1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I’m a designer from Brazil currently living in Oakland, California. I moved to the US in 2011 when I got an offer from Google. Since then, I have been working for them. Before that, in 2006 I founded a personal blog that ended up growing more than I’d ever planned. Abduzeedo started as a side project and it has always kept that status, it is a blog where I can share things that inspire me. Over the past 10 years, a lot has changed and with that, the blog has evolved as well.

2. How did you get into design? Was there a pivotal point in your life when you decided to become a designer, or was it a gradual process?

My background is industrial design, and I think the reason I got into design was because I was always curious. I also have to thank my parents, especially my dad for always nurturing a sense of curiosity in my brother and me. Then, when i got my first computer and discovered some early graphic software, things became much clearer for me and this led to my desire of creating things using my computer as a medium. Of course, when I chose industrial design, to my surprise, I had to learn to do things without the computer first. I got a bit frustrated, but that was a sign of my naïveté. Now I really appreciate those days and what I learned.

3. What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on so far?

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on so many cool projects. It is hard to pinpoint one. I always try to put myself in very uncomfortable situations so I can learn the most. Of course this inevitably has resulted in some awful mistakes, but that’s the only way to gain experience, in my opinion. But to answer your question I will say Abduzeedo because it is my personal project and the one I’ve run the longest.

4. How did Abduzeedo start, and where do you see your publication in 10 years from now?

Abduzeedo started after my design studio in Brazil got robbed. We left for lunch and when we came back our studio was empty. All of our equipment was gone. For me it was even worse because that day I decided to back up my files so I lost all my backup discs as well. It started as a backup system, way before the cloud was something. There was no Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive. I used a server and the blog to backup files in which I would write little tutorials so I could remember how I did certain things in photoshop. It ended up taking off, luckily.

After 10 years I’ve seen quite a lot of things. The blog reached its peak in 2009-2010. It was really massive the amount of traffic it was getting. Since then it has been on a decline but I believe it is more a filtering process. The web became much bigger and the long tail is simply huge. There’s a lot of information and ways to get it. That ended up fragmenting the blogosphere in terms of traffic. My goal is to keep running with Abduzeedo until the point it doesn’t make more sense for me.

5. You probably get this question a lot, but what is like to be a part of a company like Google? Do they really have slides in their offices?

Google is an amazing company. I have learned so much in so many ways. From all the incredibly amazing people to the scale of the projects and how to design for billions. It’s much more challenging indeed. The company’s culture is also incredible and we do have slides in some of the offices.

6. What’s the most interesting project you’ve had on Google?

I got the chance to work on quite a few projects, from Google Search to the most recent one that is Google Play Music. Each one with their particular challenges and requirements. I cannot get too much into the details, but designing for a very broad audience is always a big task and that really gets me motivated.

7. Where do you see the graphic design industry going? What is going to be next year’s graphic design biggest trend?

I feel that the industry is moving towards simplicity. I cannot speak too much about graphic design, but in terms of user interface we see this evolution quite clearly. From the beginning of mobile UI with the iOS and now you can see how much simpler the visual design became. There’s a constant movement towards reduction. The challenge is to do that without losing user’s understanding of how to use the software. As the audience gets more mature and savvy, it allows us to experiment more with this type of exercise.

8. Aside WebDesignLedger, where do you get your inspiration from?

More and more I try to find inspiration from the physical world. With the overload of information online I sort of started to lose my capacity to pay attention to the small little things that are so inspiring in our quotidian lives. From nature to books and architecture. There’s so much out there to be seen, and the most beautiful thing is that it’s unique to your eyes and brain to process that.

9. What are your current hobbies? What are you most curious about right now?

I became a father a little over 9 months ago and right now my hobby is to be a father hah! It takes most of my spare time for sure but it’s just awesome. I also have been learning to prototype in native Android with Android Studio. I feel that the design community focus so much on iOS and there’s a huge need for Android as the main mobile OS>

10. Tea or Coffee?

Coffee.

Written by the most creative and innovative minds of our time, these 75 books are must reads for all designers. Get a glimpse into the world of design that you’ve never seen before with these eye-opening notions that will inspire you. Those that have read these books rant and rave about them.

