Havoc Inspired

3rd Edition

Ethan Marcotte is an Interactive Design Director at Happy Cog. He’s a contributing author to Handcrafted CSS, Web Standards Creativity and Professional CSS and has recently collaborated with Jeffery Zeldman on the third additional of his classic Designing with Web Standards. Ethan has also been a featured speaker at SXSW Interactive festival, An Event Apart, Harvard University and AIGA’s In Control conference. Check out his blog at unstoppablerobotninja.com and find him on twitter under @beep.

Interview Transcript

Ethan: My job title is Interactive Design Director at Happy Cog and it’s a little bit of a hybrid position as pretty much every job title I’ve ever had doesn’t totally encompass everything I do. So depending on the needs of the project, I could be doing anything from working with Greg Storey on Art Direction, or leading up doing template production – y’know dealing with somebody else’s art work. I’m actually working on a large project right now with a university on the West Coast of the States on Information Architecture and trying to help them plan out the user experience. So I guess I try to touch on different aspects of the project depending on how they impact the end user adn the final experience.

Ryan: Ok, so what’s an average week like for you – do you have an average week?

Ethan: (Laughs) Do I have an average week? It really depends on the project. We’ve got a really talented team of designers and developers at Happy Cog, so I tend to be working with them in an advisory capacity a little bit, although it’s usually watching them make awesome things and just sitting back and enjoying the fun. Lately like I said I’ve been spending a lot of time in Omnigraffle sketching out navigation flows for large sites, to working on wireframes y’know, but a lot of the time I like to keep my hands dirty on a lot of things. At the end of the day I like to crack open Photoshop and work on some personal projects, I do a fair bit of speaking as well so A lot of keynote time from time to time. So there’s not really an average week I guess – a lot of variety.

Ryan: Cool! So how long have you been at Happy Cog?

Ethan: Well I’ve been at Happy Cog officially since August last year now. Before that I was at a company called Air Bag, which is based out in California and was founded by Greg Storey. I was working there for about two and a half years and then basically we were sort of competing with Happy Cog on a lot of projects. We would find out we were bidding on the same projects and travelling in the same circles a lot of the time, so eventually we just ended up merging with Happy Cog and we are working now as their West Coast offices right now. So I guess I’ve been working at this company I’m at now for three years, but I’ve been at Happy Cog now officially since August.

Ryan: You mention the speaking, how big-a-part of your work life is that?

Ethan: This year it’s gonna be bigger than most. I try to do like three or four events every year along with speaking at some local colleges and designer groups in Boston. This year I’m doing all five of ‘An Event Apart’, which I’m really excited about and I just did the AIGA In Control Conference in January. There has also been a lot of in-promptu stuff that has come from working with web standards last year with Jeffrey Zeldman. The Boagworld thing was pretty awesome, so thanks for having us there. But this year has been really busy, but really exciting – the calendar seems to be filling up.

Ryan: I do want to talk to you about designing with web standards, but we’ll cover that in a little bit. Rewind a little bit and take me to the start of your career, how did you get started?

Ethan: Kind of accidently. I started working online in my second year of University where I was a literature major in college. I had just gotten my hands on a not quite legitimate copy of Photoshop, so I kind of started using it and I kind of fell in love with graphic design and I started working online as an extension of that. So student organisations that I was part of and some school departments, I just started building for them. When I finished up at school I was at a fork in the road and I thought about going into extended schooling, maybe going into some advanced degree in literature, or taking a few years off and working online, getting a dot com job and making it rich – which is working out very well (laughs). I took a few years off and got a quote en quote job and seeing if I missed the schooling and that would be a good start; but I’m about fifteen years into taking a few years off, so it seems to be working out so far.

Ryan: So what was your first job relating to what you’re doing now – the first job that sent you down this path?

Ethan: My first job was awful actually. I worked with some incredibly talented people in a small dot com outside of New York City. It was really awful working conditions, really long hours and the actual work I was doing wasn’t really that exciting. Bu the people I was working with were incredibly talented, so I think it was one of the first opportunities that I had to get rid of a lot of the bad habits that I had picked up learning on my own and getting in my own routines. I kind of got hooked on the studio environment and every job I’ve had since then, I’ve really tried to look at the people rather than the things that they’re working on. I tend to think that – with the exception on my first job, that if there are interesting people working there, that there ten to be interesting people working there. So I guess that’s how I got started, in New Jersey of all places with a copy of Home Site working on some crazy deadlines with some really great people.

Ryan: So where did you go from there – what was the next step?

