out on four weeks on Thursday.

Ryan: Yeah, I do as well, I’m going with Headscape so that’ll be really cool.

Richard: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah, it’s my first one as well, so should be cool.

Richard: Ah right, well you’ll definitely enjoy it.

Ryan: So, that’s what you’re doing now and I’ve got an interview with Jeremy so that I can know a little bit about how Clear Left was started. Take me back to the beginning, take me back to your career leading up to Clear Left, how did you start out?

Richard: I started out as a hobbyist, and graduated, in 1994. Later that year Netscape 1.1 beta came out, which was very exciting, and early on there were no graphics, or perhaps they’d just introduced in that one the ability to put an image into a web page. There was no commercial web but it didn’t take long for that to appear. It did take me a while to actually get a job in the industry, I did a degree in Chemical Engineering and there was nothing relevant to web design and I had no concept of the idea that I could be a Web Designer as a job, so I did engineering and eventually became a Chartered Engineer, but in the meantime I was learning more and more web design stuff, or building really, more than design.

I created an HMTL guide called Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi, because it was for me and I didn’t think anyone else would bother coming along but lots of people did, and that’s still there frozen in time in the year 2000, or probably the year 1999, at jalfrezi.com or htmlbyexample.com as it came to be called. That was my way in and that was certainly the most popular HTML guide on the web at the time, there weren’t many others as it was fairly early days. It was one of those things where I built it and wrote it to scratch my own itch really, because early on you had HTML standards (HTML2) from the W3C and there was HTML elements being put together by Netscape, that weren’t in that standard, and then subsequently from Microsoft as well, when they joined the game, we had marquee and all of that stuff. I wanted one place where it was altogether so I could see in front of me how to use all of these elements and decide which ones I wanted to use, whether I was going to use blink regardless of its poor support – though I never did use blink apart from in the guide as an example, but that doesn’t count.

Yeah, so that grew there and it got someone’s attention. Basically, some friends of mine I was at university with were working later on, in about 2000, for a web company called Citria who were a company of about twenty people at the time and a full service agency that were starting to build commercial websites and host them and with proper software running them, and stuff like that. I was taken on, well, it was proposed to me that I could do, for a job, what I was doing for a hobby and for the same money, so that seemed like kind of a no-brainer for me. I ditched the engineering, I’d become a Chartered Engineer and then literally two weeks later quit, so I proved I could do engineering and then went on to do what I actually enjoyed doing – which is what I’m still doing.

So, I had about three really interesting years at Citria, it was real dot com stuff, a work hard, play hard kind of ethos – they were really, really talented people we were working with. The company, when I first joined, was only about twenty people and when it finally imploded it was about a hundred and fifty odd people and they’d spent the previous three years judging their success based on how many people had been employed. So they’d be telling us in monthly meetings that they’d just employed another twenty people and I think everyone in the company, apart from the people who were running it, wondered how this could ever last and why it would ever be a business that would really work, but surprise-surprise, in the end, the bottom fell out the market and everyone got made redundant and went on to other things.

I went on and did a bit of freelancing and then went on to join Multimap and had some really good time there. Again, a fairly small company when I joined, I think I was about the twentieth employee there, and then by the time I left there was about a hundred – although they didn’t judge their business by how many people they employed. They, as a pure dot com, never made anyone redundant and it was run really well and as a proper business, sensibly. They had, I think, one big round of funding which they actually spent mostly on advertising which really cemented their position, particularly in the UK. Like any company, when you go through from twenty people up to about a hundred people, there were a lot of teething problems, particularly one. As they got past fifty people they had to put extra layers of management in, which is always really hard work because it takes away all of those fast moving ways that the company is run and becomes a little bit more slow. It was still a really good place and once they’d sorted all that out it was still fun working there.

Then I left to do Clear Left. I should say that the Chairman of Mulitmap, Sean Phelan – who eventually made himself a nice tidy wedge when Microsoft bought them, was really good to me when I left. When I explained what I was doing and why I was leaving Multimap, he suggested that I worked my months notice across a period of two months, part time, so I had a chance to build up some of Clear Left while I was still getting some money from Multimap, which was entirely unnecessary from his point of view but really, really welcomed. That sort of sums up his entrepreneurial spirits, I owe quite a lot to Sean one way or another.

Ryan: That’s really good.

Richard: Yes, and that brings me right round to Clear Left, and joining up with Jeremy and Andy, and never looked back since.

Ryan: OK, and that was about five years ago that you started Clear Left, wasn’t it?

Richard: Yes, our birthday is in May and we’ll be five years old.

Ryan: So, how did you meet Andy and Jeremy? Had you known them a while before you started Clear Left?

Richard: Yeah, I’ve known them a little while, obviously we’re all Brighton based. It’s mostly because we’re in the same field, and even though we’re in Brighton, I guess we knew each other through our blogs. Then we realised that we were in Brighton and got in touch and said about meeting up for a drink, and so on, and then we got to be quite good friends. I guess they were the couple of years leading up to Clear Left, then there was just that one fateful meeting in a coffee shop. I think was New Year’s Day, one morning, when someone said “Hey, we should just quit our jobs and join up forces.” And we did.

Ryan: How did you find the experience of just quitting your job and starting a business? Was it quite scary in the beginning?

Richard: Yeah, it was kind of scary. We went into it with our eyes open and spent the best part of four or five months thinking in a lot of detail about what we were going to do, doing a proper business plan. I ran it past my people like my Dad, who used to be a bank manager, and then also I’ve got other relatives actually who used to be and, in fact still are, bank managers. So then I wanted to get it into the situation where they would be willing to lend us money – not that we wanted any money, we’ve never borrowed any money at all – I wanted to be in a position where they could read this business plan, they could understand it and then as people who would potentially have purse strings would say “Yes, based on this, we think that would be a sound business that we’d lend money to.” Like I said, because we started small – literally in our bedrooms, growing organically – we’ve never had to, it’s been self-funding apart from buying some computers and things upfront, but not money really.

Ryan: And now you’re up to eleven employees.

Richard: And now we’re up to eleven employees, yep. We had a good year last year and it’s looking reasonably good for this year as well, well I mean it’s looking very good at the moment. But, when you’re running these businesses you can never really tell too far in the future because you’ve only got two or three months work ahead of you at any given time so it could all completely disappear, at that point, but it never seems to – you’ve got pretty good warning signs as to whether that is happening or not. It’s alright at the moment, it’s good.

Ryan: So, during your career, what would you say your greatest achievement has been?

Richard: I suppose, overall, it has to be setting up Clear Left… (That was Paul joining us, by the way.)

Ryan: Hello, Paul.

Richard: Overall, setting up Clear Left, I suppose, has to be the highlight. We’ll see what happens with Fontdeck, that might be another highlight, I’m quite excited about it.

