A couple weeks back I had the privilege to see 311 and Sublime with Rome in concert at the LC in Columbus. I don’t have to tell you that it was a great show, and a good night to boot. “Beautiful Disaster” has always been one of my favorite songs, so I decided to pay it homage with a piece inspired by the song and my feelings while listening to it.

So here it is, “Beatuful Disaster”:

Let’s take a trip back in time; the year 1999. You sit down at your PC (or MAC) and connect to the internet, connection tone and all. Now imagine you are surfing the web, most likely you are on America Online or some variant of dial-up internet waiting for animated background and flashing gif filled webpages with their Internet Explorer and Netscape support buttons.

This was my reality at the time, and I wanted more. Always being an artistic person beginning to use Adobe Photoshop (I started on version 5) was a natural evolutionary step. Once I learned to hand code HTML, I began to design my own websites where I could display my Photoshop creations, and even blog a little. I then became and active member of an online art ‘forum’ (before Facebook and Twitter, forums were the social communities), where artists all over the world displayed their works to be critiqued by others. This forum was known as ‘thePAD’ and after it shut down, other members and myself created a similar forum entitled, ‘inFLUX‘. I credit both of these forums (mostly inFLUX) with the honing my skills with art, and website coding.

Twelve years later I sit here writing this inside of WordPress reminiscing about those simpler times. Sadly most of the original art and design for thePAD and inFLUX has been lost. However I was able to find (thanks to the internet archive) a few splash page images that were made by some prominent inFLUX members. Click on a thumbnail to see image full size:

When I had the idea to start doing a Featured Designer Interview series I had little doubt in my mind with who I wanted to begin with. That being said, I wanted someone who embodied all the attributes a good designer would need: creativity, experience, the skill sets and of course the obsession to get whatever they were working on just right. Christopher Cecill has all those attributes, and more. He has also been a long time acquaintance of mine since the days when we were both timidly stepping out into the brave new world of web and graphic design.

I began my online friendship with the Vancouver based designer on an online art and design forum known as, thePAD. Then I knew him only as his alias, “illcec” (a play on his last name). We would both post our artwork for others to critique, albeit sometimes a little too brutally, but I can speak for myself when I say it always helped me improve. Sadly thePAD was eventually shut down, so along with a few other members that I had become close too, we started our own graphic and art discussion forum and I believe I chose the name, inFLUX. Chris, or illcec, joined our new forum and resumed posting his work. This was when I really got to know Chris, I can’t tell you how many times I would get an IM from him telling me that I once again misspelled a word on the newest version of my website, he was like my own personal editor and one that I apparently needed badly. Knowing Chris not only improved my spelling and grammar but my design and coding skills as well. In fact I can say that I credit him with turning me onto the now standard XHTML and CSS languages, without which knowing you wouldn’t be reading this on my website, or maybe it would have frames…yuck.

Okay so now that I have given you a bit of a background on this month’s Featured Designer, I asked Chris to answer a few questions that mainly pertain to what he does for a living, design. Enjoy.

How was it that you began getting involved with graphic and web design?

It was around 2001 and I bought my first-ever PC/laptop. I bought it to play Team Fortress and Tribes 2, but a friend of mine was a Marketing Consultant and he needed help managing a few websites and print catalogs. I started with preparing images for print and web. It was a lot of cutting out product shots and adding a background. After that I started using Front page and making web layouts. I’m sure I still have them saved somewhere, but I’m too embarrassed to look at them!

Have you had any formal education or training in your current field, or were you completely self taught?

I did a lot of sculpture, drawing, and painting when I was in school. With web, graphics, and software I’m self-taught via the internet, trial and error, and 30 or so revisions of my personal portfolio site.

Working for clients, what are some tips you can give for dealing with the frustrations of the clients needs?

Most clients have an image of what they want in their head, but it isn’t always easy for them to convey that to the designer. With a controlling client, I do try my best to arrive at an agreeable compromise, but I have had a few jobs where the client and I just could not agree. I try to pass those jobs off to another designer, or just get them out of the way and leave them out of my portfolio.

Have you ever had a project go over budget or over schedule due to something you did?

Yes. I’ve taken on too much work in the past and been unable to deliver everything on schedule. I did have to finish a site one time while on vacation in Indonesia. It actually wasn’t a bad thing and it showed me that I can do my job from just about anywhere.

If something is going over budget and it’s my fault, I will usually eat the cost. This happens all the time because I want a site to shine, or I’m fighting for hours with some obscure WordPress, or JQuery plugin.

What strategies do you employ to make sure a site is easy to use?

The web is old enough now that there are some conventions about where you put things on a site. A lot of it is fairly obvious and goes without saying. With larger monitors, websites can be bigger and have larger elements. You can go pretty far with good content hierarchy and large headings, a navigation that is quickly and easily understood, and key information where the user would expect to find it.

What can you offer that other designers can’t?

Photography, copy writing, email marketing, web hosting with on-call support, exposure through my website and featured client spreads.

I try to make every design unique. It’s not the most time-efficient approach, but I take pride in delivering a completely custom-built site. Also, I’m a one-man WordPress/Drupal/ExpressionEngine shop with some decent Javascript/AJAX/DHTML chops.

Chris is one of the lead designers behind his design group Factotum. Together with his brother, they create unique and user friendly web sites for their clients. You can check out his work on both his personal site, as well as on the company portfolio of Factotum Design Group. Also, don’t forget to follow @Factotumdesign and visit their Facebook page!

Chris also provided me with a “ProTip”:

I’ve recently started using a program called WebDrive that enables me to access a web server as though it were a drive on my computer, and edit the files directly on the server. It saves a lot of dragging, dropping, uploading, and time.

Before posting this, I downloaded the trial of WebDrive, and have been using it since, I recommend it to any web designer. In closing I would like to sincerely thank Chris for doing this interview, and for always being helpful when I needed it the most whenever I would be stuck on some random code or graphic problem. I consider him a friend, and I have never even met him in real life, I think maybe we should change that fact Chris.

So as I sit here smoking a cigarette I got to thinking that I haven’t posted any of my art or wallpapers in quite some time. Thus I am posting one of my wallpapers, which is actually in a series of three. This one is the third of the series. Hope you like it, and you set it as your background by the time you have finished reading this post.

Oraniq 03

I am currently in the process of redesigning my portfolio site and when it is complete it will display a lot more of my artwork that I haven’t put on the internet as of yet, including the above wallpaper and the rest in it’s series.