Ryan Downie.com

My first year as a designer.

This is a post that I have decided to write even though it has not been a full year since I decided to be a designer. I have Tonsillitis at the moment so I am not able to do much more at the moment so it sparked me to write up this post.
This year has been eventful to say the least but I would have not changed anything what so ever.
It all started by getting let go (not sacked!) by a local carpet company in the village that I am from, and I was at an end on what to do. I did study Multimedia design at college a two years before (but never finished the course) and I always enjoyed looking at design and creating designs.

I started off by doing a few logo contents the site on sitepoint.com as at the time I found this the easiest way to make some money as I didn’t know any other way as I didn’t know how to code or design layouts at that time.
I started to get a few decent logos finished and some money so I put the logos on to a disk and go to some local design firms. I thing about the Village that I am from its very small I would have a say and say less than 1000 people live here but we have three design agencies.

After taking these to the agencies only one got back to me and asked if I do websites. Erm I can was my response and I asked for a dummy brief to design around for them. I designed two layouts, one was very image heavy and it was the better of the two. The other design was nothing but plain crap to be honest but I thought it would have been easier for them to code.

Never designing a layout before I made the assumption that it would be easy like designing a poster or a logo, when in fact it’s a different kind of monster. But I was not offered the job, but it sparked something that lead me to say I want to be a website designer. So I went to the nearest PC world (Lancaster btw) and purchased The Principles of beautiful web design by Jason Bierd for sitepoint.com and that became a bible for me for a few weeks.

I knew that wanting to become a Website Designer I had to learn how to code XHTML and CSS, not being a technical person myself I found it hard at first for the first few weeks/months but I kept reading.

However things took a change when I came across a post on a forum about someone wanting some graphic work doing and the position was to work from home. I applied for it and got it so I was now working from home but it was not doing website designs (that is what I wanted but I needed money). It was doing Logos, Website Buttons, Banners etc but at least it paid the bills for me.

I used the money for normal things like going out, Socializing, Clothes and Rent but I also made sure that I bought a design/development book every three weeks. By the time I finished I had :

• Logo and Letterhead Design 8 and 9.
• Making and breaking the Grid.
• The Zen of CSS Design.
• The art and science of css.
• Bulletproof webdesign
• CSS Mastery
• Transending CSS, The fine art of web design.
• Webstanderds creativity
• Pro CSS techniques.

After reading and studying all these books and lots of late night reading of blogs and communities. I understood a fair amount XHTML and CSS, enough to code a website. Then to my surprise I got an email of Paul Boag from Boag World, the podcast that I listened too saying that I had won the competition to go down to Brighton and be part of Andy Budd’s CSS Mastery workshop. Inspiring was the only word that I could think to describe the Workshop. I met many people like minded and I have kept in contact with a few of them. Andy’s Workshop ironed out all the little questions that I had with left with CSS and I go that AHHA moment when the little things clicked.

I then decided to call it a day with my employer as a mutual agreement as I was not happy then working there with the direction and went out on my own. This now seems to be the best decision of the lot as it gave me the time to build my portfolio.
The site that you see now is the labour of that time. It was the fifth layout that I did and the first one I full coded and designed all the pages for. I was quite happy with the site that I put together, and the response off the community was good.
I now see little areas that I will fix up over time.

I had a good stream of work coming in and requests for quotes and I would have been happy working here for myself. But I noticed that the agency that I applied for was looking to hire again and by the off chance I sent them an email to say I would be interested. The next day I was asked if I can come down for an interview. And a day later I was offered the job.
I really like working for an agency and I think that is the right time in my life to do so. The agency gives me the tools and area to grow and learn my trade more so then I could at home as there are four of us in the same room and critiques and help is always there if I need it. We all like the same things and get along so that really helps. Also working on projects that I don’t pick myself keeps me fresh as it removes me out of my zone and that’s a good thing.

So the first year (well almost a year) has probably been the happiest year of my life to date, and the design community is really open to anyone.

One thing to say to people wanting to get in to design is that read and experiment as much as you can, be prepared to lose many hours in front of the computer and books. And you can never stop learning.

I hope that this post made sense as I am not the best at writing (that’s why I am not a copywriter).