Elliot Jay Stocks - Interview & Video from the lecture
Elliot Jay Stocks is a freelance designer and web developer from U.K. Previously a Senior Designer at Carsonified, now running his own business with recent clients including Wordpress, Blue Flavor and Twiistup. Past clients include The Beatles, Massive Attack, Trojan Records, and EMI Records. Recently he held a lecture in Kiberpipa, Slovenia on Spletne Urice where Simon Ručigaj made an interview with him for Blogorola magazine. We decided to publish an original version of the interview here on Social Media Soup with the video from the lecture.
Photos by: Marta Lamovšek
So – what do you preach?
I try to do design that’s a little bit different... that behaves a little differently... thinking outside the box – though I really hate that term. Stuff that challenges a little bit and work that looks good and doesn’t get too worried about functionality and accessibility at the cost of looking really nice. And vice-versa.
At some point then you have to make a compromise? How do you do it?
How do I do it? These are big questions. (laugh) You can vary the compromise depending on what your scenario is, or that of the client. If you compromise a lot, you may end up with something that doesn’t look too good. Sometimes you can get a client around your way of thinking... It’s about educating them; showing them the balance between accessibility
and good looking design.
Can we say that blogs and WordPress destroyed the scenery in the web-design sphere? Everything is the same (almost). What can be done?
I don’t think blogs or WordPress (or any CMS) are to blame, but it’s true that a lot of blogs and designs look like default themes. Some people do interesting things, like lifestreams, Twitter stuff; these are interesting. I use WordPress for most of the sites I build, but it’s usually used more as a CMS and less like a blog... and that’s maybe a little bit easier to make it look different from a typical ‘blog’ design.
People just need to stop resting on their laurels and other people’s laurels and start thinking about why elements should be placed where they are.
How much does a web designer earn these days?
It still varies a lot. You can earn fairly decent money but be prepared to offer discounts. The more known you become in the industry, the easier it gets to charge more. Recently I’ve done some jobs at a relatively high rate, but I often still end up dropping down to the kind of money I was charging a few months ago, because they were friends or returning clients. I don’t mind dropping the price so much if I can do something that I’m really pleased with. So with some jobs that aren’t so fun to do, there’s more of a temptation to whack the rates up. But it’s all still pretty decent – an average agency will charge you about £500 a day in the UK for their labour, so if you’re freelance, you can be expected to charge a little bit less. The bigger your profile is, the more you can charge. I’m booked up until March, which is great, but it also means that
Can we say that blogs and WordPress destroyed the scenery in the web-design sphere? Everything is the same (almost). What can be done?
I don’t think blogs or WordPress (or any CMS) are to blame, but it’s true that a lot of blogs and designs look like default themes. Some people do interesting things, like lifestreams, Twitter stuff; these are interesting. I use WordPress for most of the sites I build, but it’s usually used more as a CMS and less like a blog... and that’s maybe a little bit easier to make it look different from a typical ‘blog’ design.
People just need to stop resting on their laurels and other people’s laurels and start thinking about why elements should be placed where they are.
How much does a web designer earn these days?
It still varies a lot. You can earn fairly decent money but be prepared to offer discounts. The more known you become in the industry, the easier it gets to charge more. Recently I’ve done some jobs at a relatively high rate, but I often still end up dropping down to the kind of money I was charging a few months ago, because they were friends or returning clients. I don’t mind dropping the price so much if I can do something that I’m really pleased with. So with some jobs that aren’t so fun to do, there’s more of a temptation to whack the rates up. But it’s all still pretty decent – an average agency will charge you about £500 a day in the UK for their labour, so if you’re freelance, you can be expected to charge a little bit less. The bigger your profile is, the more you can charge. I’m booked up until March, which is great, but it also means that
I’ve had to turn down some decent jobs.
During the credit crunch crisis do you expect to drop prices?
All of my clients at the moment are in America, which is a bad thing on one hand because they’ve been hit with the credit crisis too - and I’ve lowered my rates for them - but on the other hand it’s easier to separate it from the stuff happening at home. Plus, my clients are doing fairly well, so I think the media is exaggerating the whole crisis thing.
The Internet enables exaggeration...
Yes. The other thing is this: our industry is so great since we have almost no overheads. A lot of us work from home, we don’t have to print anything, and we collaborate and communicate by e-mail or IM or Skype. It’s the perfect industry for cutting down on your overheads.
What overheads do we have?
Paying for the internet line, paying your rent, and buying the newest Mac. (laugh) But I have to sell the old one first!
The term designer, in the age of Internet, started to refer to some kids who do some HTML, CSS and such, and they call themselves web designers. You do need education to be a designer, right?
Education and experience. My dad is a designer, but I was never taught design at school. I picked up most of the design principles along the way doing various different things.
