Devlounge

Design, Develop, and Grow

Rina Miele

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In this interview I go one-on-one with a designer I worked with a few years ago, before I was any good at design at all. Rina Miele of Honey Design stops by to talk design with me.

Devlounge: Hello Rina – thanks for giving up some time to answer some questions for us and let us dig deeper into the mind of an extremely talented designer. Care to introduce yourself and give some background information for our readers?

Rina Miele

Rina Miele: Hey all. WHATUP? I’m Rina, and I am 25 and live in Sleepy Hollow, (yes, it’s a real place) New York and I make designs and it’s fun and I’ve been doing it practically my entire life and I like colors and when I grow up I wanna be a supermodel and music is awesome and I love watching anything in HD and I love video games, vinyl toys and Lego™ and this sentence is ridiculous.

DL: How did you first get into design, and is it more of a hobby or full time job?

RM: Growing up. My father is a designer and I remember when the industry started to use computers. One day he just went out and bought a Mac — the Mac IIsi. Ah, what a classic: 20MHz, 1MB of RAM (yes, megabyte). I was fascinated by that thing. I even loved just playing with the screensaver for like 3 hours. But he had Photoshop… version 2.5 or something. All I know is that you basically were able to paint and there were no layers. That was tough! But that’s what I remember. I made designs on the computer from then on. What was that, like, 1990? It was cool, seeing the application developing and growing with it. I was always an “artsy” kid, but I didn’t really think much about “designing” as a career until high school was ending. It wasn’t anything monumental though. It sort of just happened because I could do it. So I went off to college, got some jobs, and here I am.

Rina Miele - Work 1

Design is a full time lifestyle though. That sort of sounds clichéd, but it’s true. I walk into a grocery store and notice every little thing, down to the labels on the anchovies. I’ve always been conscious of things around me. It’s a discerning quality I think many designers develop. It’s like an advanced form or curiosity, really. You just want to see what else is out there. I think in this way I’m fortunate to be able to work in this field, it surrounds us.

“Keep those business cards and use them, don’t just consider them decoration.”

DL: You have worked with some extremely influential brands in Pop Culture – VH1, the NBA, Allure Magazine, and Atlantic Records just to name a few. What does it mean to be hired by companies like these out of all the designers in the world, and have you had fun with these projects?

RM: All the work I’ve been doing lately has been really great. Anything in the entertainment field generally gives you a ton creative freedom. You always have to do something fresh/crazy/stimulating/new/innovative. I love that.

I’ve worked with a bunch of agencies on most of my projects rather than with the clients directly. I try my best to stay in contact with the people I meet. Anyone can tell you how hard that is if you’re busy 24/7 – but like I said, I do my best. It’s a small world, you’d be surprised who you run in to down the line and what roles they play in shaping your career. Keep those business cards and use them, don’t just consider them decoration.

Rina Miele - Work 3

DL: Do you have a specific area of work you like doing the most (Web, Print, ID, etc)?

RM: Hmm… Well, I’ve been doing 90% web for the last few years, and that’s been great, I love it. Though, I do have to say I miss print. I miss the tactile quality about it. I like making “things” – especially packages and all things 3D. It’s funny because I didn’t make a conscious decision to become a web designer. It just worked out that way. But yea, 3D/packaging is hot. That’s my answer and I’m sticking to it.

Rina Miele - Work 2

DL: Working in a field overcrowded with male designers, what does your own success story say about the role women can play in design / development?

RM: Girls rule, and boys drool. I’m kidding. Honestly, gender hasn’t been a factor I’ve ever considered. Sure, if you break it down it seems there are more males in the industry. But I’ve always been concerned with being a good designer. Period. I never gave much thought about being a good “female designer.”

DL: Where did the idea for the name “Honey Design” come from?

RM: My last name is Miele – it means honey in Italian. I wanted to create a pseudonym/alias for myself. I started asking questions like, “Who am I? What do I want? Where am I going?” Then I decided to keep things simpler. I looked to my name… realized how dope it is that it translated to “honey” and then sort of went from there. I’d love to say there’s a deeper meaning to it, something inspiring, but it was as easy as 1, 2, 3. The logo on the other hand wasn’t as easy… but that’s something else altogether!

DL: What do you like to do in your spare time when you’re not busy designing?

RM: I answered a little bit of this in Question #1. Other than what I mentioned I try to just sit back, relax and do nothing and/or sleep. We forget to do that sometimes. That’s really important. I can’t stress that enough. I have to start practicing what I preach though…

DL: Where do you get most of your inspiration from?