“The author is a very incisive thinker, relaying stunning insight after stunning insight” – The Next 100 Years by George Friedman

“I learned lots more about color and its interaction. I had forgotten the physics of color and the perception of color from my college days” – Interaction of Color by Josef Albers

“Shaughnessy writes so clearly and with such honesty that I found it hard to put the book down.” –How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy

This collection of books for designers will not disappoint you. Skim through and find your next favorite source for inspiration. Keep your pencil sharp and your mind sharper!

The Vignelli Canon

“Beautiful imagery. Vignelli was one of the superstars
of Graphic Design and a big inspiration to me.”

Less But Better

by Dieter Rams

 “It’s a bargain for a design book this specialized.
Fascinating look at Rams’ design process and history.”

Grid Systems in Graphic Design

by Josef Müller-Brockmann

“This is a must for all designers. It is a deep dive into
understanding the grid system and typography and how
to use them effectively to solve mass information layout.
If you’re looking to understand the principles of good
design, it is a perfect.”

Interaction of Color

by Josef Albers

“I learned lots more about color and its interaction. I had
forgotten the physics of color and the perception of color
from my college days. This book brought most of it back
and added to my insight into color interaction.”

Visual History of an Airplane

by Jens Müller

“Worth adding to your library if you are interested in
corporate design generally and in Lufthansa/aerospace
design concerns at least marginally.”

The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems

by Josef Müller-Brockman

“I bought a copy recently and it’s like returning
to an old friend”

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

by Edward R. Tufte

“As a graphic designer and a minimalist, I love the
way this book looks and I love the graphics Tufte’s team has created.”
team has created.”

The Art of Looking Sideways

by Alan Fletcher

“Difficult to tell you what this book actually says,
except that it’s author is a genius.”

The Laws of Simplicity

by John Maeda

“I found the laws themselves to be thought provoking;
my mind immediately engaged the task of relating the
laws to my own work.”

The Elements of Color

by Johannes Itten

“It is not only enriching as a color theory document,
but it helps expand the artist or designers possibility
of using, arranging and conceiving color.”

The Design of Everyday Things

by Don Norman

“Finally, I got a chance to read this amazing book.
Don Norman treats design very methodically and shows
that good design is not a black box but something even
more analytical people can understand and apply.”

TOKUJIN

by Tokujin Yoshioka

“The book editors deserve an award for putting together
a beautiful looking book. Never heard of this guy until I
flipped through the book & was blown away…”

Change by Design

by Tim Brown

“Highly recommend this short text, not only to the
artist, or engineer but to all concerned citizens who
hope to make a contribution to solving the problems
of their own life and those of a global society.”

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

“Thinking Fast and Slow is a very valuable book by
one of the most creative minds in psychology”

The Monocle Guide to Better Living

by Andrew Tuck

“You won’t find this worldly view about business
and the business of people anywhere else.”

Living with Complexity

by Donald A. Norman

“There’s so much to take away and ponder it’s
difficult to sum up. But one thing’s for sure, after
reading ‘Living With Complexity’ you’ll never look
at those salt and pepper shakers on a restaurant
table quite the same way again.”

The Paradox of Choice

by Barry Schwartz

“This is an eye-opening book — it brings the clarity
and insight into decision-making that The Tipping
Point did for trends.”

Paul Rand: Conversations with Students

by Michael Kroeger

“A wonderful paperback essential for any Paul
Rand student. And by student, I mean one who
appreciates, admires, and learns from one of the
greatest designers of the 20th century.”

Creativity Inc.

by Ed Catmull

“With this book, Ed Catmull has given the world an
amazing gift. Much more than a book for managers,
it contains wisdom and stories that you will carry
into the rest of your life.”

The Geometry of Type

by Erik Spiekermann

“Great Book for reference, and learning the history
of Typefaces.”

Information is Beautiful

by David McCandless

“There is a wonderful almost recursive aspect to
this work- the world we perceive is shaped by
`invisible’ streams of stuff that can be converted
to data and analyzed.”

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

“This is a gripping journey into the life of an amazing
individual. Despite its girth of nearly 600 pages, the
book zips along at a torrid pace.”

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

by Ronan Bouroullec

“I bought this for my husband and he loved it and
is frequently pulling it out for inspiration. The colors
and prints, page layouts, (everything!) – are all
gorgeous!”