Ethan: From there I moved up to Boston, which is pretty much where I’ve been ever since in 2001. That was a interesting job, I was working for a consulting company that tossed around all of the keywords like ‘B to B’, ‘B to C’, ‘Systems Integration’ and stuff like that. They had just bought a new studio in Soho down in Manhattan that had a really interesting background in print and they were one of the first companies to work online and I found myself working for the Boston offices of this new studio and spent a lot of time down there and worked on a lot of financial plans for the most part. Again there was a lot of people there from varied backgrounds – at the time, the web was so new that nobody had actually gone to school for anything I.T related. I worked with artists, writers, photographers that were basically web designers and web developers. There was this really great multi-disciplined approach to working online, for somebody that was a literature major that was pretty appealing to me. So yeah I was there for two years and when things eventually got a little bit rocky I decided to jump ship and move over to Harvard where I worked for a couple of different years holding a few different jobs, but the stability thing kind of appealed to me at that point. So yeah, like I say, I worked at a couple of different places. I worked at the education school first for this almost research based little dot com for want of a better term. They did online courses, so I worked on this team that worked on their custom software application and basically acting like a designer working on a three man software team. Trying to help them figure out what their students actually needed and the best way to customise that experience for them from people working in the development world versus people working two towns over from Harvard. I really enjoyed it there; it was kind of fast paced, but a little weird, very sort of left brain research driven environment, but it was a lot of fun. But then I actually moved into a different position working for a group that essentially built course ware for the University, which was another set of challenges altogether because it was based around pushing something out to lots of different schools put together. If you’ve ever worked in a large University, you’ll know that every department, much less every school is it’s own little fiefdom and there’s no technical standards for the most part. Getting an experience in place for somebody that was working in the Business School that was working in the Medical School was an interesting challenge. But it was great, it was a lot of fun – the software that we worked on is still in use today. It was a really great time and I felt myself in another fork in the road after spending two or three years. I could see myself doing that for another ten years, but I had also been doing a lot of freelancing at the time and it was starting to get the point where I kind of felt like maybe I should try this out for a while and branch out on my own, so eventually I did. Anyway, that was the very long winded version but…

Ryan: And the freelancing lead to the business that you were in that has now merged with Happy Cog?

Ethan: Yeah, so I was independent for about three years trading under the name Virtua for a while and worked with a couple of different clients. I worked for a while with an institution that actually does Au Pair matching, which was actually really interesting and staffed with some really great people. Then I ended up working for New York Magazine for their bug re-design in 2006 – most of which I believe is still around today. They were an incredible client, I still talk about that all of the time as I really learned a lot from working on a site of that size and working under deadlines that tight. They really had a lot of my personal heroes, a lot of my personal design heroes actually worked there. Ian Adelman is their Creative Director, if you’ve ever been to the site then its a really great example of taking an offline identity and merging it to the web and feels uniquely suited to life online. Just in general, it was a great time and I really had a great time working on it. But yeah after a while, I started working with Airbag on some projects, then more and more and more of my work just ended up coming from them. At some point I sat down with Greg Storey and we talked about formalising the relationship a little bit. So eventually I became a part of Airbag and then found myself a part of Happy Cog – it was like a weird dream come true.

Ryan: So you mentioned obviously earlier that you co-authored the third edition of Designing with Web Standards? So how did that come about – in the third edition, Jeffrey brought you in to help write it?

Ethan: Yeah, I keep thinking that Jeffrey meant to ask the other Ethan Marcotte to work on it. It was surreal and I actually wrote this on my dedication in the book. Designing with web standards was a huge moment for me when I first bought it. I had been reading Jeffrey’s blog for a while, but to actually hold this thing in hand and show it to clients and say ‘look, we have to revolutionise the way we are building websites’ was a huge moment for me. I had always had this hero worship thing with him for years before I had even met the man, but when you do, he is actually one of the kindest, most generous and funniest people you ever likely to meet. So I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Jeffrey on a couple of things, I’ve written for A List Apart a couple of times and I’m one of the magazine’s technical editors and just a few side projects here and there, for example I was a part of the Html5 Super Friends last year, which was a lot of fun. So when he asked me to help him write and finish the book, it was a huge honour – it was one of the most fun writing projects I’ve ever had. So yeah, I don’t really know how it came about, but I’m certainly really fortunate that it did – so that was fun!

Ryan: So what’s it been like personally now that the book is out and people are reading it – has anything changed for you. When people write a book, they tend to get a lot more attention, have you experienced that yourself?

Ethan: Well yeah, there was a crowd of groupies outside of my apartment (laughs). No I mean it’s not like I get recognised in the street or anything y’know I’m not the guy with the blue beanie. But nothing has really changed all that much – I’ve gotten some interesting emails from readers and it’s been really nice to see that for those of us who work and write, especially for us in the web standards circle that there are some people put there that this material is still new and daunting. So hearing that Designing with web Standards is their first edition – that has been important to me I think. There was this one woman that was middle aged and she was taking a continuing education web design class and this was the text book. She had been working with table based layouts for years and she was writing in saying she didn’t understand this whole float model thing, saying she didn’t find it compelling and not as powerful. This is someone who has never seen the CSS Zen Garden and probably doesn’t read any of our blogs. She was at that point where we were about ten years ago, when we were serving up these all of old techniques, trying to figure how to make the transition. So it was heartening to hear that there was still an audience for this kind of stuff. I think that is the main thing that has changed – I’m not getting mobbed by Paparazzi or anything like that.

Ryan: One thing that I ask a lot of people that I interview is ‘what is your greatest achievement’ career wise, or personal wise? What are you most proud of?

Ethan: Well this could be a long and awkward part, I may just start crying.

