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During my time at Canadore, my class was tasked with conducting an interview with a professional in the field that you hope to work in the future. My ideal position would be designing functional, eyecatching, and leading edge websites for clients, So this lead me to a man who has been self taught for years and is still on the forefront of the industry, making time to share his knowledge with designers and progamers all over Canada and the United States. Phill Cowcill a.k.a @canadianpacman (twitter) Coordinator of Mobile Application Development program at Canadore College.
Interviewed by Dan Beauchamp
Dan- How did you become a Web
Designer?
Phil- “I started actually at multi-media back in 1984, well before the
web was public knowledge. I started mixing video and doing some computer
programing and computer graphics and did a lot of work with that. In 1993 the
internet started to make its presence known within the school. In 1995 I was hired on as a coordinator and
when I got into working with websites I realized that this was going to be a
huge trend, so right away I picked up every tid bit I could find out. Back in
1994 I had started learning a lot about developing for websites and keep in
mind at this time there is no Google and there are no search engines that we
know of today, so finding information wasn’t as easy as today. So in 1994 I
started teaching myself by opening up different web pages and looking at the
source code to see what they did. I would then go in to note pad and start to
create my own websites using those formats.”
Dan- What do you enjoy most about
Web Design as a career?
Phil- “I find it’s a lot of fun in the way that web
design is restrictive but if you can arm wrestle the code then you can make it
do what you want it to do. It’s like it’s a computer game for me, the website
wants be very blocky, very straight forward and very plain. My job is to figure
out ways to make it interactive, engaging, and make it look nice, and have a
nice clean layout and make sure it loads very fast.”
Dan- What is the most challenging
part of a Web Designer Job?
Phil- “I think that the most challenging part is
understanding the technical aspects of web design and also graphic design and
user interface. You need to have all three to develop and create a rich
experience and it is very difficult to get a good balance of all three.”
Dan- If there was a list of
essential skills that a Web Designer should have, what would they be?
Phil- “One is to have a very good understanding of
graphics and how to re-size properly. I find a lot of people when they make
websites if they are a Graphic Designer they don’t pay attention to size, when you’re
streaming things online size really does matter and the smaller the better. The
other thing is you have to have a very good eye for understanding the flow the
layout and you have to understand how people will access your content, the
other thing is you need to understand the code you have to get into the code,
even with Dreamweaver you still need to be able to understand the code enough
that you can go in and make alterations within the code.”
Dan- Is there a particular area of
graphic or web design that you prefer?
Phil- “There are all sorts of aspects I really like
when you start build in the dynamic content so you tie it in to a database. For
example I can create one web page and have thirty people come to the website
and it’s different for all thirty people. To be able to create that dynamic
content that’s a lot of fun because people look at that and say how did you do
that? It’s actually not that difficult to do, it’s just a matter of
understanding the technology and the background.”
Dan- Where do you tend to look for
inspiration?
Phil- “Ah, excellent question. There are a couple
of websites that I go to; one is coolhomepages.com, to take a look at what some
of the best websites designs are. I also while surfing around if I notice a
good website I make note of it. There are also other sites that provide very
nice free style sheets, because a lot of the good sites are designed with well
documented and well created style sheets, so I take a look at what they are
doing. A lot of it is just surfing around and seeing what some of the best
designers in the world are doing.”
Dan- Alright
Phil, thank you for your time and insight.
Phil- “Not a problem at all.”
Or if Your interested in learning a thing or two check out his multimedia site.
http://www.pjrules.com/canadianpacman/