Visual Grammar

by Christian Leborg

“This is a must-have for anyone studying design.
This book is as simple as a child’s, yet it successfully
relays concepts that I paid $7000 to learn over the
course of two semesters.”

Making Ideas Happen

by Scott Belsky

“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. This
book helps you with the hard part.”

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

by Steven Heller

“I use it when I’m in the middle of a project and
hit a brick wall. I thumb through this book, find
ideas I like, and either draw inspiration from the
given examples or research it more.”

Start With Why

by Simon Sinek

“Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” is a must read for
any entrepreneur or leader struggling to create a
long-term vision and guiding principles for their
company or cause.”

Naoto Fukasawa

by Bill Moggridge

“Really good book. Perfect balance between text
and images. Like reading his insights on the designs.”

Knowledge Is Beautiful

by David McCandless

“Book does what it says … Amazing amount of
work behind these infographics, there is
something in every visual that makes you think
and the beauty doesn’t detract from the
importance (or fun!). A work of art and passion.”

Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty

by David Kadavy

“Kadavy does a fantastic job taking the
complete design beginner through the
important parts of design. From a hacker’s
point of view, this book is brilliant, and exactly
what I needed.”

Graphics Standard Manual New York City Transit Authority

by Massimo Vignelli

“You will love it, it is everything you would expect.”

Elements of Design

by Gail Greet Hannah

“This book provides a really good way of introducing
basic visual compositional theories to students,
especially for beginning students.”

Geometry of Design

by Kimberly Elam

“Very interesting for anyone who would like to
know more about graphic arts and why some
patterns and object relationships are appealing
and some are not.”

How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul

by Adrian Shaughnessy

“Shaughnessy writes so clearly and with such
honesty that I found it hard to put the book down.”

Information Graphics

by Sandra Rendgen

“This book’s a must have if you consider yourself
a graphic designer data freak”

Graphic Design Manual: Principles and Practice

by Armin Hofmann

“THIS BOOK IS THE BIBLE OF GRAPHIC
DESIGN…FOR ALL OF YOU GRAPHIC
DESIGNERS, YOU NEED TO KEEP THIS
BOOK AS A GUIDE.”

A Designer’s Art

by Paul Rand

“The single greatest book on Graphic Design ever
written. This is not a tutorial or a how-to, but a why.”

Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture

by Casey Reas

“Form + Code is a wonderful glimpse of how
computation can be applied as art.”

Visual Miscellaneum

by David McCandless

“Seeing the author on TED, I was intrigued and
bought the book. Then I bought it two more times
to give as a present. Fantastic design, captivating
data, and a pithy humor all thrown together.”

The Next 100 Years

by George Friedman

“The author is a very incisive thinker, relaying stunning
insight after stunning insight in demonstrating how we
arrived at where we are now, with Europe having been
supplanted by America as the world’s focal point.”

Things That Make Us Smart

by Donald A. Norman

“This book is easy to read – and should open most
people’s eyes a bit more…”

Designed for Use

by Lukas Mathis

“A great overview over nearly everything that a UI
or UX Designer needs! to know”

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

by Don Norman

“For me, the book was a perfect read. I am always
hunting and gathering for the meaning of art and
design, to push my own work forward, and to gain
an advantage over my competitors in terms of design.”

Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages

by Alex Wright

“This book is easily the best book I have read in the
course of my research. The style is quick and engaging.”

The Power of Positive Thinking

by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

“It’s such a simple and effective concept, that positive
thinking creates a positive life, yet hard to do at times-
which is a good reason alone to read this book.”

D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself

by Ellen Lupton

“This is a terrific book for ideas all across the board!
I bought this book after flipping through it at a
friends and was excited to see so many hip and
unique ideas.”

Color: A Course in Mastering the Art of Mixing Colors

by Betty Edwards

“If you have had problems understanding just
what makes up a harmonious color palette, then
this book will help you solve that problem.”

I’m Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee # 59

by Douglas Edwards

“This book is great! Doug is a fantastic writer and
a compelling story teller.”

Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type

by Kimberly Elam

“The simplicity of presentation and clean design
continue to set Ms. Elam’s educational strategy
above the rest of the publications regarding the
use of compositional layout tools”

Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

“This is the best book I’ve read about Steve Jobs.”

Visual and Statistical Thinking

by Edward R. Tufte

“I found myself slowing down my usual reading
speed to half and doubling my concentration to
follow him, which is a compliment to the depth of
his writing.”