I’m quite glad of the webtypography project that I started and may one day be close to finishing at webtypography.net – the Robert Bringhurst ‘Translated to the Web’ thing – I’m quite proud of that although frustrated with myself that it hasn’t got any further. It’s just a lack of time, so many other things grabbing attention, it stands as it does at the moment and hopefully I can chip away at it a bit more.

Our new hire at Clear Left, Andy Hume, is a big typography fan as well. So, as he sits opposite me here in the office maybe I’ll start to rope him in and get him writing a few bits and pieces as well, because he writes quite well on web typography too so maybe there’s a chance to get it progressed further.

Ryan: OK, great. So, on the flipside of that, do you have an regrets?

Richard: I think the simple answer is “No.”

Ryan: No?

Richard: I’m not really someone who regrets actions. Maybe some odd drunken indiscretions, or whatever the word is, but nothing major. There is no major thing to my life where I think I would have done something different, I find that life tends to work out reasonably well if you go at it with a good attitude I think.

Ryan: OK, cool. Well to wrap up, as I can see that everybody is arriving in the office, where do you see yourself in the future or where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Richard: Speaking broadly, I’d like to still be doing something that I enjoy doing, as I do at the moment. I think a lot of the people at Clear Left, myself included, will one way or another still be doing website stuff, even if they didn’t have to – but just maybe not for eight hours a day or ten hours a day, or however long we actually spend working. So broadly speaking that’s what I’d like to be doing, something that I still enjoyed doing and probably something still on the web, but we’ll see what the web turns into over the next few years. It’s going to be there in one form or another but things are evolving as devices are evolving and branching out, changing and then merging back in again. At one point we thought that mobile phones were going to be changing the ways that we designed websites but then in some ways they’ve become so advanced that they’ve become regular browsers anyway. So who knows really what’s going to happen? As long as I’m still involved and enjoying it, that’s all I really care about.

Ryan: OK. Well, thank you very much for your time Richard and I’m sure people will enjoy that.

Richard: You’re welcome, Ryan. Thanks.

Much thanks goes to Dan Millar (@danmillar) for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

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Enjoy.

Chris Lea works for Media Temple. He does the systems engineering work for Virb.com and conducts research into emerging technologies the the hosting provider may want to pursue. You’ll find him on the conference circuit having recently spoken at FOWA London. In this weeks episode Chris takes me through his career, how Media Temple has grown and his plans for the future.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Chris: I don’t have one actually. I haven’t had one for a bit, but if I did it would be something along the lines of Performance Engineer or Research and Development Engineer or something like that.

Ryan: Ok, so tell me a little bit; you work for Media Temple. So tell me a little bit about what you are doing day to day.

Chris: So what I’ve been doing… there are sort of a couple of disparate tracks that I’m doing with Media Temple. The easiest one is that I do the systems engineering work for Virb.com, which is a social network that Media Temple acquired in 2008. So, that’s making sure those systems are operational and are doing what the developers need the systems to do and secure and that sort of thing… that’s under my umbrella. I do some business development work just because some of the things that I’m researching tend to be emerging technologies and that puts me in touch with companies that are using those things and if we’re going to do work with different companies, different projects or whatever, I’m usually involved in those things. Then like I said, a lot of it is seeing what’s happening in the software landscape, sort of server wise and seeing what people are doing on the bleeding edge of things, because the bleeding edge things now are not going to be bleeding edge in six months and more traditional hosting customers may want to be involved in some of those technologies, so I check them out and see what they are used for, and how/if in what way we can leverage them at Media Temple for our customer base.

Ryan: I saw you talk recently at Future of Web Apps, so are you on the conference circuit quite a bit, are you talking quite a bit about this stuff?

Chris: It kinda comes in waves. Talking at FOWA is great, Ryan and his crew put on such an awesome conference, so I’ll probably try and do a little more next year. This year I spoke at South by South West, FOWA and maybe one or two more, I’ll try and do some more speaking next year, I’m not sure. But yeah, I’m out there on the conference circuit. I was just at An Event Apart out in San Francisco to say hi to those guys and its a good way to keep in touch with the community.

Ryan: Ok, right cool. So, that’s a little bit about what you are doing now. Rewind, go right back to the beginning. What was your first job?

Chris: First job post school? or first job like ever!

Ryan: Whichever is most interesting!

Chris: It would be post school actually. I moved out to Los Angeles in the last 90’s and at the time I was just planning on taking a year off and then going back to graduate school, but the Internet was just really, that what was really taking off. You know I studied Physics at school so you sort of picked up the computer skills there and a friend of mine started a little web design company. Actually I ended up working at Fox for a year and a half, working on digital television stuff. This is back when HD only existed in prototype form, so I did that for a year and a half also with the web development stuff. Then the web stuff got too much so I left Fox and did just web stuff for a couple of years. Then we shut that company down and I did freelance software for a while and worked on a couple of books, programming books, PHP books. From there it was Media Temple and I’ve been at Media Temple for six and a half years now.

Ryan: Ok, cool. How big is Media Temple? How many of you are their there?

Chris: It’s big. It’s 180 something people now which is crazy to me as I was employee 18 so its certainly grown a lot. You know you go to the office now and its really really full. That said we’re still hiring as quickly as we can for talented people.

Ryan: So was it quite small when you started?

Chris: Yeah, like I said my employee number was under 20, and a fair number of those people aren’t still there. There’s not a whole lot of people who have been around as long as me, there’s a couple but not too many.

Ryan: What’s your greatest achievement in your career? What are you most proud of?

Chris: Hmm, that’s a good question. I’ve done a couple of things at Media Temple that I’m pretty proud of. I mean most of them were internal projects that aren’t that sexy to talk about but, like, I was one of the guys that got our data centre moved. It was like this god awful project, but you know it had to be done and it actually happened, all things considered, really really smoothly. You know when you’re trying to move that many servers there’s a lot of room for error. We actually managed to get that done over a couple of weekends and few summers ago and that worked. I was sort of in charge of the technical groups at Media Temple during a pretty intense phase of the growth, and you know I managed to keep things going. It was pretty hairy at times, but I think when I took over that job role we were hosting close to 17,000 domains, give or take, and when I stopped doing that role we were hosting like 130,000 domains…

Ryan: Bloody hell.

Chris: Yeah, so percentage wise that was a really big crook in the hockey stick on the graph you know. So really I’m proud of that. I certainly could have done things better than I did looking back on it, but you know we got through. Then, outside of that, I think I’m really proud of some of the biz dev stuff I’ve done at Media Temple. You know when I started it was a company that very much catered towards graphic designers, and we still do certainly, but when I came in I was coming in very much out of being a PHP programmer, a Perl programmer and stuff. I think I helped push the company into supporting the web standards guys, the List Apart kind of crew that we’re friendly with now and that we work with. Things like getting the guys from the Django project and JQuery, sort of more developer centric guys, sort of in the family, I had a hand in there. They are friends of mine, they’re doing fantastic work so obviously I’m proud of those efforts.