RM: Mostly from other artists – designers, illustrators, photographers, writers, etc. But I do take cues from other things like toys and games and such… but then again, didn’t an artist create those things too?

My inspiration for this week was a book I bought called “The Acme Novelty Library: #17” by Chris Ware. Check it out!

Thank you all for reading and thanks to Devlounge for setting this up.

Upcoming Q&A With Digg

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We will be hosting an upcoming interview with the crew behind Digg, and we need your input! This will be a user-generated interview, where will take the best 6-8 questions and send them in to Digg for response. Multiple digg staffers will be contributing, so nows the time to ask away! Please leave your questions in the replies. Later this week or early next week we’ll be sending in the best ones, and the interview will go up shortly after that (it may take a few weeks as the digg crew is busy, but we’ve already got the ok, so this is a definite interview!).

Interviews – My Turn

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A little odd to be on this side of the ball, but our buddies at Fadtastic recently conducted and interview with me. We discuss a lot of different things, including the reason behind the creation of Devlounge, tips for young designers, the issue of age vs surving on the web, a few other topics. It was fun getting a chance to answer questions rather than type out my own this time around. The only downside was Andrew Faulkner (Fadtastic Admin) was recently interview for FT as well, so we couldn’t get a 1 for 1 admin interview switch. Anyways, enough talk, feel free to head over to Fadtastic to give the interview a read.

Nicolò Volpato

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Italy brings a lot more than some wonderful Italian food, because they also bring our friend Nicolò Volpato. An excellent designer and one of my favorites because of how classy he is, chats with us about his work and design in general in 2006.

Devlounge: Hello Nick, how’s it going? Thanks for taking some time off around the busy holiday season to answer some questions for me. It’s really an honor. Much like we begin most of our interviews, mind giving our readers the “411” on who you are?

Nicolò Volpato

Nicolò Volpato: Hello AJ, it is a pleasure for me to be interviewed here at Devlounge. My name is Nicolò Volpato. I’m 24 and live in Rimini, one of Italy’s most famous seaside resorts. I’m a full-time freelance web designer and Flash developer.

You probably got to know me because I recently designed the latest version of PhotoMatt and contributed to the MintPages forum skin. However I’ve been designing websites for the last 7 years. Since 2004, I also run my own design studio called GNV & Partners, based in my home-town Rimini.

In my spare time I play around with my blog at www.jek2k.com. Since 1999, Jek2k.com is my home on the Web, the place where I post personal stuff, photos, articles and my playground, where I can experiment with new technologies. It has always played a key role in my professional carrier and recently it’s been earning me a lot of visibility.

Jek2k - Nicolò Volpato's Blog

DL: How’d you get started with design and build up your skill set?

NV: I got my first 56k Internet connection back in 1998 (in Italy we’re always two steps back than the rest of the world…) and I started playing with creating websites some months later. In October 1999 I published the very first version of Jek2k.com.

It began as a way to spend my afternoons, but all of a sudden it became a passion. I bought books, I read hundreds of online tutorials and I devoted a huge amount of time to learn and improve my skills.

I started with plain HTML, but after some time it was not enough and I added CSS. Then I needed a bit of Javascript and ASP to spice things up. One thing lead to another, until I was able to create a complete website from A to Z.

The same happened with Flash. I started with Flash 4 and since the very beginning I’ve been interested in Flash ability to build rich and interactive interfaces. So I learned ActionScript. I had no programming background at that time, so it has been hard to dive into a completely new language and understand programming logics. Luckily, at 17, I had enough time and passion to make it.

This is how I learned all the technologies I use today.

Then in 2001 I chose a University that helped me to build an in-depth knowledge of both traditional and online communication, with a special focus on new media and the Internet as social environment. The importance of theory is often under-estimated in web design, but I think it is really a plus for a designer to have a psychology and communication background.

DL: Let’s talk about your blog, jek2k. As I type these interview questions, I’m reading
your latest post on hitting 100,000 visitors since version six of the site was released
in June. Congrats on that, it’s a great accomplishment, especially for a short period
of time. What inspired the design behind the blog and the sick [awesome] illustration?

NV: Well, I really can’t explain myself how much success Jek2k.com has had in the last six months. I designed this latest version of my site to start playing with WordPress themes and some Javascript effects. I searched for a clean and professional-looking theme to start. I chose the Hemingway theme because it offered me a clean structure to build my design on. I kept many elements of the original theme, but I skinned them my way with CSS.

Then I added the background vector illustration of my girlfriend, which I made back in 2003, and made the main content semi-transparent to smoothly reveal the background.