Paul Rand

by Steven Heller

“This is a pretty thorough book on a graphic
design icon. Lots of full-color samples of Rand’s
work to coincide with the text, which is nice.”

Philographics: Big Ideas in Simple Shapes

by Genis Carreras

“Remarkable visual eloquence in his Philographics project.”

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal

“Hooked presents an empowering perspective
that allows us to start looking at building technology
as building habits.”

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

by Peter Thiel

“This book delivers completely new and refreshing
ideas on how to create value in the world.”

Business Adventures

by John Brooks

“This book casts a wide net over the USAmerican
business and investing scene, always with the width
and insight.”

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

by Klaus Klemp

“Very detailed account of modern German
design and Dieter Rams. The definitive book
on Dieter Rams.”

Sketching User Experiences

by Bill Buxton

“This is a book that I will read many times. I think
this book will be helpful for many years to come.”

Remote: Office Not Required

by Jason Fried

“What you’ll find in Remote is profound advice from
guys who’ve succeeded in the virtual workforce arena.”

Startup Communities

by Brad Feld

“I think this is very helpful and practical book for
entrepreneurs, government officials, university
leaders, and other entrepreneurial-related fields.”

Startup Life

by Brad Feld

“If I could go back in time and hand this book to my
younger self, it might have saved us much angst.”

Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

“Paul Graham has delivered final proof that he is a
marvelous essayist with his volume of fairly diverse
writings”

Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff

by Mark Hughes

“If money is tight and everything to lose, time spent
studying this well-written book could place you and
your product in the forefront of your target buyer’s
mind.”

Connected

by Nicholas A. Christakis

“An entertaining guide to the mechanics and
the importance of human networking.”

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

by Shunryu Suzuki

“This is a collection of talks by one of the first Zen
teachers in the U.S. If you’re already practicing Zen,
I highly recommend this book”

TM: The Untold Stories Behind 29 Classic Logos

by Mark Sinclair

“If you are interested in logo design, whether or not
you are a designer, chances are that you would want
to get this new book.”

Thinking with Type

by Ellen Lupton

“This book is an excellent resource for anyone who
is serious about a graphic layout. It is not a type book;
it does not review fonts individually. Rather, it
considers type as a visual element.”

Logo Modernism

by Jens Müller

“The quality of the work contained in this book is
simply humbling, this is a great piece for everyone
interested in design, from students to seasoned
professionals.”

Designing Brand Identity

by Alina Wheeler

“As a designer, I’ve had difficulty for years finding a
book that really spoke to me about Identity and
Branding. This book is the perfect solution to the
problem.”

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance

“Exhaustively reported . . . this work will likely serve
as the definitive account of a man whom so far
we’ve seen mostly through caricature.”

The Best American Infographics 2014

by Gareth Cook

“You’ll come away with more than your share of…
mind-bending moments – and a wide-ranging view
of what infographics can do.”

Patterns of the Universe

by Alex Bellos

“Dazzling and calming at the same time.
I’d highly recommend for yourself or as
a gift. So cleverly, artistically, and
creatively done”

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

by Philip E. Tetlock

“Superforecasting is the most important scientific study I’ve ever read on prediction
study I’ve ever read on prediction.”

Work Rules!

by Laszlo Bock

“I really like this book because it helps explain why
I felt connected to some companies versus others
regardless of the company size, team dynamic,
or manager style.”
Did you see anything you like? Is there a book we left out? Let us know, and happy readings!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx9l6fO2Qc0]

Not only does Adobe Muse allow you to build websites without knowing any code you can now integrate a shopping cart with the PayPal Shopping Cart Widget from Muse For You.

Since the inception of the web e-commerce websites have become a major part of how we buy items. Web designers and developers are always looking for new ways to integrate shopping carts into their website. We have seen a number of different e-commerce platforms come onto the scene. Platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, Sellfy, Gumroad, and many more. Along with these platforms payment methods such as PayPal have become hugely popular. More and more online users are using PayPal to pay for items online. With PayPal you can pay with your PayPal account, bank account, debit or credit card. This allows web designers and developers to easily add e-commerce to their website with simple to use PayPal buttons.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper at some of the e-commerce platforms mentioned above. Shopify has become very popular and uses its own type of code called liquid to edit and modify templates. It is quite extensive and is a bit of a learning curve. WooCommerce requires the installation of WordPress and afterwards you can integrate WooCommerce into your WordPress template. Etsy, Sellfy, and Gumroad are great but they don’t include a website, so you get the shopping cart but with no website. They also take a fee for each sale.