Ryan: How did you go about getting those people on board to use Media Temple? What approach did you take?

Chris: Being really blunt. I would stalk them sometimes, but yeah, you know you run into these guys at conferences and I’d be like “Hi we’re Media Temple, we think you’re doing really great work. We’d like to help out with the hosting for people we think are doing great work, what can we do?” You start that dialogue… I think with some of the technical guys because I come from a more technical background we were able to speak the same language pretty well. But like with the jQuery stuff I email John Resig a couple of times and hadn’t heard back as I’m sure his inbox is crazy, and I finally found his cell phone number somewhere are just cold called him, said “Hi, why don’t you let us host the JQuery stuff, we think it’s awesome”. That worked too. So yeah, it’s going straight in I’ve found works best.

Ryan: Cool, ok on the flip side of your greatest achievements, what would you say is your biggest regret career wise?

Chris: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. I mean if I could change one big thing that I did I probably would have worked less in school. I really busted my ass in school, which I mean was good, but I really thought I was going to go into Physics and as I said I was going to take a year off and then come back and I think I missed out on a lot of college because of that. But other that that, biggest regrets… I don’t really have too many. There were a couple of start ups that had I gone with them back in the day I probably would have ended up doing pretty well, sort of when I was doing that freelance stuff people hit me up once in a while, but I don’t really regret it, I mean you never know and they seem pretty crazy at the time, so it’s ok.

Ryan: You briefly mentioned then you wish you’d not worked so hard in school. How do you feel about college or university education when it comes to coming into this industry? Do you think its not necessarily needed? Better to teach yourself on the job?

Chris: I don’t think it is necessarily needed, I do think you need to go through a process of learning how things work in the industry. I studied Physics in a very mathematical piece of the physics universe really hard in school, and I don’t use any of that now, but it certainly taught me a way of approaching problems in a very general sense and very applicable to technical problems. You know coding, dealing with servers, systems, sort of an ability to look at something that is big and complicated and break it down into smaller and smaller pieces until they are small and you can make sense of them and you just deal with them. I definitely got that out of what I learned at college, or I guess university if I were British. But, I don’t think it is necessary you know, the people I know who are really good have all gone through that process one way or the other and sometimes it was self motivated and sometimes it was school and sometimes it was training of some sort. A lot of the guys that I work with don’t have degrees and they are as, or in many cases better than I am at this stuff. I certainly don’t think that on the technical side it is a requirement anymore. I think that the availability of technology has really changed that. When I was doing it I think it maybe was more required more, I don’t know how I would have done it otherwise, but I mean you know Linux is free and easy for everyone to use. Back then if you wanted to get a C compiler you went to your lab because you didn’t really have one you could use or get for free on your computer at home, but now you do. The availability of the technologies that we’re all using for free I think makes that a lot more possible than it was 15 years ago or so.

Ryan: So I suppose really just to wrap up then, where do you see yourself in the future?

Chris: Well, Media Temple is going real strong so I don’t have any plans to depart any time soon. I think that I’m probably going to move, you know… I expect I’m going to go more or less technical than what I’m currently doing. Meaning I will probably get into, just in terms of really trying to focus, I’ll probably need to really hone down on some of these more complex technologies which is going to require doing less biz dev stuff and less publicly viewable stuff and really geeking out, or maybe the other way and I may really sit back and let guys who are probably younger and sharper and more on the ball than me start working on those things and do more of a developmental sort of a role going forward. Media Temple is the kind of company that… we try and hire really talented people and then we try and let them do where their talents take them. So it’s not, like I said I don’t have a title, and that’s fine, that’s cool. We are going to see what kind of problems come up and if I can be of help I’m going to do them and that not always something we can really plan for, but its taken me in some really cool directions so its not something I’m nervous about, its worked out pretty well so far.

Ryan: Ok, fantastic. Well thank you very much Chris for taking the time to talk to me, that’s great. I’m sure people will enjoy that and nice speaking to you.

Chris: Yeah great to speak to you too, thanks.

Much thanks goes to Dan Millar (@danmillar) for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
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Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Ben Bodien arrived in the web industry via a fuel depot explosion and an economic crisis. He’s co-founder & principal of Neutron Creations, a development agency based in London, that are quickly making a name for themselves, collaborating with well know designers such as Elliot Jay Stocks and Tim Van Damme. In this weeks episode, Ben takes me through he career to date and his experiences of starting his own business.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Ben: My job title erhmmm , Ok my job title is co-founder and principal which is quite a mouthful it is one of those job titles where everyone sort of loves to hate. It is not something that is short and snappy that is very descriptive
the reason was when Mark and I set the company up we wanted to have a title that sort of described that we owned the company but it wasn’t a dusty corporate title like director or CEO because we are both equal partners in the business so we can’t both be CEO’s
So yeah we had quite a long discussion about it and we sort of borrowed from the advertising/creative industries where they have principals or partners so we went with that and we stuck co-founder on the front to make it a bit longer and also to imply we are the ones running this place.

Ryan: And we are talking about Neutron Creations?

Ben: That’s right yes, it is a web development agency very small agency more like a studio there are two of us in it at the moment the two co-founders, and yeah we may be looking to expand this year we are only a year old now so errhm we are now at the stage where things are running stably and happy with where it is going it might be time to grow but we do not want to run too fast I don’t think.

Ryan: So what do you do day to day for the business ?

Ben: Day to Day, there is no such thing as a sort of typical day really it depends what type of projects we have on, there is a lot of running the business. We sort of share that so we haven’t lumped either one of us with your doing all the finance, your doing all the marketing so there is a lot of admin answering emails we both look after accounting that sort of stuff all the day to day operational things for a business. My actual stuff, stuff that I actually do is front-end development that’s my reason to be I suppose typically it is, for the last few projects we do all sorts of different stuff, we do not have a typical project either so we have been asked to jump in on existing websites and add some extra stuff, we have also done projects were we have taken a design and we do all the front-end coding and also we we take designs and do front-end and back-end. So we do all sorts of things really. So depending on how much front end coding there is involved in the project dictates what I am doing on that particular day with that particular project. So if there is none then I will be doing other stuff, or working on another project. Mostly it is taking designs and implementing them in HTML and CSS, jQuery and making them work and sing that is really what I do.

Ryan: Lots and lots of variety then so that is always good

Ben: Yes, although recently over the xmas period it seems to be mostly email is what I have been doing. So I have had a month of emailing and now it might be back to work, actual work.

Ryan: OK, so as you say you have been running your own business for about a year

Ben: That’s right yes.

Ryan: Just rewind a little then and take me back to the beginning how did your career start out?

