Spicy Web Designer Interview with Davy Van Den Bremt

Davy Van Den Bremt is a web designer specialized in Durpal and Web Standards from Ghent, Belgium.  He originally studied Computer Science at University of Ghent.  In 1996 he found himself working on a website for a friend’s band and then started doing web design for small businesses and has been designing ever since.  

1. How did you get started in web design?

As soon as I got an internet connection I was intrigued by the power of the Internet. It’s power to the people. At minimum cost you can make a company brochure, a design portfolio, promote your music, … I wanted to be a part of that.

2. When did you start designing websites?

I think around ‘96 I started making websites for bands of friends of mine; myself … I used tools like Paint Shop Pro and FrontPage then. Tables! The horror!

Around 2001 I started working on websites for some small companies in my neighborhood.

In 2005 I discovered web standards. I participated in CSS reboot and May 1st reboot and got a lot of exposure there. That’s when I realized I could make appealing sites and took it more seriously. I also decided that the Web would be an important part of my career.

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

I try to make my clients clear it’s in their best interest to skip the WYSIWYG stuff (TinyMCE and FCK) in their CMS and do some hand coding. I give them a small introduction and set up some classes for common styles. Not every client wants to work this way right now. The ones that do see the benefits clearly: consistent design and ease of work and by using semantic code better search ranking.

Web design is a challenge for me every time since I’m not a designer per se. I’m more of a developer. Since my day time job is developer, I don’t have much time to catch up with all the new CSS and JavaScript techniques.

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?

My website says “Drupal developer and designer”. I’m a mix of different things. As most designers, I do design, HTML, CSS, Javascript, php, Drupal, CakePHP, … I now do iPhone development too.

When people ask me what I do I always say “I make websites”.

My day time job is pure development: Drupal, jQuery, … My freelance stuff is mostly the whole package: design, slicing, Drupal implementation.

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

I studied Computer Science at the University of Ghent. I haven’t learned any design stuff there. Not much web too. More network and computer stuff.

It made me all round though. And it gave me a deeper insight in how the stuff that I do works and why it works. Like how do programming languages work under the hood, networks, image compression … This helps me a lot when I do performance tuning.

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 the days you had WYSIWYG. The code was under the hood, it didn’t matter that much how it was programmed. You had the occasional inline JavaScript which was mostly used for navigation stuff but for the rest it was not done. You also had websites that were “IE only”.

Then around 2005 I heard about designing with web standards. Not much people were using it. Now almost everyone is using it and I’ve seen a lot of people selling websites using some buzz words without knowing what they really mean: XMHTL, CSS, semantic markup… it’s all the same for them.

JavaScript frameworks have introduced JavaScript again. You now get a much richer user interface.

The latest trend seems to be big fonts and typography in general has won a lot of interest. And transparency is already a common thing these days.

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

For design? Photoshop! Of course.

Slicing and development? Basic stuff is of course Apache/MySQL. I use MAMP for local deployment. I couldn’t live without SVN (or any other versioning system) anymore too. I use Beanstalk as my hosted SVN server and Versions as my client.

My favorite editor these days for web design / development is Coda these days. The preview feature is great for slicing. The most important feature though is “projects”. You make a project with SVN, FTP and SSH settings and with 1 click or key press you login to ssh, upload a file via ftp, check in a file in SVN. I also made a plug-in to make my life as a Drupal developer easier.

Coda isn’t suited well for more advanced stuff. For FTP I use YummyFTP, for power editing Textmate.

Firefox is my favorite environment for HTML and JavaScript debugging. Firebug, YSLow and LiveHTTPHeaders are must have extensions!

I use Parallels for my virtual machines to test IE, Linux, … IETester makes it easy to have multiple IE versions on one machine.

Litmus is great for a final checkup to see how your design works in all browsers.