Some of these alternatives are great, but what if I wanted to create a simple e-commerce website that looks great without having to learn new code or install WordPress and go through all the steps to integrate WooCommerce into WordPress? That is where Adobe Muse comes in. Adobe Muse allows you to easily create a website with total creative freedom, and now with the PayPal Shopping Cart Widget from Muse For You you can easily include a shopping cart into your Adobe Muse website. Adobe Muse has its own built-in PayPal buttons that allow you to easily add e-commerce to your website. You can use these buttons to create products on your website, and with the shopping cart widget users can add their products to a PayPal shopping cart.

Example of the PayPal Shopping Cart Widget from Muse For You.

With the PayPal Shopping Cart Widget all you need to do is add the widget to your Adobe Muse website and you instantly have a shopping cart. Any PayPal buttons you use will work with the shopping cart and if the user clicks on a buy button the product gets added to the shopping cart. You can set the shopping cart to save so if the user leaves the website the shopping cart will be saved and the user can continue shopping next time they come back to the website. You can also have the shopping cart reset on the page so that if the user leaves the page the next time they come back the shopping cart will be reset and they can start from the beginning. This works great if you want to set a page that resets the shopping cart after a user has finished a purchase. After the user has added all the items to the cart they can simply checkout with PayPal and complete their purchase.

What is also great about the PayPal Shopping Cart Widget is that it is completely customizable. You can customize the color and the text of the shopping cart to match your website. If you are looking to create a simple, and beautiful website with a shopping cart look no further. Adobe Muse does not require any code to build the website and all you need to do is drag and drop the PayPal Shopping Cart Widget onto your Adobe Muse website, and you now have an e-commerce website. I’ve titled the following video PayPal Shopping Cart Widget (view at top). The video shows you just how much you can do with the widget and how to add it to your Adobe Muse website.

I will be sharing my knowledge of Adobe Muse via my weekly blog post on WebDesignerLedger.com. I invite you to check back weekly for news and updates on Adobe Muse :). Happy Musing.

“Don’t be afraid to ask questions. When you’re just starting you can’t possibly be expected to know everything.”

Inez Torre: Designer, Creator, Innovator

Inez Torre can only be described as a result of what occurs when incredible talent and industrious work ethic collide in a perfect storm. The Portugal born, London based designer is an industry leader, with her take on creative design, sharing her talents with companies the likes of AKA UK, The Economist, Guardian Labs, and CNN.

Starting her path to success in the gorgeous city of Viseu and it’s Instituto Politécnico de Viseu, Inez Torre learned how to craft her art in a spectacular fashion. Furthering her learning by attending the University for the Creative Arts in England, she left their Masters program to embark upon a more than stellar career.

Now Inez works as the Senior UX Designer for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s iPlayer website, and works to bring her talented view of design and vamp the broadcasting giant’s already illustrious organization. Inez Torre has taken this chance to express her take on the modern design industry.

What’s your opinion on the Design Industries current trends?

‘Trends’ would be considered a passing thing, and while they apply to visual styles, in terms of the user experience I see new techniques to create a greater immersion and fluidity of the designs as a constant evolution. They won’t disappear once the new trend comes along, they will influence it. Personally I quite like the simplicity of Material Design, it feels alive and allows for great flexibility.

Horror films are a personal favorite for Inez

Where do you see the industry’s direction going towards?

Design with the user as primary focus. UX Design is now so present in the industry, and it seems to be still expanding.

What trends do you hope to see more of and continued to be developed upon?

Interaction design incorporating motion graphics. VR is on the rise at the moment and as experiences become more and more immersive, the interactions within the user journey will be increasingly more important.

Courtesy of CNN International

What would you like to tell someone who is just starting, or

have a desire to start getting into design?

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. When you’re just starting you can’t possibly be expected to know everything. And asking questions doesn’t mean you know little, it just means you want to know more.

What one Sci-Fi technology would you want to have

right now,and what would you do with it?

Tough to pick just one…but I’d probably go with teleportation as it’d save me all the time wasted commuting!