Finally, and I think this is the most significant change, I couldn’t stand those typical sidebar things, such as Archives and Categories. So I moved them into a collapsible Javascript-animated drop-down panel, where they’re still easily accessible while leaving the layout much cleaner.

That’s it. I think Jek2k.com has been one of the first blogs to display such a modified version of Hemingway and a drop-down panel. Nowadays I see lots of sites like that and it is no more an original idea as it was 9 months ago when I started designing it.

DL: Besides running your own blog, you have your own studio, GNV & Partners. It’s apparent in your extensive collection of work that 1) you like large headers and 2) your all about practicing clean and valid xhtml and css. What do you think of the movement to standards based design which really took flight in 2006?

NV: I’ve been interested in web standards since some years now. I switched to XHTML and CSS in 2003 and since then I try to build all of my sites using only valid code. Moreover I try to write semantic markup and use table-less layouts.

I believe web standards must be considered the ground where we designers can build our sites on. They should be part of every designer’s daily work. Finally, in the last year, web standards have become a real standard. I think the blogging phenomenon and the Web 2.0 played a key role.

Blogging has made creating a personal website extremely easy and CMS allow everyone to publish contents in an intuitive way. The majority of blogging and CMS applications are based on web standards and produce valid markup, so there is a huge amount of young designers and web enthusiasts who are making their first approach to web design using web standards-compliant tools. They have no transition to face, no work routines to change. As the number of blogs increases day by day, so increases the number of web standards-compliant websites.

“Here we are witnessing a deep separation between Designers 2.0, who master web standards and take usability into consideration, and the all others, who keep doing their stuff the old way.”

Moreover the Web 2.0 definitely turned the web into a social environment. Developing services for the people means developing with web standards and usability in mind. So developers focused on making intuitive and friendly UIs (see AJAX and the many JavaScript libraries to enhance use experience). Designers left Flash and heavy graphics for clean and readable layouts, using standards to deliver interoperable websites.

However the job is not fully accomplished unfortunately. I live in a country where web standards are still considered a plus and usability is often ignored. Here we are witnessing a deep separation between Designers 2.0, who master web standards and take usability into consideration, and the all others, who keep doing their stuff the old way.

DL: You were recently called upon to redesign arguably the third most significant site in the wordpress world besides wordpress.com and wordpress.org, that being Photomatt. In the recent Fadtastic interview you discussed how nerve-racking the process was, so we won’t get into that, but what kind of feeling did you get knowing your work would be enjoyed by the millions visiting Matt’s blog from their WordPress Dashboards?

Photomatt - Designed by Nicolò Volpato

NV: When I gave my final PSD design files to Matt I didn’t know he was going to release the new site that soon. I was a bit surprised when I saw my design on PhotoMatt the next day. I knew that thousands of people would see my design and I was quite nervous about that. Are they going to like the new design or hate it? I had already talked with Matt and I knew he liked the design, but I feared the people’s feedback. Luckily it was good. When I read the first good comments from users on his blog I relaxed a bit.

In the following days and weeks I’ve read many blog posts and articles about PhotoMatt’s redesign and that has been a great satisfaction.

DL: I also was lucky enough to witness your work pattern as I watched three mockups of Mintpages get refined each week based on user feedback. New designers always seem to struggle with taking and accepting feedback from others, because if a designs considered bad and gets hit with many disheartening comments it can take a new designer out of it. Mind explaining why it’s so vital to take feedback and build from it and not get frustrated?

NV: Well, I still haven’t found a way of not getting frustrated by negative comments. If you ever find one, give me a shout, because I need it too.

Apart from that, all we have to do as designers is to take every feedback in a constructive way. We shouldn’t get offended by a negative feedback and it doesn’t mean we are bad designers. It just means we can improve our design. After all, we learn from mistakes, don’t we? Frustration is just human, but we need to turn it into motivation. One thing that I think needs to be said: many times, especially in forums or in blog comments, feedbacks are given in a, let’s say, not-so-polite way. It’s easy to see comments like “I don’t like it at all”, “Your design sucks”, and even worse.

This kind of feedback is useless and for a young designer can be very hard to take. How can you make your design better basing on such a kind of feedback? Designing is finding the right balance between the designer’s ideas and the client’s needs, in a given context, with particular communications needs and peculiar problems and limitations. This should be kept in mind when giving a feedback, cause we don’t know how some design choices were made.

“While being confident about choices is good for a designer, feedback on execution can really help us doing our work better and focusing more on details.”

