Spicy Web Designer Interview with Shelly Dennison

Shelly Dennison is a web designer and art director from Nashville, Tennessee. She first started designing websites in 2005 but began her career about ten years earlier when she started in print design and after spending some time off as a stay-at-home mom she decided to research more about web design and before knew it she was designing websites.

1. When did you first start designing websites?

I started designing websites in 2005. My career started a decade earlier when I was at the University of Tennessee. There, I was mostly interested in print making techniques including letterpress and book binding. After college I continued designing for print and was never interested in the internet and especially not in designing for it. I stepped away from the work force in 2002 to be a stay at home mom. 2 years later when I decided to go back to work I knew I wanted a change. I started researching web design and discovered the new (to me) world of CSS and was immediately impressed by beautiful websites that looked nothing like what I had studied in school 10 years earlier. I began teaching myself html and CSS. I learned from books and websites like CSS Zen Garden and A List Apart. I remember the first website that I made for money. It was only 2 pages but took me about 10 hours per page to code! I sat diligently with books on my lap and called all too often on my next door neighbor who happened to be a PHP developer. After about my third site things started to click and I new that I had found something that I really enjoyed and captivated my attention.

2. I read that you are inspired by “minimalism, color, texture and order”. Would you say that it is more difficult when a potential customer asks you for a creative project where vibrancy and chaos are requirements for the look of the design?

It is more difficult in the sense that in order for me to do that I have to step outside of my own box. That sort of design is not what comes natural to me, yet I like it very much and often times”oooh” and “ahhh” over other peoples work. It is very hard for me to design for myself in a style that is not minimalist, but I’ve been designing long enough to know that part of my job as a designer is to give the client what they are looking for. And if vibrant and chaotic is what they want then I push myself to create something with in those guidelines yet still satisfy my need for order and perfection. Sometimes this satisfaction is gained simply by creating an underlying grid structure, or by focusing on text sizes and the ratios between them so that even though the design looks chaotic I know it’s not.

3. How did you become passionate about web design and what helps you keep that passion alive for what you are doing?

I became passionate about web design at first by having a complete inability to create what I wanted. I lacked the technical skills to produce what I designed. This lead to many long hours of trial and error, lots of online research and tutorials, and much frustration. Once I over came that handicap and got to a place where I was comfortable coding anything I could dream up my focus was able to switch to creating better designs. Every project is a fresh opportunity to do something better or different than you did before. There are so many different genres or styles – I like to come up with an idea or a technique that I am interested in exploring or learning and apply it in some way to whatever I am working on. This could be a certain typeface, a technique in Photoshop that creates interesting textures from photos that I’ve taken, a new jQuery plugin, a grid system that I’ve set up, a color palette, the possibilities are endless.

4. How do your experiences as an Art Director make you a better and more well-rounded web designer?

As an art director I’ve had the opportunity to experience all facets of design, from conceptual to production, print to interaction design. I’ve done the work myself, outsourced, delegated, and directed. All of these experiences have made me a better web designer. I think that when directing other designers you can look at their work in a more objective way than you can your own. When you put your heart and soul or even just hours of time into something it’s easy to lose the ability to see what is really there. You get so focused on what “you” see that lose the ability to see what others will see. Working with other designers has helped me to remember this and to make a greater attempt to be more objective and less personal about my own work, which I hope leads to better design decision making.

5. What are some of the biggest challenges that you currently face in web design?

The first one that comes to mind is IE 6. Which really isn’t much of a challenge it’s more of a nuisance. Having to spend extra time to dumb down your design or write hack code to make things work but don’t because you are dealing with an outdated browser that is not standards compliant is a pain in the ass and always sort of feels like a waste of time to me. I’ll be glad when IE 6 is gone.

Keeping up with the ever changing technology can be a real challenge. Web design is constantly changing. Every day there are new techniques, new trends, and new rules! I spend a great deal of time reading blogs and following other designers on twitter or tumblr just to keep up with things.

Another challenge that I’ve really been struggling with lately has to do with clients managing their own content via a CMS. Today I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to write my CSS so that no matter what choice the client makes everything will still work properly and maintain some sense of design integrity. It’s tough for me as a designer to give the client full control of the mark up of the content. At Sitening[http://sitening.com] where I work we build a lot of websites with custom CMS’s and often times the client requests a simple wysiwyg text editor for the main content areas on each page. I’m not sure what the solution to this is. It’s not feasible to always say no to a client and force them to do exactly what you want! Nor do I want to be called upon to maintain their site.

6. Since you’ve been designing websites since 1995, what is the biggest and best change you’ve seen in the industry?

I have been designing since 1995 but I have only been designing websites since 2005. I designed my first website in 1997 while still in school. I hated it. Using tables for layout made no sense to me. I couldn’t get it. With tables the layout and design were confined to certain restrictions and everything tended to have a boxy rectangular feel. Designers often used images for text because of these design restrictions and limitations which lead to horrible search engine recognition. Currently there are much more advanced technologies including CSS, sIFR, and jQuery that free designers from such constraints while still maintaining the integrity of the code and design and allowing content to be cataloged by search engines.

7. How do you usually price the work that you do?

I prefer to get as many details as possible, to get a good over view of the work involved. The first thing I do is send a questionnaire to the potential client. The questionnaire asks about look and feel, target audience, why they want a site, how the site functions, etc. Then I come up with a number that is roughly based on a flat hourly fee, how many hours I predict that I will have to work, how hard or easy I think the client is going to be to work with, the time frame that it needs to be completed in, if the site could end up being a portfolio piece or not, and what my schedule is like.

8. What advice do you have for someone starting out in web design today?

Learn to do it the right way from the start. There are so many great online resources that there is really no excuse to do otherwise. It may seem like it will take forever for you to complete your first site or web page but the knowledge you will gain by starting out with hand coded CSS / XHTML will end up being priceless. Also, don’t forget to find inspiration from places other than the web. Magazines, newspapers, restaurant menus, and of course great pieces of graphic design from history offer many ways of displaying content or using typography and image in interesting ways. Searching outside of your box leads to innovation and originality!