Chart designed for AIDS Day

If you could give the person you were when you began on your

career one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?

Remember what you love designing and do it! Starting as a freelancer, I often would overwork myself with projects that would completely kill my motivation. It would’ve been so much better for me if I took the time to also pursue my own projects. I eventually realized that and it does help balance things out!

DocSend is a sales acceleration platform that makes salespeople more effective by enabling them to track, control, send, and present sales materials with real-time document analytics.

DocSend Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Mobile Visionary

In June of 2007, the iPhone was released by Apple, creating a technological revolution that would change the direction technology was in. A year earlier, in June of 2006, David Koslow was a Stanford Computer Science Intern at Palm, working on the Palm OS browser, Blazer. When completing his Masters with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction, Dave worked as an intern at Google, working as part of the Google Alerts team, where he worked on back-end database optimization.

When Dave finished his studies Stanford in 2008, Apple had changed the world with their mobile device, and Dave already had his finger on the pulse of the industry. Dave dedicated himself for the next four years at Greystripe, a rich media ad network, where he flew through the ranks and led their engineering team in pursuit of success. Dave found success there, and even authored Greystripe’s native advertising SDK for iOS as well their cross-platform mobile video ad format. He would leave GreyStripe after four of incredible success to reach out into the world for himself.

In March of 2013, Dave co-founded DocSend, a sales acceleration platform that makes salespeople more effective by enabling them to track, control, send, and present sales materials with real-time document analytics. Since then he has continued to operate with DocSend as the Chief Product Officer, delineating high-level product vision and tirelessly need-finding with customers to surface opportunities. Here Dave continues to define his legacy as one of the true innovators in the industry of product design.

What’s your opinion on the current trends?

“You know I think when we, and by we I mean we collectively in the product design community, saw when there was that shift broadly to flat design, there were definitely things that were lost along the way. I think it felt like a kind of knee jerk reaction. And the fact is that we lost gradients, and the affordances of certain things being interactive. It’s been nice to see trends like material design more recently moving past that and making things like buttons once again appear interactive. And so I think that it was kind of interesting that history has us going back and forth, oscillating from things that are very skeuomorphic, like having a notebook look like a notebook, or having a desktop look like a desktop, and then moving to something more abstract, and then responding with ‘Well now we’ve tipped the scales too far in one direction’, and then we go back and forth.

And I’d like to think that over time, we’re kind of getting closer to something that strikes that perfect balance, between being visually compelling but also having those affordances so that you have an expectation of how to interact with it. One of the things I think is interesting, and I don’t know maybe this comes across as a nitpick, but we’ve been able to benefit for so many years on the desktop web, that having things like hover states and we haven’t quite gotten there yet on mobile.”

Why has it taken so long for mobile optimization to become an important factor, and push for more than just integration? With mobile technology growing every year, when will we see a unified design “language”?

“I think that we’re making good strides, and of course there is the favorite buzzword of ‘responsive design’. The fact of the matter is, there are just so few things you can code in mobile, and just have it work on desktop. So even with something like Bootstrap, you still have to go into your browser, open the inspectors, set up all the different screen sizes, have a look at how things actually will work, not to mention the fact, do the actual interaction patterns continue to make sense, even in a layout that looks good on mobile? And to be perfectly honest, I’m cautiously optimistic, but I do believe there is a sort of art to designing anything. I think that there needs to be a necessary manual process that actually goes in and patches up the design after the fact. But even with that way, whether you’re on mobile first or you’re on desktop first, you’re going to have to make a decision where you’re going to spend your energy, especially when you look at it from the view of an early stage start up, where you can only afford to focus on one, and I think for a while mobile was kind of the thing that came second. And I think that we had a bit of a knee jerk reaction to that. A lot of companies came out of the gates that are mobile-first. And so what we end up with is all sorts of services that are out there on the market that are mobile-first, and I think there were more companies that were on the market mobile-first then there was a need. I think we’re starting to see what happens when things go one way and not the other, and we’re seeing a rubber band effect where it’s starting to come back from that, and is making us ask some fundamental questions, ‘What about this application would requires that it be a mobile-first app?’”

DocSend has innovated the way people do business.

Where do you see the industry’s direction going towards?