On the other hand designers should be open to feedback regarding execution: even the best design choice can be executed in a poor way. While being confident about choices is good for a designer, feedback on execution can really help us doing our work better and focusing more on details. This article deals with some interesting points for young designers and is a must-read in my opinion.

DL: What are some of your favorite resources, whether it be daily websites you read, books, design galleries, or music that inspires your design?

NV: I visit CSS galleries daily, CSS Remix is my favorite one. In general I don’t rely heavily on CSS galleries and design trends. They are an easy way to design a trendy website or to take inspiration, but they are also dangerous, because you risk to lose your originality and stick to a predefined style. This is a really interesting and provoking article on this topic.

I keep an eye on Solution Watch, Devlounge (of course), Jonathan Snook’s and Veerle’s blogs and Fadtastic, to see what’s going on in the web design scenario.

Mint Pages - Designed by Nicolò Volpato

MintPages is a great place to exchange opinions and get feedback from other experienced designers and developers. I like browsing design, interior design and architecture books, to see how great designers and architects used space and shapes to build beautiful and useful objects or comfortable places. I like photography and art books to learn the use of colors and light to express emotions and feelings. I’d like to be able to do the same with websites.

DL: Your turn to share whatever you’d like. What do you like to do outside of designing?

NV: Hmmm….. designing? I spend pretty much all of my time in front of my Mac. This is for me much more than a job and love devoting hours and hours to browse websites and try new techniques in Photoshops or Flash. This is how I got to be what I am today.

Apart from that, I love spending time with my girlfriend, watching movies, playing around with my digital camera, doing the typical geek things (like configuring my LAN or disassembling some old PC hardware…) and collecting Star Wars toys.

DL: Out of all your work from 2006, what was your favorite project / design to be a part of?

NV: This is a tough question. I never really thought about this. I like to think that my best design is yet to come, this helps me finding motivation and struggle to always do my best.

To name a few, the MICE CD-Rom is the biggest project I’ve been involved in, in terms of time spent and people in the development team. PhotoMatt is with no doubt the most important project I’ve ever done and the one that earned me the most visibility. But the good old Jek2k.com is the site that gave me the biggest satisfactions in 2006 and without it there would have been no PhotoMatt, no MintPages and even not this interview.

DL: Once again, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. I know I’m looking forward to seeing more of your work around the net in 2007 and beyond. Happy holidays and happy new year!

NV: Thank you for this opportunity. I wish a happy 2007 to you and all the Devlounge team. Keep up the good work!

Be sure to visit Jek2k to check out more of Nick’s work!

Shaun Andrews

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Fresh off the press comes our latest interview, this time with Shaun Andrews, designer and XHTML & CSS Genius, and time tracking master. A little late, but who can blame him when you have a look at all the sites he’s involved with!

Devlounge: Hello Shaun, how are you? Thanks for taking the time to answer a few for us, I’ve had some things I’ve been burning to ask

Shaun Andrews: I’m doing great. Thanks for the opportunity!

Shaun Andrews Himself...Along with the Molehill Test Monkey (Not Really)

DL: Alright, let’s get started. Mind introducing yourself for those who may not yet have seen Tick or your personal blog?

SA: Well, my name is Shaun Andrews. I’m a 24 year old web designer from a smallish city named Binghamton in upstate New York. I’ve been working on the web for a few years now and for the last 9 months I’ve been making a living as a contractor doing design and XHTML/CSS coding. Some of recent projects that I’ve been involved with are: Tick, the Molehill, Scrapblog, Pluggd, the DrumArchives, and XHTMLGenius. Of course I’m also tweaking and posting at shaunandrews.com, my little corner of the web.

DL: On the subject of Tick, we first previewed the application in mid July, and recently Tick opened to the public. Where did the original idea for Tick come from, and what made you want to put together an application like this?

SA: First off, thanks for the great write up. The Molehill team has poured many hours of sweat, blood and tears into building Tick. We’re very happy to see others finding it useful. The original idea for Tick came out of our own need to accurately track project and task budgets and keep our teams up to date on the project status. We searched the web for a solution, and although we found some great time trackers, none of them gave the feedback our teams needed to really work towards a budget. Many people make the assumption that Tick is simply another time tracker. While it is true that Tick tracks time, Tick was built with the goal of helping people hit their budgets and, as a result, have profitable projects. So we only track time to the extent that it helps achieve that goal.

While it is true that Tick tracks time, Tick was built with the goal of helping people hit their budgets and, as a result, have profitable projects.