When people say ‘I’ve got a pirated copy of Dreamweaver’ and they think they’re designers... that is very easy to do. Some people see the free web design tools which you get when you rent space at your hosting provider and they think that that’s all there really is to it and that it must be pretty easy. It’s a challenge to try and convince people that there is way more to it than that. People do get caught up in their tools – they’ve pirated Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash, for instance – but you still have to have some kind of education and experience.
Do you have any idea about what is harder – teach an old school press designer to ‘go web’, or a web designer to learn print design?
I probably don’t have enough experience to say. But, I would guess – with a terrible generalisation – people who start off doing web are probably going to be younger and because of that, they might be more adaptable to the tools and skills required, and therefore might easily get swayed into doing print; whereas print designers tend to be slightly older and they might find it a little bit harder to get into the web. But obviously that is changing!
I think that when a lot of people start web design they may not necessarily have the understanding of print design or the key principles, but that is not a terribly bad thing because they can develop them most of the time. When you start off, you get into web design, but you never really know the fundamentals of actual design; you don’t know the rules. As you develop, you may then come in contact with these things, and to become better it might require you to read up on these kinds of concepts. It’s weird, but people who study print design are generally better designers as a whole – although this is another terrible generalisation – because many of the key principles of print design are so important that without them you can’t really be a print designer, whereas to be web designer you can do without them, sadly. It does come down to education as well. Print design is taught, and along with it, all that key knowledge, but web design is taught more from the technical side. They concentrate more on how to write HTML, which is great, but maybe you lack design knowledge in the process.
So, in your lectures you were really cheering for the flash interface? We have the feeling that most people hate it because it is so non-universal and it is expensive to do? The ‘flashers’ are not as common as HTML coders...
Well, I guess I didn’t really explain what I meant. Flash is great – I started up doing Flash. Its user interface is so similar to Photoshop and therefore it was really easy to start designing, although if you really want to do things heavy in flash then you really need to go deep into coding with ActionScript. I kind of moved away and got into web standards, trying to make things more accessible. I’m still in touch with Flash, but I haven’t done a Flash site in about three years – I use bits of it, but not much. Mostly it’s the universal access point – you can index Flash sites, you can make it searchable, but you have to jump through hoops in order to do so. So although I was saying that people have done great things with Flash, I find it too inaccessible most of the time to use it in place of XHTML / CSS. In my presentation, I was saying that we (designers in the web standards world) should try and embrace some of the experimentation seen in all-Flash sites, since they’ve inherited a lot of the ‘experimental’ stuff form print design.
So – in your opinion – when does a page get overproduced?
That’s a good question. Probably when the content is no longer clear, like if something doesn’t grab you with an immediate message because it’s too confusing.
Can we get fed up with design and start going in the way of ‘no design’?
You mean minimalism? Of course... There are also many sites, like Tumblr, where people can’t be bothered to write a blog; they just post minimal stuff, like what they have found elsewhere on the web... which is also cool. I find microblogging an interesting concept, and it has its own design conventions and challenges.
Probably the really cool designed web pages are the one from the top corporations with gazillions in budgets?
Well, there are many agencies which usually put out the really consistently good, interesting and experimental designs. But people also do this in-house. I personally don’t look for inspiration just from the big agencies; I also find it on some personal designs, and on blogs etc.
You’ve designed a very successful WordPress theme named Starkers?
Oh, yes. It’s basic, stripped down completely. It’s meant to be a starting point. I took the Default theme that comes with WordPress, stripped out the presentational HTML, stripped out all of the CSS, and then added some reset CSS... that’s all it is, really!
What are your design statistics?
I graduated in 2004 and I got a job at EMI. So I’ve been in the business for four years now and I have around a hundred items in my portfolio – including adverts, print, packaging...
Here comes an Ali G style question – do you think that any web designer should be sentenced to death because of bad design?
Yeah, most of them (laugh)... No, I don’t think anyone should be killed, but there are some terrible web design crimes out there.
Should they receive an aversion therapy like the character Alex in the famous Clockwork Orange?
That would be punishment enough, yes. (laugh)
During the credit crunch crisis do you expect to drop prices?
All of my clients at the moment are in America, which is a bad thing on one hand because they’ve been hit with the credit crisis too - and I’ve lowered my rates for them - but on the other hand it’s easier to separate it from the stuff happening at home. Plus, my clients are doing fairly well, so I think the media is exaggerating the whole crisis thing.
The Internet enables exaggeration...
Yes. The other thing is this: our industry is so great since we have almost no overheads. A lot of us work from home, we don’t have to print anything, and we collaborate and communicate by e-mail or IM or Skype. It’s the perfect industry for cutting down on your overheads.
What overheads do we have?
Paying for the internet line, paying your rent, and buying the newest Mac. (laugh) But I have to sell the old one first!
The term designer, in the age of Internet, started to refer to some kids who do some HTML, CSS and such, and they call themselves web designers. You do need education to be a designer, right?