“I’m very optimistic. I think that the way that software has advanced over the past twenty years, and additionally the way that infrastructure and cloud computing has advanced, in the past ten years, has made it so software can be written so that getting from zero to an MVP has never been faster. All of these off-the-shelf components are already there at your disposal and it’s up to you to kind of put the pieces together and create a novel application. The beauty of that is you don’t have to spend a ton of time coming up with your own real-time messaging framework, for example. You don’t have to spend all this time developing your own error reporting service.  All of that stuff is available right now through a variety of best-in-class services that really allow you to get off the ground quickly. And from a design standpoint, we’re maybe about ten or fifteen years behind. It’s still the early days, and I think that Bootstrap has been a wonderful tool for so many people. Starting DocSend, for example, we had bootstrap in place from the start, as well as these icon sets at our disposal. We could go and integrate it into our application, that actually is pretty darn good looking, really quickly. There’s just this stuff that wasn’t possible before, and I think what we’ll continue to see in the next handful of years is just further and further elaboration on that, that will develop into having more creative spirits get involved, and help establish a feedback loop that will lead to designs off-the-shelf that you can then use to go from zero to MVP incredibly quickly.”

What would you like to tell someone who is just starting, or have a desire to start getting into design?

“You know Ira Glass said something about his early days broadcasting. And I’m totally going to misquote him but, he basically said something to the extent of, Whenever you’re getting started in something, the best thing you could possibly do is to produce a high volume of work. And you’re going to look at it, and think, I suck at it, and you’re going to think it’s not good enough, and you’re going to keep at it, and you’re going to suck a little bit less. It will continue to get better, and that frustration will drive you forward. And so long as you can embrace the frustration, and make it a positive force in your feedback loop, it will drive you to continue creating and get back up and continue to produce a high volume of work. That’s going to be your way forward. Just do it, over and over, and over again.”

What one Sci-Fi technology would you want to have right now, and what would you do with it?

“Okay I’m going to answer this without sounding too cheesy, but I would say the lifeblood of what I do is rooted in understanding the customer. Getting inside their head, asking them questions, understanding what keeps them up at night. What’s the first thing they do when they come into the office, the first thing you do in the morning? What are the challenges? If I could have some way of doing a bit more than swapping shoes with them, to really for a moment experience life from their perspective, that would be incredible. An empathy machine.”

If you could give the person you were when you began on your career one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?

“I think you’re never going to know everything. So you might as well just go ahead and get started, and give it your best shot. Because we can be preparing for the future our entire lives and never get to that point where we take the plunge and move forward from preparing to actually doing it. I think, especially when I was going to school at Stanford, ‘Wow, I’m just so far behind.’ I remember one summer in college I actually read the O’Reilly book on HTML from cover to cover. And like, who does that? Why would you do that? That’s how deeply I felt I had all this ground to cover, that I had to catch up. And you can really get into your head, that feeling of inadequacy, that you have all this stuff you have to cover until you know those things. That you’re not ready to get started. The fact of the matter is you are never going to know all the things. You’re never going to check all the checkboxes. And the best thing, the best way is to get out there, give it your all, and learn from your mistakes. And get back up, get back in there, and keep going.”

We are so honored to share a fascinating interview with Nicholas C. Zakas, a front-end engineer, author, and speaker, with our readers. He is a Principal Architect at Box and has worked on and lead several projects with Yahoo! where he worked as a Front-end Tech lead for the Yahoo! homepage. Nicholas personally shares his first unsettling year at Yahoo! and the solutions he created to help overcome some serious obstacles. Along with his contribution to Box’s success in their early years of immense growth and his impacting, long-term fight with Lyme disease to which he ultimately contributes part his success as a high-performance engineer.

How did you first get your start at Yahoo!?

Initially, I was set to interview with Google in California. I figured while I was there I could meet up with other people in California. I sent an email to a couple people out there including Thomas Shaw, the creator of YUI, and had a good conversation about the state of the web. He eventually told me that if I was considering moving all the way across the country, that I should also interview with Yahoo! I flew back to interview with Yahoo! and Google, In both cases I had the same reaction. Both events produced a high level of anxiety. I am to this date a very nervous air traveler. This trip, in particular, was very anxiety provoking because I had also never traveled on my own before. I was so nervous before the flight I threw up. To calm myself down I kept telling myself “this is just an experience, go in and see how it goes. I don’t need both of these guys, but this is a good possibility. If I didn’t get the job that was fine.”