Ben: The beginning OK , [Laughs]

Ryan: Start from the beginning

Ben: Yes, OK I guess it is all in the title. It is quite funny actually I was thinking about this when we agreed to do this I haven’t really had any jobs that haven’t been directly relevant to what I have ended up doing, which quite handy I suppose I have never done any bar tending or anything like that maybe I will come back to you later as a retirement project or something. The first thing I did was like an internship for a company my aunt worked for actually and I was just lumped in with the IT department, like 5 people and I think it was a two month thing over a summer holiday and I was basically the IT busybody so I was checking cables restarting things and making tea was pretty much the extent of my duties. One thing I had to do was make an asset register of every single piece of IT hardware in the company premises which was like for a company of 500 people that takes a while.

Ryan: [laughs]

Ben: That was like a month long project that one, that was an unpaid work experience thing I think I was about 17 or so, 16 or 17 but i have been set on computery related things for decades now. So it has always been that sort of career path, I have never swung in from other avenues like being an accountant or microbiologist or anything.

Ryan: So where did you go from there I mean , were you did you do university or college.

Ben: I yes, I went to University, after that I did, I got into my head that I was going to be a video game designer or developer because I have been playing games since I could look at a computer basically so right from a BBC basic so gaming has always been there in a big way and I wanted to write games basically so I sort of set off down that path working out what I needed to do to reach that goal, I got internship, well it was not an internship it was a beta testing thing for two weeks with Loinhead studios.

Ryan: oh yeah

Ben: Who were the guys that made black and white and some other stuff as well Fable, Peter Molyneux’s company basically so I did two weeks there and that was fantastic It was like a games company brilliant this is what I want to be doing so talking to there coders they said the best way to get into games coding is to do a course in computer science as a degree rather than anything games specific as a degree as that does not give you a decent founding in the sort of theories of it so off I went I went to Kent University and studied computer science there. During which time I tried coding games and found it was actually quite hard so I drifted along for a bit not sure what or which way I was going with it. As part of the university program it was a sandwich year, or a year in industry and in that year I went to work for Sun Microsystems in California for one year so that was amazing, being paid, it wasn’t actually that much money but the accommodation was paid for flights there and back were paid for so it was kind of everything you were given it was errr disposable income so we bought lots of cameras and shiny things, explored San Francisco and the bay area that was all very good. So while I as there I was working with the streaming server team which was a software streaming server for video and they were developing one with this tiny team in Sun that no one even within the rest of Sun had heard of. So they were trying to get that started and get a voice within the company and get Sun actually using their own product. Part of that was helping to revamp the products internal intranet, sort of web page so they had this really ropey typical open-source web page which sort of said download this, download this download this there were like 50 download links on a web page it is how most open source things seem to work, and no one really knew what the thing was about so I worked with them to redesign the web page and introduce this new thing which was new to them and me at the time which was CSS moving from their tables based horrendous site they had before. So that was my first taste of front end development on the web I hadn’t really done much web stuff before it had all been in Dreamweaver or on the back end side of things with PHP and relaying on a CMS for front end so that was where I got my first taste for front end development so I thought OK this is the next to be looking at is coding interfaces and doing the front end of things.

Ryan: SO OK where did it go from there when was that, how long ago was that you were working for Sun ?

Ben: That was 2002,2003 that was a year long placement so they sent us back to the UK and we finished or degrees and what happened after that, well I graduated mysteriously by some string of luck then whjat happened, that time was all very lots of things happened all very quickly it was kind of a blur.

Ryan: [laughs]

Ben: Oh so that is right I did a diploma in audio engineering for a year which was another thing, I was always interested in making music as well so that was kind of me exploring if that was something I wanted to do professionally?

Ryan: OK

Ben: But as with games coding it turned out the industry is fiercely competitive and the salaries are not all that high so, it is not the easiest thing to go into and luckily I had the degree in CS sitiing behind that so that was a decent fallback. So then I worked for company called Trilogy logistics which is always a mouthful to say, I could never get the hang of that and they were a new division of a video games distribution company so it was computer science stuff not actually working on games but in and around games. It was basically working in a warehouse making sure video games got to shops from the pubishers and the manufacturing so there was a lot of more IT related stuff looking after a warehouse full of computers all the staff and operation stuff, replacing printer cartridges the usual exciting stuff but within that job I got involved in writing some of our own applications for the company and those were all web based apps. So it was my first taste of web apps. So they were like things for booking delivery slots for the drivers to come and collect packs of games, the warehouse only had a finite number of loading slots, I think it was one so we had a very tight schedule for when drivers would come to pick things up. They would get stuff loaded into the van it would take 20 mins or something and they would drive off and these guys are all working on a tight schedule so we needed something to organise all of this and is probably quite typical it was all done in a excel spreadsheet when I got there so I though you know there is a better way to do this something that more than one person can look at at a time, doesn’t loose information if someone edits the spreadsheet, you know it is done properly. So I set about building a webapp for that having learnt more about this transition everyone was making from desktop apps to web apps. This was in 2003 I suppose , 2004 when it was starting to happen. So yes that was a good run into web application building, as I was the only person their doing that, that particular side of the work I was doing front end and back end. There was no specialisation there it was just we need this get Ben to do it, so that’s pretty much how that worked.

Ryan: OK

Ben: And then the warehouse exploded. They had, I don’t know if you remember it was next to the Bunsfield Oil Depot in Hertfordshire .

Ryan: No but I can imagine where this is going

Ben: OK to set the scene it is basically this enormous facility which has petrol tanks, not just like tanks but massive storage containers for all the petrol stations in the southeast and Heathrow, and Stanstead and Luton and Gatwick so there is a lot of petrol there and one day some of it spilled out and someone started their truck and it all exploded and it basically levelled the warehouse we had so that was my first taste of how important backups are because ours were very rudimentary at the time. It did actually work out we had it all backed up but it was a bit scary when you turn on Sky news and your office is on fire and flat.

Ryan: I was going to say, so you was not there at the time I take it.

Ben: No that was pretty amazing actually it was the christmas period I think it was 2005 it happened around then it was kind of miraculous it was 6:00am on a Sunday morning. Had it been a few hours later there would have been some temp staff in there doing some packing or if it had been on a weekday then there would have been 50 people in there so no one hurt but the business was demolished and had to relocate so there was a long period of reshuffling moving servers and getting everything set up there. We moved to a new facility and carried on with that for a while. But you know there is only so long you can go on for changing printer cartridges in half of your time and then building webapps in the other half, when you really enjoy doing the webapps and the printer cartridges just start getting you down a bit you just start resenting them so

Ryan: [Laughs]

Ben: So I started to get a little bit bored there, so I think I lasted two years there with a massive explosion in the middle so that wasn’t too bad.

Ryan: So that’s what spurred on your interest to go down the web route.