For us, the big idea behind Tick came out of the realization that for a services company, time is your inventory. We began thinking about how companies that produce physical product track, price and sell their products. This realization changed the way we ran our business, thought about time, and back to your original question, drove the development of Tick. We have written a little more about this on the Tick website (http://www.tickspot.com/why/). If you work in the service industry, I think it’s worth checking out.

DL: By the way, how did that public launch go?

SA: The public launch was a huge success. It’s still early, but so far all of our expectations have been exceeded. Our preview period was immensely successful, with thousands of subscriptions created, and hundreds of encouraging emails. It’s great to see that Tick is providing a real solution to a real problem that a lot of people are struggling with. At the same time, we had more than a few people that would prefer a heavy time tracking application, which as we stated before isn’t our goal. This really helped us hone in on the folks that stand to best profit from Tick.

DL: Our preview article generated a pretty good amount of buzz surrounding Tick and I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of positive comments. It’s inevitable however that a few people will have negative things to say about the product. How do these negative comments effect the team as you work to complete and launch an application?

Shaun Andrews - Tick Spot

SA: Tick isn’t build for everyone. Tick was specifically designed for people who work in the service industry and struggle with hitting budgets. We knew going into this project that some people wouldn’t get it, but more importantly we know a lot of people were in need of it. Even though Tick is still young, we’re delighted at the level of passion our users have. Most of the criticism that product has received has been in comparison to time tracking or project management solutions. For the most part this doesn’t affect us much, as we understand that the reviewer/commenter may not understand the pain that Tick relieves. We’re not interested in going feature-to-feature with other products or compromising the foundation that Tick was built upon.

DL: Let’s talk personal: How’d you get into design & development?

SA: It’s strange really. I’ve always been into computers, but never specifically web design. I actually went to school for Computer Aided Drafting/Design, and then continued and received a masters in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. I spent a lot of time with math and physics throughout college, and I loved every minute of it. Somewhere along the way I began to realized that being a mechanical engineer just wasn’t for me.

Shaun Andrews - His Personal Blog

I think I made my first website while I was in high school. It was a personal website with links to sites I thought were “cool”. I made it with Netscape’s built in WYSIWYG editor, and I only toyed with basic HTML. All throughout high school I played with HTML as a hobby. In college I began using the Macromedia studio (Fireworks and Dreamweaver 3 mainly) to create websites for bands and school organizations. Sometime during my junior year of college I discovered CSS. Since then I’ve been addicted. I got my first professional web job before I graduated from college. I moved to Miami, FL to begin working at Alienware Corp. as a web editor. After getting my feet wet I then moved onto to a much bigger role as part of a small web team for a branding agency name Propeller in downtown Miami. After leaving Miami for Jacksonville, I made the choice to start my own business and have been self-employed ever since.

DL: What are you hobbies and interests away from the desk?

Music. I’ve been playing drums for well over 10 years now and guitar for about 5 years now. It’s a safe bet that if I’m not online, I’m sitting at my kit or playing guitar.

DL: Let’s talk about your newest venture, XHTMLGenius. First off, killer domain name, I can see that going for thousands in the future ;). What made you decide to give it a shot, and how do you hope it will pan out (max clients per week, future plans, etc)?

It’s a safe bet that if I’m not online, I’m sitting at my kit or playing guitar.

SA: Yea, XHTMLGenius is a pretty cool domain name, but I don’t see myself selling it anytime in the near future. I also own CSSGenius.com and WordPressGenius.com. There are plans to launch those other two sites as companions when time permits.

The site came about during some down time between projects. I was looking for a way to bring in small projects to fill those gaps of down time. I saw a few sites popping up offering similar services and I knew that I could compete. I kept the site very simple and gave myself a budget of 5 hours – I really thought it would be wasted time, an experiment at best. I spread the word through Google AdSense and some forums and before I knew if I had a few jobs lined up.

The site has been a huge success and has paid for itself many times over. The great thing about XHTMLGenius is that there’s no negotiating or squabbling. The scope, price and timeline are all set up front. The client pays and I deliver. It’s simple and it’s been working great!

DL: Any things you want to get out while you have the chance?

SA: You can expect a redesign of shaunandrews.com in the coming weeks and some code updates to Tick in the near future.

XHTMLGenius has been getting a lot of love lately, and you can expect to see some other Genius sites in the future as well.

DL: As always, thanks for chatting with me. Looking forward to more of your projects in the future, and of course, we’ll be talking about them before anyone else.

SA: Thanks for the opportunity and keep up the great work with Devlounge!

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