Spicy Web Designer Interview with Fabio Carneiro

Fabio Carneiro is a web designer and developer from Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. He is a recent graduate of the Art Institute of Atlanta from the Fine Arts, Web Design and Interactive Media program. Fabio originally began learning about web design when he started college after high school in 1999 but didn’t become serious about it until his girlfriend encouraged him after he was laid-off in 2007 to pursue a career in web design which is when he went back to school at the Art Institute of Atlanta. He has produced some amazing web design work that is soft, clean and well formed and recently won the “Best in Show” during the Winter 2009 Quarter.

1. How did you get started in web design?

I was laid-off from my previous job back in 2007, and with some encouragement from my girlfriend, I decided not to look for another job in the same field. Instead, I enrolled in school again in order to earn a dedicated degree in web design.

2. When did you start designing websites?

I graduated high school back in 1999 and started college that summer, where I began to fiddle around with web design. The school gave us an astonishing 5MB (WOW!) of server space, on which a friend and I began to build individual websites. Mine wasn’t anything fancy: just three or four pages of humorous content and gaming-related articles. It planted the bug in me, though, but it wouldn’t be until 2007 when I decided to go with it.

3. What are the biggest challenges that you face in web design currently?

I think that keeping up with everything and everyone is the biggest challenge out there. I wouldn’t say that I’m competitive, but I’m definitely a perfectionist and I strive to crank out quality work that rivals what I see coming from a lot of other designers. There are also a lot of tech-related advancements to follow: script libraries like jQuery, image replacement methods like sIFR, CSS3… it seems like there’s a new toy out every week that I’m dying to play with.

4. Do you refer to yourself as a Front-end developer or a web designer?  Do you code any of the web sites that you design currently?  If so, what language(s) do you code in?

I tend to refer to myself as both a web designer and web developer. I’m trying to make sure that I walk that line between both camps by keeping both my design skills and my coding skills as sharp as I can. I’ve personally coded 99% of the sites I’ve designed, using xHTML and PHP to build them out. I’ve just recently begun dabbling in ASP, as well. More and more, I’m seeing that web designers have to be a jack-of-all-traders sort of person. That’s what I’m aiming for.

5. Where did you go to school and has it helped you become a better web design professional?

I recently graduated from The Art Institute of Atlanta, and it most definitely helped me become a better designer and developer. After initially tinkering with web design back in ’99, I stopped designing after a couple of years. It wasn’t until 2007, when I started school again, that I got back into web design full-bore. The Art Institute of Atlanta’s Web Design & Interactive Media program is one of the best scholastic web design programs in the U.S., and it certainly helped me blow the dust off of my skills.

6. Since you first started how has the web design industry changed? Has it changed for the better? If so, how? If not, please explain?

Back in ’99, when I started designing, it was all table-based page structure with no semantic development and no real regard given to backward- or forward-compatibility. The web was still being figured out. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a seasoned web veteran or anything, but I feel that the web has most definitely changed for the better. Standards-based web design has made it so that the web is versatile and exciting but still available to anyone across the globe. It’s only going to get better from here, and that’s a great prospect.

7. What are your favorite tools to use when designing a website? Why are they your favorite tools?

I tend to use Adobe Photoshop right out of the gate when designing a site, though sometimes I’ll go analog, and sketch basic site structures out on paper before building them digitally. One way or another, I’ve always had access to Photoshop, so it’s what I’m comfortable with. When I code, I use Adobe Dreamweaver, for pretty much the same reason. Those two programs are like trusty old wrenches to me.