Ben: Yes so then I was definitely set on doing web stuff I thought this was a fast moving industry and I’d heard about these people who specialise in doing certain aspects of web development are not just lumped with doing the whole thing so I thought if maybe I can find a different company I might be able to focus more on what I am interested in, not stuff that I can’t do or I am not confident I can do a brilliant job in. So for me that was moving away from backend development and towards the front end.

Ryan: OK So where did you end up after that

Ben: So after that one, well one random evening I met this guy in a bar who turned out to be the CTO of a hedge fund. We were both extremely drunk he was asking me what I did and I explained what I was doing and explained that I was working on some reporting stuff and guys in finances go crazy for reporting they can never get enough reports so I sort of lit up because I though reporting, oooh fancy stuff web stuff and he said why don’t you come in and talk to us and we will see if there is something you can help us with here. So I went in there and I sort of had a very rapid shotgun job interview in like 30 minutes where I sat down by the technical team and they asked me what i did and all that kind of stuff and asked me some finance questions which I completely flucked becuase I had nothing to do with finance before that. They said, they started me on a sort of probation period thing just to see how it goes so I did not know anything about finance that was a sticking point for both of us but it turned out quite well and I went on full time there and that one that was interesting, this was pre credit crunch and it was a hedge fund that was specialising in collatorised debt obligations which were the things that went pretty wrong and they were also specialising in American warrants and mortgage backed securities and all the stuff that you read about in the papers during the summer that year. So not only that the company was also doing it on behalf of an Icelandic Investment bank so ..

Ryan: ahhh

Ben: It was like this huge huse of cards, mountain of cards with a few of us perched on top. So that was fun and it unwound very quickly but while I was working on a webapp which again seems to be theme in my career was moving people away from excel to web applications so that was taking these dusty financial reports which were just a billion numbers crammed into a A4 page and no heirachy or anything it was just numbers numbers numbers and you just had to sit and look at it for ten minutes and have a degree in Economics to understand what any of it meant so I thought what … By this time I had been reading lots of books by Edward tufte aswell , the visualisation Informational designer

Ryan: Yes

Ben: So i thought I can apply loads of this stuff to this. So I started building this web application which would go through the same database that all these numbers were coming out off but get out the important ones for certain groups of people, so you had traders who made snap decisions so they did not want to be sat there with a spreadsheet that has a million numbers in it when they only need to see maybe five for a particular company they are looking at.
That was me trying to educate the finance industry or at least a tiny pocket of it, and it was going quite well but then it all collapsed extremely quickly when the credit crunch took hold. Since we were working on the reporting we had a pretty good idea of what was happening so we sort of had forewarning of what was coming since we were the ones doing the charts which had this lovely line going up and up and then suddenly bang this huge fall and at that company I had recruited Mark who is now my business partner who I had originally met at University I recruited him into the company as our sort of Systems Architect because he is a fantastic backend developer. So he was working with me there for, I think he was there for about nine months before the end, so maybe around that yeah and then it all started falling apart so they laid of a few staff, luckily we were seen as some of the key ones so we were kept on but increasingly there was not much to do in the office it was sort of us sitting around twiddling our thumbs while everyone else was running around putting out fires because the technical teams were, you know there was not much to do while the house was on fire. So we were there twiddling our thumbs wondering what to do facing the increasingly likelihood of redundancy so we started planning for that for quite a while and eventually we thought this has coming it was just around the corner so we may as well either we are going to have to go out looking for jobs, which neither of us particularly fancied or we can try and start up a company of our own doing much the same stuff as we are doing now just for something other than finance as that is going to be on hold for a while in healing mode. So while that company whilst it’s death throws we were quietly sitting in a corner setting up another company researching company names and this sort of stuff and planning our line of attack with our first clients. So that was how the company came about. We were given a few months notice period with redundancy by which time we had already had about two months preparation time on this company so we bootstrapped our company enabling us to have the first three months free of having to pay ourselves out of the business so that really gave us our jumpstart.

Ryan: Ok

Ben: And luckily it all worked and here I am still today.

Ryan: Cool, Fantastic, I suppose leading on from that, I suppose, you are the first person I have interviewed that’s a partnership. I have interviewed quite a few people who have freelanced or worked for an agency but there is just you and Mark …

Ben : Yes

Ryan: …as a partnership, what advice would you give to people who maybe looking to, maybe a bit afraid of going out on their own or don’t want to go for a bigger agency or want to get involved with working with someone else what advice would you give to them starting their own business?

Ben: Sure the partnership is really good I think it is has the best of both worlds it still feels like you are freelancing when there is only the two of you because, obviously initially you are not going to have an office I don’t this is my house [indicating behind him] so you don’t have that sort of slugging into work thing like when you are in a larger company but also with a partnership you have got someone else to lean on and bounce ideas of so there is a bit more stability and security then just you going stir crazy in a room by yourself. I think it has a lot of benefits from both sides, Mark had been freelancing before so he knew what that was about I had never freelanced myself before so it was all new to me. I had worked in sun for a year which was well at the time 40,000 people and I think day after I arrived they got rid of 10,000 so I was pretty sure I was not going to go back to that kind of scale of company since you know they can kill 10,000 people of with a wave of the hand and now they are owned by Oracle is it, I think they are owned by know is it I haven’t even kept up so yes it has all been a bit funny. So I think for partnerships as long as you find the right person to do it with, I would not recommend just grabbing someone of the streets and saying “hey be my partner this is what we are going to do” it has to be something you are both dead keen on that you both can bring complimentary skills sets to the table so you are not both doing the something arguing about how you would do something all the time and I think with Mark and I we already knew we worked really well together from our time in the financial sector short-lived though it was. So we were both confident we could work with each other I think that is the main thing. I think I read an article recently where someone was saying it is more important to prioritise the working atmosphere between partners in the company rather than the skills so if you go out and cherry pick people you would like to work with that you have never even met before just purely based on their skillets then you may probably end up being disappointed because you will find out they are complete idiots that you can’t spend more than five minutes with in one room.

Ryan: Yes true

Ben: So yes it is a good way to go as long as you can find the right person and as long as you havoc the necessary guts I suppose, because it is pretty scary as you know going freelance trying to do it the same but with two of you is a little bit more scary because then it is two people who are potentially being done over if it all falls apart so. Yes it is good we are aiming to turn it into a larger thing to grow a little more but as I say we are trying to keep it small and controllable for now.

Ryan: Ok so looking back at your career what would you say your greatest achievement has been?

Ben: Greatest achievement, I would definitely say career wise it is setting up this company because it has been the most enjoyable thing I have worked on in my entire career being able to choose what I work on being able to say no to people and them not just saying do it anyway. Yes it has been fantastic so I think definitely this company has been the best thing. Having said that if I had leapt straight out of University and tried to go into this I think it would have fallen flat on it’s face quite quickly so I think you do need a bit of experience under your belt working for other people before you leap straight out there

Ryan: Ok

Ben: Although I know people who have done that so it is not impossible but yes

Ryan: So on the flip side fog that have you any regrets?

