Liam Faulkner and Katherine Boardman are web designers who run Twenty3Design, a small web design company in the United Kingdom. Liam Faulkner studied Multimedia Technology at the University of South Wales while Katherine Boardman has her BSc of Sound from university. They complement each other and have created some amazing web design work because of their vast experience in multimedia design, flash and graphic design.

1. How did you and Katherine get started in web design? When did you start designing websites?

Liam: I was always interested in web design.  Actually I have a bit of a coding background, I did a qualification in Visual Basic (of all languages), and when I went to University, I studied other programming languages, but actually found I like the visual design side of things best.  While at Uni I took on a few simple paid projects for clients, and learnt my freelance lessons designing and coding for them.  I then took a couple of full time positions as a graphic designer, but always had in mind that I will be working for myself, and it turns out that going freelance was surprisingly easy.

Kath: I fell into it by accident really.  My background was in Sound Technology, but I helped out on a few projects with Liam and found that I picked up HTML pretty quickly. I found coding incredibly satisfying and now can’t imagine doing anything else.

2. How long has Twenty3Design been in business?

Liam: Well, we’ve been Twenty3design full time for nearly 1 year …it’s our birthday soon!   We have both worked professionally for over 6 years, be that freelance or full-time and about a year ago we thought it was time to put all our efforts under one happy roof.

3. How many designers, developers and other creative people currently work for Twenty3Design?

Liam: There’s just the two of us.  We’re the designers, developers and project managers for our projects.  For anything we can’t do we rely on the extensive UK and US freelance community to lend a hand.

We’ve got some pretty good contacts built up now who we know we can rely on.  I think that’s the key for freelancing.

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

Liam: I think from a design perspective the hardest and most crucial part is getting a really decent brief form the client.  It’s so important to understand what the client wants and needs, but sometimes they don’t know themselves or they’ll “know it when they see it”.  I guess what I’m getting at is that people are more web savvy than ever and managing clients’ expectations among the vast array of information available for them is an ever changing task.

Kath: Is it too obvious to say dealing with IE6? That said it does at least keep me on my toes .  Other than that I’d say for me it’s utilizing the correct technologies for the right project.  Sometimes clients want something fancy just for the sake of it and, although it might be nice to be able to bill for the extra dev work, you can over do it and ruin a good project.

5. Do you ever 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?

Liam: We code and design everything ourselves.  We have the luxury of being multi-disciplined; we can take on the coding and design aspect for our clients, providing them with the whole package.  We code in the standard languages: HTML, CSS and PHP as well as doing bits and pieces of other languages such as JavaScript when it’s required.

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

Liam: We both went to University in South Wales, but I’d say that real life experience has made us better professionals, nothing can beat that.  Our degrees certainly gave us the start we needed to find out what type of work we’re in to and the time we had while at Uni allowed us to experiment with taking on clients and managing projects for ourselves.

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

Liam: The industry seems to have grown and developed in to much more of a community, everyone is chatting online using Twitter, comparing notes and sharing ideas.  It’s a nice industry to be involved with.  From a client perspective, more people seem to be tech savvy, giving people like us a little more freedom to be creative.  The openness of the design world has always been there, but now there are so many tutorials, blogs and communities that you can really immerse yourself it what ever you like.

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

Liam: I love my Macbook Pro, can’t do without it.  I also use an A5 Wacom tablet when I’m doing illustration; it’s incredibly helpful to be able to sketch freehand.  Software wise I use Photoshop for web design and Illustrator for print work and logo design, they can’t be beaten in my opinion.  Oh and can’t forget pen and paper, cheapest design hardware available.

Kath: As a developer I live inside Coda.  I can do almost everything in there and it makes developing so much easier.  The other thing I really rely on is my notebook.  It might sound odd for a developer, but it’s always when I’m out and not by my Mac that I figure out how to solve some problem I’ve been stuck on for a while.  I’ve got to be able to note it down quickly or I’ll forget.