Ryan: Well If I can make someone start crying, then that’s a good interview (laughs).

Ethan: Thanks Barbara Walters. I guess what I’m most proud of lately is that I’m getting the opportunity to work on a lot of different things. Designing with Web Standards was huge for me, but in terms of what I have produced personally, I think that I’ve always been a big fan of flexible layouts and the whole fluid grids thing that I wrote about on A List Apart last year. It was really nice to finally have that out in the open; that was something that came out of a challenging client project. I think for the longest time, we as designers, we try to write constraints for ourselves because we try to find comfort in having some boundaries in our work. Especially working online, as soon as something is published and shown to users, we surrender so much control. I guess for the longest time, I’ve always tried to marry complex, rich layout with that loss of control that flexible layouts bring and the fluid grids thing seems like a really nice approach to me. I think that’s probably one of the things I’m most proud of lately, just trying to walk the walk a little bit in terms of non-pix width layouts. But other than that yeah, I was really pleased about working with web standards and incredibly humbled by that. Being a part of Dan Cederholm’s Hand Crafted Css book last year was also a lot of fun. So yeah, last year has been really busy for me and it’s looking like it’s going to continue.

Ryan: So is there anything that you wish that you’d done differently – have you got any regrets, or any missed opportunities?

Ethan: Hmm. Yeah plenty, I think especially since I was coming out of school in the early days of the web, I really do wish that I’d had a bit more formal training in Art History and Art Criticism I think. Most of what I’ve learned, whether it’s front end development, or Art History, it’s all been self taught and I can see the holes in my thinking – especially when listening to someone like Mark Bolton speak. So if I had infinite time and resources, I think I would go back to school for some training in that. But y’know, hindsight is 20/20 and all that. At the start of University I thought that I was going to be some dottering old literature professor when I was fifty, but things happen sometimes.

Ryan: I think that that’s also a difficult one to tackle, as often you don’t know what knowledge you’re missing because you don’t know you’re missing it.

Ethan: Haha – yeah exactly! In my first couple of jobs, everybody had fallen into the web and I think that just now we’re getting to the point where online design programs are getting to the point where people can go to school to work as a web professional, so I wonder if we’re becoming a dying breed, the self taught dinosaurs.

Ryan: People are still asking that. That’s one of the reasons that I do these interviews because of people asking how people get started and wondering what inspired them to continue. So what are you most excited about at the moment? What are you talking about and blogging about and talking about in the industry at the minute?

Ethan: Well, the subject of my AEA (An Event Apart Conference – organised by Eric Meyer) is a lot to do with the fact that we are starting to see clients with things like the Iphone, smartphones and the Android and web OS in general, that people are starting to see that there’s a world outside designing for the desktop. The result is that people are starting to ask and say ‘well I need an Iphone website’, or ‘I need a Blackberry website’, so try and think about treating whether it’s designing for the web, or designing for mobile and different displays and how we can start to treat all of these things as one experience; also using things like media queries and some intelligent design practices to be more responsive in general. I think it’s just breaking out of that compartmentalised thinking of ‘I need a print based website’ and ‘I need my webkit content to live over here’. That’s what has been really exciting for me, just thinking beyond the desktop a little bit. Beyond that, I spend an inordinate amount of time on Dribbble, I think that’s one of my favourite sites and I just love tinkering with it. There’s a lot of really great stuff on there and it’s a kind of perpetual inspiration machine. Are you on it?

Ryan: I am yeah – although I haven’t uploaded a lot of stuff on it, but I’ve started uploading a bit more stuff on it recently with a few things I’ve been doing. But yeah it’s good fun to see what other people are working on and it make you want to try harder to try and impress your peers a little bit more and thinking you want t work a bit harder on this project to make everyone go ‘OOO’.

Ethan: It’s really weird how it works, I was talking to Rob Weycher who’s a really talented designer who lives in Boston no and he said ‘well y’know it really just makes me want to create more’. Which is great, at the end of the day It’s easy for me to switch off and not want to be in front of a computer screen, but every once in a while I just get this Dribbble itch and need to get something out there. So it’s kinda nice and I like it a lot.

Ryan: They’ve just opened it for everyone to view, so it’s not closed to the public.

Ethan: Yeah, I think its read only to the public, but you can go on there and see the commentaries, but you still have to get the golden ticket to actually post stuff and respond to comments on stuff.

Ryan: Ok – so just to wrap up, where do you see yourself in the future; where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Ethan: Uh (pauses). That is a great question, I guess I’m really happy right now, I’ve got a great job and I’m able to do some speaking with some of my heroes and I think that at least right now, I can at least see myself doing this for a while. I guess the main thing for me is that as long as I can work on interesting projects and work with good people, then I’m pretty happy. At some point, I would actually like to write a book solo. We’ll see if that ever happens, but I’ve been kicking around with some ideas, so I think that’s kind of next on the list right now – beyond that, I’m good.

Ryan: Alright, well thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us Ethan and I’m sure people will really enjoy that.

Ethan: Ok -hey Ryan thank you very much for having me, this has been a real pleasure.

Thanks goes to Blake Williams for transcribing this interview.

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