Ben: Regrets ooh the difficult questions are coming now

Ryan: [Laughs]

Ben: Lets see I suppose let me think this is well OK I suppose the difficult thing would be what would I have done differently in hindsight I probably wouldn’t have flapped about with the career direction as much although I think I have been fairly focused but I probably would have abandoned games earlier if I had tried doing it earlier rather than just thinking about doing it. The diploma in audio engineering was fun but I haven’t applied that much to anything that has made any money so again maybe that was a mistake but you have to experiment to know where you need to be going and the web was also, you know how fast it moves so you never know what’s going to be around.

Ryan: OK so just to finish up then you have already touched upon it a little but where do you see yourself in the future ?

Ben: Hopefully ruling a small empire, err no well this empire here that I have now with Mark if we can build that into something that is able to support a few more people and get some more, I am not saying our projects have not been exciting , but some larger projects some more broader reaching projects we have had a few recently which have been really good, they have been improving all the time so if we can follow along that path and stay alive and keep feeding ourselves that’s been our objective so far and its been paying off we are both still here.

Ryan: Well OK fantastic and thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me and I am sure people will find that very interesting

Ben: Thank you Ryan it has been a pleasure. Thank you.

Much thanks for to Shaun Hare (@sdh100shaun) for transcribing this interview.

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Andrei Zmievski is a web developer and founding member of Analog, prior to this he was Open Source Fellow at Digg and a platform engineer at Yahoo. Andrei is also a core developer of PHP and a member of the PHP Group.

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Leif Steiner is the Creative Director for Moxie Sozo, a 17 strong design agency based in Boulder, Colorado. Leif has infectious enthusiasm for the world of design and in this weeks episode he takes me through his career and direction his company is taking.

Leif Steiner – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

Cat herder *laughs*, on the business card it says Creative Director, I actually own the agency but I don’t look at it that way, we have a very egalitarian kind of system here my job is to keep everyone heading in the same direction. Sometimes when you have 17 people in an office and 12 of them are full on creatives it’s like herding cats so I say Cat herder but I feel a more accurate title would be, bus driver of the gifted bus you know, I’ve got all the smart kids on the bus I’m just making sure we going in the right direction…

Can you tell me a bit about your company, how did you get started with that?

We are 10 years old and I worked for two other agencies before starting this and I had a lot of problem with the way a lot of design and advertising agencies were run and the biggest thing that I saw was a lot of agencies making decisions that benefitted them and not their clients. Financial decisions where they would recommend things to their clients that weren’t in their best interests but made the agencies lots of money.

I also have a very strong design background, I went to one of the best design programs in the country so what I saw was a lot of design work and a lot of creative work, in fact lets back up, if you assign a number 1 to very bad work and arbitrarily a number 10 to really really good work very few clients know anything past a 5. You can produce a 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and clients can see that they like the 4 better than the 3 but anything past a 5, clients tend not to be able to see the difference, well most agencies, their businesses and they’re running in such a way that they aim to do a 5.5 because anything past a 5 is just wasted time which is wasted money. For me having a strong dedication to exceptional work, in our office we’re always going for those 9’s and 10’s, even if the client doesn’t know anything past a 5…

… so I started Moxie Sozo with the full intent of being able to produce great work without being told by someone above me that we needed to stop, move on and hit the next project. Yes this is a business, yes we need to make pay-roll, pay our rent etc, but at the end of the day it more a collection of phenomenally talented creative people who all have that shared vision of doing more than just pumping out brochures for the local hospital etc and I think that’s the foundation for who we are and how we got started.

So you’ve told me a little bit about your business, day to day what are you personally doing there?

Putting out fires *laughs*, without exaggerating we tend to work 60 – 80 hours a week here so the day for me really is truly going from client to designer, from a meeting to a conference call. When it comes to actually having uninterrupted quiet time I don’t get that until 10, 11 o’clock at night or on the weekends. So my day to day activities consist of art directing everyone, having said that we have a phenomenally talented group of people here and so I could disappear for a month and I’d come back are the work would be great, so it’s more me just nudging things strategically in one direction or another but I’m not a micro-manager, I hire very good people who can manage themselves my job is more to make sure we’re all just heading in the right direction and overseeing from a more broad perspective.

What’s your greatest achievement?

… in 2005 hurricane Katrina struck the United States, New Orleans and it caused billions of dollars of damage, killed several thousand people and it was a catastrophic event on many, including political levels, so my greatest achievement so far I would say is after hurricane Katrina in our office we actually organised a world wide collaborative effort of designers and artists to design and donate limited edition series of posters, it was called the Hurricane Poster Project, we got about 180 people to do the posters, they were signed and number and they sent them to us, we sold them and we raised $50,000. All the money was donated to victims of the hurricane. $50,000 is a drop in the bucket but to me it was incredibly satisfying and very moving to get phone calls from people in the effected area. We had a article appear in the local news paper and that day we had so many phone calls, emails and letters from people thanking us for putting this together…

Where do you see yourself in the future?

We don’t have a 3 year plan to be twice the size or three times the size. We want to continue to grow in such a way that we can work with any client that we want to work with. Moving forward into the future, I want us to be a world class agency, I’d rather be 80 years old, well lets hope I make it to 80 years old, and broke and have created an amazing institution than to be 80 years old and rich and be irrelevant. That is for us the driving force and the path we’re on, putting together a world class agency and producing great work.

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Eric Meyer is Principal Consultant at Complex Spiral and co-founder of An Event Apart with Jeffery Zeldman. He has written numerous books on CSS and web standards and is recognised the world over for his work. On this weeks episode Eric takes be through his career in the web, what he’s doing now and his plans for the future.

Eric Meyer – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

*laughs* I don’t have a job title. I guess the name I devised for myself as a consultant is principle as in the principle person because calling yourself CEO when you’re the only person is just so awful, it’s so awful to do that, you may as well call yourself janitor because you have to clean up the office too. So I’m a co-founder of An Event Apart and Principle Consultant for Complex Spiral. When you work for yourself you have to make it up…

So what to you get up to day to day?

Well a lot of what I do is working on An Event Apart as conferences take up a lot of time even when you’ve done a lot of them and you have a lot of things that are the same thing ever time you still have to do them every time like pick a menu for what people are going to eat and decide who’s going to speak and keep the website up to date and all that kind of fun stuff. I also try to keep up a lot, obviously like everyone else through email and RSS feeds and there’s always the Twitter and then also a little bit of consulting, in fact generally what I do as consulting is customised training so a client will say, we know these things and we don’t know these things and we’d like to get from A to B, please help us and I also do writing from time to time in fact I’m working on a book now and will be working on a new addition of an existing book probably starting after the beginning of the year and that’s what I do professionally.

What are you most proud of in you career?

