Marceline Smith in Glasgow speaks about her jump from printmaking into web design

Marceline Smith is a web designer from Glasgow, Scotland in the United Kingdom. She has been working as a web designer for the past 10 years now ever since she decided to take an IT course and learned HTML and Photoshop. Marceline studied Art Printmaking at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland and says that during university, “We barely got to touch the computers at art school so being a web designer had never entered my mind at all.” Her style is more illustrative but Marceline definitely has a unique and well developed style that is all her own and to see it all you need to do is look at her portfolio of work. Her work is funky and highly creatively however if you are looking for a more “corporate” you may want to look elsewhere as Marceline’s work is not for the faint of heart… It’s bold, colorful and action packed

1. How did you get started in web design?

By accident really! I was a bit lost after i finished art school and ended up doing an IT course which eventually led to me learning HTML and Photoshop. I’ve been a web designer ever since, both freelance and for various universities and internet companies.

2. When did you start designing websites?

I’ve been self-publishing zines since I was a teenager so I started putting some of the content online using some free web space I got with a magazine. This was back in the late nineties so the internet wasn’t such a big thing. I started designing little websites for my friends in bands and it all just grew from there.

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

Internet Explorer 6. It’s my personal nemesis. There must be so much time and money spent making sure sites are compatible with all its idiocies. Compliancy and accessibility are extremely important to me – I hate to see sites that put style above content and end up frustrating their users. On a more personal level, the challenge of being a freelance web designer with Repetitive Strain Injury. It’s hard to keep a balance of earning enough to live well and meeting deadlines without damaging my health.

4. Do you code any of the web sites that you design currently? If so, what language(s) do you code in?

I do a lot of the coding, mostly HTML/CSS and Shopify’s Liquid, and I know enough PHP to get by with the sort of projects I work on. A lot of my work involves Shopify and WordPress so it’s template-based and there’s less coding to do than in my early days when I had to code the whole thing in Notepad.

5. I wanted to ask if and where you studied at college or university, what you studied and ask how has your education helped you become a better web design professional? What other skills has it helped you to gain and what else has it taught you about design in general?

I studied Fine Art Printmaking at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland. We barely got to touch the computers at art school so being a web designer had never entered my mind at all. It did give me a great creative base to work from, not just an understanding of color and composition but how to start and finish a project and what to do when you’re uninspired.

6. What are your favorite tools to use when designing a web project? Why are they your favorite tools?

I’m a very visual designer so usually Photoshop or Illustrator. I love to just play around with colors and shapes and fonts for ideas. I also doodle a lot in my sketchbook and keep folders of imagery and color schemes that I’ve saved from websites and magazines. You never know what might jumpstart an idea in my brain. I also love working with Vision on Shopify sites – I could happily only design with Shopify for the rest of my life I think. Everything about it just clicks with how I like to work.

7. You’ve got a very unique style of design that is shown in your web design work. How did you develop your style? (Not an easy question to answer I’m sure but i had to ask)

Thank you! I’m pretty sure it’s because I come from a Fine Art background and not design or computing. I have no qualifications whatsoever in anything to do with web design or programming – I’m completely self-taught – so I probably work in a very different way to most web designers. I’m not saying that’s better, but I’ve often found it helps me stand out at job interviews. I approach web design the same way I approach anything creative I do, from collage to illustration to printmaking to sewing. It’s all the same to me.

8. What are some of your favorite techniques to use when you are working on Photoshop and illustrator?

Because I’m self-taught I know I don’t use programs in the way they’re supposed to be used but hopefully that’s what makes my style unique! I do love to scan in things from my sketchbook and use them as a base for designs – there’s a character to my hand-drawn sketches that I just can’t recreate on screen.