Havoc Inspired

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:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

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.