Well I used to say it was whatever I did most recently and in a way that’s still true, the thing I’m proudest of has generally been whatever project I finished last. I suppose it’s still true for An Event Apart because it’s on-going but in a lot of ways I’m the proudest of that because of what we’ve accomplished and it brings together hundreds of people of a like mind, people who are really web craftsman and who care passionately about the web in the same way the Jeffery Zeldman and I do but as speakers and the audience members, I mean the people in the audience I consider them colleagues more than anything else, they’re people who feel the same way about the web as we do and that I can talk too as peers. I know there are some conferences and maybe conferences in some other fields where the speakers are considered to be above the attendees and that the attendees don’t know nearly as much as the speakers but sometimes I feel that the attendees know even more that the speakers do and so we try to have great authors and people who have contributed to the industry come speak which is always great to listen too, but the conversations in the hallways between attendees and speakers and attendees, there’s no difference really it’s sort of a bunch of colleagues together right and talking in a common language about the thing they all care about so much and I love that. It gets me every time and I feel really proud that Jeffery and I have been able to facilitate that and beyond that in project terms I guess the other thing I would say is the web design survey that we do through A List Apart which has been routinely year after year getting 30,000+ responses, people say what their titles are and where they are and how they feel about the feel and I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done with that because I think it’s the first wide scale look at who we are as an industry. There have been other surveys that have looked at aspects of the industry but 30,000 people, that tells you right there that there are at least 30,000 people out there that are professional web designers and developer, that do it for a living and really care about it and certainly we’ve not surveyed everyone who’s out there so every year we try and spread the word and get people involved.

So where do you see yourself in the future?

Doing more of this stuff, same as what I’ve been doing for the last 16 years, but talking about different things. The web has proven to be very resistant to being replaced, obviously some day it will be, we won’t be writing HTML in the 31st century but I think it’s going to be around for a long time and so talking about how it works and how we can make it work better and I think that’s going to keep me occupied for a number of years from here on out just because I still love it, I still think it’s one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and as much as we’ve done with it it has order of magnitude more potential so if nothing else I need to hang around and see what happens right.

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Greg Wood is a Web Designer at Erskine Design (the lucky sod! :-P). He’s quickly building a great reputation for breaking the mold on his personal site, a couple of my personal favourites being Top 5 reasons to learn to dive and Top 5 Spielberg films. On this weeks episode Greg takes me through how he works, his career to date and his plans for the future.

Greg Wood – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

Well I guess despite the stigma for calling yourself a web designer I normally do because you try something else, like you try to call yourself designer for example when meeting someone new and they just end up saying “Oh what do you design then?” and you just say “Oh websites”, “So you’re a web designer”, “…yeah”, even though you try and get away from that in the first place it’s just easier to call yourself a web designer and live with the whole, my son design website or my nephew or something like that. It’s just easier and I design website, that’s what I do.

Do you focus on the visual side or the front-end as well?

Both generally, the front-end design and front-end implementation we call it, but basically HTML, CSS with a bit of javaScript.

You do “non-uniform” layouts in you design work, what made you start doing that?

I think initially I just became a bit bored with the whole, content here, secondary content here, things at the top, things at the bottom, job done and on my old blog I just started getting a bit bored of writing blog posts in that format and I just wanted to mix thing up a bit so I did a few posts that did that and when it came time to do another version of my blog I thought, I hated writing all those other bits and enjoyed the two or three that I’d designed specifically for each post so I just decided to focus on that. It’s a lot more enjoyable doing this version of my blog that the last one.

Do you get to incorporate any of that into your client work?

To some extent yeah, but it is difficult because there would be a massive cost implication for a start and to sell clients on that is not really going to wash with many clients and a lot of clients don’t have ever changing content like I do for example, I mean when they write things for their websites it’s normally quite targeted and to change the design for each post or news item isn’t very feasible, but we do at Erskine try to make our clients enjoy publishing their website and give them more flexibility with adding images, blockquotes, headings, things like that were they can use a heading but they can also use an alternative version of the heading for example and the same with images and blockquotes. So they have this options when they’re publishing a post.

So how do you implement that kind of flexibility?

Expression Engine is generally what we use and that’s so flexible that offering those options is pretty easy to be honest. So when the client has added the main content and they then go to add an image for example, they upload the image and there’s just a little drop-down for setting how they’d like to style this, float it right or left, add a caption. The templating system works in such a way that we can set those things really easily.

What’s you greatest achievement been so far?

Probably getting the job at Erskine because they took quite a big gamble on me because I was so inexperienced and I don’t think I would have grown the same amount as a designer, if I’d worked for another agency.

And where do you see yourself in the future?

Hmm… somewhere good but I don’t know where. I’d still like to be doing design stuff, whether it’s on the web or not you don’t know because you don’t know how the web is going to change in 5, 10, 15 years. I’d like to stay with Erskine so we can form an ultimate company just doing awesome design stuff all day and with very few clients. *laugh* So somehow creating products that we sell and people buy and working for ourselves all day. That would be super.

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Alex Hunter is an Independent Digital and Branding Ninja. He’s worked for the likes of AT&T, Virgin America and Virgin Group and he speaks regularly at conference such as FOWA London and Miami. In this weeks episode Alex takes us through his career and gives his advice on how you could get into the field of marketing and branding.

Alex Hunter – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

*laughs* I refer to myself as an Independent Digital and Branding Ninja, that title was actually bestowed upon me by one of my clients and I liked it so much that I’ve just run with it.

So you work for yourself now, tell me a bit about what you do day to day?

Well I help companies big and small, startups to half a billion dollar companies kind of define how they are going to migrate their brand online if they’re not already there, if they’re an older company. Older companies tend to struggle a little bit with that, they’re very good at older style marketing be it TV or just traditional outreach, but when they really want to engage their customers they see people on the web and they’re just not sure what to do so they come to me. The web startups and companies that I work with, both from an advisory and client perspective and I also do a little bit of investment as well is mainly around developing a brand that people can relate too, that they can invest in emotionally and get involved in so that’s kind of where I spend a lot of my day. I’ve got clients here in the UK and in the US which is nice because I want to split my time between my two home countries.

I recently saw you speaking at FOWA, are conferences and speaking gigs something you do quite a bit?

Yeah, I do a ton of it, actually I kind of fell into it about 2 years ago. Ryan Carson who’s a good friend to Americans here in the UK took a chance on me about 2 years ago at a conference called Fuel and I spoke about what I was interested in and it seemed to go down well with people and I’ve been doing it ever since…

What’s your defining moment, what have you enjoyed the most?