Education and experience. My dad is a designer, but I was never taught design at school. I picked up most of the design principles along the way doing various different things.
When people say ‘I’ve got a pirated copy of Dreamweaver’ and they think they’re designers... that is very easy to do. Some people see the free web design tools which you get when you rent space at your hosting provider and they think that that’s all there really is to it and that it must be pretty easy. It’s a challenge to try and convince people that there is way more to it than that. People do get caught up in their tools – they’ve pirated Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash, for instance – but you still have to have some kind of education and experience.
Do you have any idea about what is harder – teach an old school press designer to ‘go web’, or a web designer to learn print design?
I probably don’t have enough experience to say. But, I would guess – with a terrible generalisation – people who start off doing web are probably going to be younger and because of that, they might be more adaptable to the tools and skills required, and therefore might easily get swayed into doing print; whereas print designers tend to be slightly older and they might find it a little bit harder to get into the web. But obviously that is changing!
I think that when a lot of people start web design they may not necessarily have the understanding of print design or the key principles, but that is not a terribly bad thing because they can develop them most of the time. When you start off, you get into web design, but you never really know the fundamentals of actual design; you don’t know the rules. As you develop, you may then come in contact with these things, and to become better it might require you to read up on these kinds of concepts. It’s weird, but people who study print design are generally better designers as a whole – although this is another terrible generalisation – because many of the key principles of print design are so important that without them you can’t really be a print designer, whereas to be web designer you can do without them, sadly. It does come down to education as well. Print design is taught, and along with it, all that key knowledge, but web design is taught more from the technical side. They concentrate more on how to write HTML, which is great, but maybe you lack design knowledge in the process.
So, in your lectures you were really cheering for the flash interface? We have the feeling that most people hate it because it is so non-universal and it is expensive to do? The ‘flashers’ are not as common as HTML coders...
Well, I guess I didn’t really explain what I meant. Flash is great – I started up doing Flash. Its user interface is so similar to Photoshop and therefore it was really easy to start designing, although if you really want to do things heavy in flash then you really need to go deep into coding with ActionScript. I kind of moved away and got into web standards, trying to make things more accessible. I’m still in touch with Flash, but I haven’t done a Flash site in about three years – I use bits of it, but not much. Mostly it’s the universal access point – you can index Flash sites, you can make it searchable, but you have to jump through hoops in order to do so. So although I was saying that people have done great things with Flash, I find it too inaccessible most of the time to use it in place of XHTML / CSS. In my presentation, I was saying that we (designers in the web standards world) should try and embrace some of the experimentation seen in all-Flash sites, since they’ve inherited a lot of the ‘experimental’ stuff form print design.
So – in your opinion – when does a page get overproduced?
That’s a good question. Probably when the content is no longer clear, like if something doesn’t grab you with an immediate message because it’s too confusing.
Can we get fed up with design and start going in the way of ‘no design’?
You mean minimalism? Of course... There are also many sites, like Tumblr, where people can’t be bothered to write a blog; they just post minimal stuff, like what they have found elsewhere on the web... which is also cool. I find microblogging an interesting concept, and it has its own design conventions and challenges.
Probably the really cool designed web pages are the one from the top corporations with gazillions in budgets?
Well, there are many agencies which usually put out the really consistently good, interesting and experimental designs. But people also do this in-house. I personally don’t look for inspiration just from the big agencies; I also find it on some personal designs, and on blogs etc.
You’ve designed a very successful WordPress theme named Starkers?
Oh, yes. It’s basic, stripped down completely. It’s meant to be a starting point. I took the Default theme that comes with WordPress, stripped out the presentational HTML, stripped out all of the CSS, and then added some reset CSS... that’s all it is, really!
What are your design statistics?
I graduated in 2004 and I got a job at EMI. So I’ve been in the business for four years now and I have around a hundred items in my portfolio – including adverts, print, packaging...
Here comes an Ali G style question – do you think that any web designer should be sentenced to death because of bad design?
Yeah, most of them (laugh)... No, I don’t think anyone should be killed, but there are some terrible web design crimes out there.
Should they receive an aversion therapy like the character Alex in the famous Clockwork Orange?
That would be punishment enough, yes. (laugh)
VIDEO
3 Comments:
Well, that's a great post! Thanks in our newsletter Blogorola name :)
Elliot is really fantastic at his job!!! (and fantastic out of the job, too :)
Sem ga imel priliko poslusati ze v NYC na FOWD 2007, ko je govoril o webdesignerskih clichejih, na spletne urice takrat pa zal nisem mogel priti.
Si bom ob priliki pogledal video (tnx 4 sharing) in upal, da je bilo predavanje bolj poglobljeno kot tisto v nyc.
Natan
Thanks for collecting this for those of us who could not make it to www:h.
Post a Comment