Spicy Web Designer Interview with Guilherme Zühlke O’Connor (Part 1)

Guilherme Zühlke O’Connor is a web designer who recently relocated to London, England. He has a varied past which most recently involves working for Yahoo! Europe and before that taking on web design work. Lately he has currently been moving away from freelance web design but has developed a WordPress plug-in to manage blog rolls.

1. You have such a unique style to your web design work how did you develop it and what inspires you to design the way that you design web sites?

That is very curious; I didn’t know I had such a unique style .

Well, I do realize that a good part of my graphic work tends to be flat, while there is a tendency of pursuing 3D, shiny effects. Actually, I like the effects when they are well produced, but probably what inspires me to make my design more “flat” is the love for traditional design, print media and typography.

Also, I think it’s the result of having an eye that is often enthusiastic on organic (as opposed to designed) visual displays, like the visual of things meant to be practical and little concern on the visual aspect. Sometimes, randomly, these things are genuinely beautiful, and I think I’m strongly influenced by the (healthy) envy for the beautiful randomness.

Flat and efficient design is much more appealing to me than the attempt to create visual effects. Not that I’m against them, don’t get me wrong, some of the most beautiful design pieces I’ve seen lie on this category.

2. I read on your site that you studied Architecture before you got into Computer science. Do you find that these educations worked well together to make you a better designer?

Yes, definitely! Both architecture and computers are passions I developed as a child. I grew up with the idea that I wanted to be an Architect and programming was just a hobby. When I was studying Architecture, I quickly found myself more interested in Design, broadly speaking.

This was in 1996, and in the next year, when I started to put my nose in web development, I just felt that was for me, both design and programming were beautifully tied. That is when I decided I wanted to plunge on Computer Science.

When I graduated on computer science, I wasn’t working with design even on my free time and at some point I found the web again and I found out that the few years I hadn’t had desing as a main concern in my mind helped me to be more free on how to design. I had to exercise a bit before actually get the rhythm, but it was a very pleasant process.

3. How long have you been building websites?

The first time I’ve built a page was as my home page, in mid 1997, just for fun. In late 1997 I was already working with that on a local ISP and in the next few years I was working on bigger projects, until 2003. Then, I’ve been away from web design for a couple of years, while I was involved with more traditional software development and teaching computer science, but roughly speaking, it would be 11 years now.

4. How did you become involved in the “Designers that Blog” site?

I have written a WordPress plug-in to manage blog rolls in a more efficient way that the traditional list of links in the sidebar. When I’ve landed on DWB (designers who blog) it was like the ultimate challenge, so I contacted Kat and offered my plug-in to her.

Ref:
* http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/11/wordpress-plugin-to-display-names-favicons-description-notes-and-even-the-feed-on-your-blogroll/
* http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/the-right-amount-of-information-to-make-them-useful/