Great question, I think it’s got to be working for Virgin America I really do. Since there were so few of us in the early days we all got so emotionally invested in it we did everything we could for it to succeed and there was no kind of this is your work life and this is your personal life it was like completely integrated. We all became really, really close friends through good times and bad times. Doing the web campaign that was to let people know before the airline was even airborne was a lot of fun and that’s how I first got involved with Digg Nation and hanging out with those guys. We did a Digg Nation on the airplane once before anyone had seen the inside of the plane and that was so effective and so much fun and I got to meet a whole host of awesome people, so I think that that is one of the highlights really.

For anyone who may want to pursue a career similar to yours, what advice would you give them?

In terms of branding and marketing the thing that’s interesting to me is I now look at commercials and billboards and anything were someone is trying to sell me something, I look at it with a much more critical eye not criticising the commercial itself but it’s like what are they actually trying to say to me here? You peal away all the layers and actually there’s a really interesting positioning, I know that it says buy me for 5.95 but they’re actually going for this demographic, at time slot, on this specific channel during this TV show, now why is that? It’s actually pretty fascinating. The science behind marketing and branding especially is absolutely fascinating and there are so many good books and so many awful, awful books on marketing and branding, yeah read them but also go out there and see what you dig, see which company strike passion into you and approach them, talk to them, read behind the scenes. If your into Apple like pretty much everybody is, the history of Apple branding and the actually Apple marketing campaigns is fascinating…

… so find a company you really dig and email them, marketers love to talk and you’ll more than likely hear back from them and if you’re young, intern at the company or the agency. In addition to that I think it’s import to get agency side work and client side work so that you can understand how the conversation goes from both sides of the table because agency bitch about clients and clients bitch about agencies and it’s good to have both perspectives. I think that’s unique for a lot of really strong marketers.

Really good advice, so to wrap up where do you see yourself in the future?

One of the things I’ve started to get into recently, and this is totally cliche for people from California, but it’s investing in small business and I don’t do it to make a shit ton of money I do it because I love being around passionate, enthusiastic, energetic people who are completely bought into their idea, so I’ve started to do a little bit of that where I sit on the bored of small companies and kind of steer the marketing and branding and public face a little bit. I’d love to do that completely full time eventually and the other thing I’ve just started doing and your the first person I’ve told this on a public forum is I’m trying to start a travel foundation to help people who can’t afford to experience the rest of the world and kind of get out there and explore new cultures and new parts of the world so if I can be given a little bit more time to do that I would be very happy.

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Chris Mills is a Web Evangelist & Dev Relations Editor for Opera (or Opera Jackass for short), his main role is technical writing and editing for dev.opera.com and labs.opera.com, he’s also put together the excellent Web Standards Curriculum which is a must read for anyone starting out or needing to update their skills. In this weeks episode Chris takes me through his career and his goals for the future.

Chris Mills – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

…let me think, it’s change about 3 times since getting to Opera, it’s Web Evangelist and Dev Relations Editor, there you go, previous to that it was Developer Relationship Manager which I hated because it made me sound like an agony aunt for developers with emotional problems or something like that. May I just add that I think job titles in this industry and quite laughable because most of them don’t really mean very much, you tend to have the obvious separation between developer type guy and designer type guy, although you do get some insanely talented folks like Shaun Inman and Dmitry Baranovskiy who can do both pretty damn well, gits!

You work for Opera, what do you do there?

“I do loads of things at Opera, the main stuff that I do is technical writing and technical editing, I publish articles on dev.opera.com and labs.opera.com which is kind of our main two outreach sites where we tell people how to use new Opera features and new web standards features when we start to support new CSS3 features and stuff like that, I tend to release articles about them. I’ve also done this little thing called the Web Standards Curriculum which is our big educational course aimed at teaching the world how to develop websites properly *laughs* and I’m going around universities at the moment talking to students about the work that they are doing, creating websites, I’m also trying to put as much pressure as possible on teachers to insure that web type topics at universities are taught properly and students aren’t leaving with bad habits which happens far too much these days.

So just to expand on that a little bit, the universities you’re going to are they actually running web design courses?

This is an interesting one, the universities that want you to come with open arms are the ones that have already got it right and they’re definitely the minority, it’s a bit difficult, it’s always this case of preaching to the converted. I think there is still value in going to universities that have good web courses because it’s often very good for the lecturer to get an actual industry figure, I’m not trying to same I’m this amazing big guy from the industry or something, but to get anybody from the industry in to talk to the students tends to have quite a lot of weight and tend to make them sit up and think “Oh this is kind of cool, this guy must know what he’s talking about” and I think it makes them take the lectures that I do a little bit more seriously and it’s useful to give a real world insight as is always the case when you’re study a course on anything you can do as much studying in the world as you want but there’s no substitute to getting some kind of real world experience no matter how slight so I think that’s still useful. In terms of the universities that don’t care about teach web standards and best practices properly it’s a lot more difficult to get through to them. It’s kind of best to try and approach universities that will teach something vaguely related such as design or multimedia design or computer science so you’ve got the design and art approach and the hardcore programming approach because the web will feature at some point in those course even if it’s just a minor little feature because it’s a very important thing these days, which is good that at least they can recognise that but of it is very difficult because their courses are stuck in 1998 and the really don’t have a clue about how to teach best practices and it’s like a lot of them just don’t see it, a lot of them will be like “This is what it was like when I learn’t to write a web page, so I don’t see the point in changing and I don’t see the point in doing all this extra work to update my curriculum when there’s already one in place that I think is perfectly reasonable”. So it takes a while to find these guys but we have got somewhere in at least trying to get these people to consider material that we’ve made available.

What’s your defining moment?

It would have to be the Web Standards Curriculum, it was an idea I’d had in my head for maybe 6 or 7 years before I actually did it, it’s a huge project have to do in my own time and I’d never found a company that would cough up the cash and actually let me do it on work time. I’d felt for years it would be great, there’s this education problem, people aren’t getting taught properly at universities so what we really need is this free resource which is the ultimate resource that everyone can turn to to learn this stuff, it’s released under a creative commons so you can remix it and re-release it however you want as long as you’re not just trying to sell it and of course it’s turned into a much bigger thing that that I’m also part of the WaSP Education Task Force contributing to the WaSP InterAct Curriculum project which is another fantastic educational resource and of course I’ve also become a core comity member of this new Open Web Education Alliance that’s a W3C incubator group which we’re also aiming to do really big thing in the future, that’s really kind of a think tank where we’re trying to work out what we really need for a standard for Web Standards education and then we’re going to sort of  create some kind of super curriculum and build up a big outreach arm of the alliance to help us get to a lot more universities than we could before.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

I think I see myself carry on all this education work that I’m doing, I’d really really like to build that up into some a lot more definite and concrete because it’s very very nascent at the moment. I think I see Opera as definitely having a larger market share in some of the western countries where we don’t have a very good market share because we’re doing a good job about getting the word out about that and I think I’m still going to be hanging around claiming to be heavy metal but really just being a parent of two who has to go to bed early every night so he can get up for work.

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Enjoy.