I ended up getting offers from both companies.

How did you transition from Yahoo! to where you are now?

At the time I took the path less traveled, I choose to go to Yahoo! instead of Google. A lot of people ask me why I choose Yahoo! over google. It was really a question of fit. I felt like I fit better at Yahoo! over Google. I could picture myself better.

Once at Yahoo! I felt like a fish out f water for about 9 months. I was working with people who are incredibly smart and solved problems on such a massive scale. I came from pretty small companies, 100 – 300 and I was at a company who had 10K people when I was there. Even the intern of the group I was working with. I felt like the intern knew more than I did. I had never worked with Linux before and the intern knew Linux and looked down on me like “you don’t know what you’re doing”. I was really overwhelmed and wasn’t sure if I was going to cut it. but I took it as a challenge, working on my Yahoo! was a really great introduction and there was a lot of smart people surrounding me from which I could ask questions.

After about a year and a half there I felt like I found my stride. I stepped up into more of a lead position where I was being told that I was building some really high quality stuff and was tasked to teach other how I do things so we can raise the level of quality across the board. I started thinking more of what it means to be a tech lead and a lead software engineer vs someone who just does what they are told. That sort of transitioned me into a larger role onto the Yahoo! homepage where we were rewriting it from scratch, in a way that was very framework focused so that we could launch Yahoo! home pages that were specific to different locals. We could have one in India, France, Japan, China in the appropriate language for that local.

It was pretty daunting at the time. It’s one of those things where the first thing you ask is “What is the team?” because you need more than just two people to wrap their brain around just an elaborate project. Knowing that you have a good team around you is key. Myself and other people who were working on My Yahoo!, ended up being chosen to work on the Yahoo! Homepage project because of the great job we did on My Yahoo!.

The problem was in order of magnitude larger because of the traffic, ad revenue, and the requirement that the homepage can never go down; no 500 errors, no 404, no server failed to respond, that is just not acceptable. Every second is bringing in money, which means every second it’s down it is losing money. We had to get very deep into the product requirement for each region.

There were a lot of interesting challenges technically. It’s one thing to design a homepage to work for the US. When you switch to a country like Japan, where the topography of the characters is much more compressed, you end up with having to solve for a lot of extra whitespace. We also had to account for languages that are written from right to left without requiring for a whole new homepage design. There was also my first bite of being a leader on a large team, my manager made it clear that the responsibility for the entire homepage fell on me. That meant having to organize people, resources and technology to make sure that the homepage was running as smooth as possible. Worked with a team of about 24 people distributed between USA, London, India, and Korea. I had to figure out how to get all of these people working on the same code base, while staying out of each other’s way because they were all working in different time zones. That I look back on as my crucible in term of how a lot of best practices were developed in my mind. It was really the lessons that I learned there that lead me to the position at Box.

What are you focusing on with Box, and what unique challenges do you face there?

What attracted me to Box was that I was looking for a new challenge. I quickly came to realize at Yahoo! that I was solving the same types of problems in the same space. I really wanted to do something where the solution to the problem wasn’t already known to me. I was introduced to Box through a friend who had worked there. I realized that they were in a very interesting position. Box was growing like crazy, and the processes and technology were not keeping up.

There is a scaling problem, not just technology wise but also process-wise, it seemed like there was some basic automation that was missing that could alleviate some of the stress about not being sure if their code was going to break something or not.  I wasn’t entirely sure how i was going to fix everything but being able to help a rapidly growing company scale into a large company, a lot of people don’t get that kind of opportunity. I felt like I could make a significant difference to the company as a whole.

First was how do we automate a lot of manual processes, which was a problem that they started to work on before was there but there was a lot of things that were not being done like any sort of linting for JavaScript. Now we have a very robust linting system using ESLint that has our own plugable rules, now what we’re able to do, if we go through a post mortem of a product and discover that there is some JavaScript that was missing we just create a rule that will flag that from now on so we don’t encounter that same error again. We did a whole tooling upgrade where we have linting for CSS as well and improved the compression of images. Really optimizing our static asset pipeline by switching to UglifyJS which gave us better savings.

Also started digging into the process of how we communicate with one another. What I saw a lot of was complaining on code reviews about things where done. which isn’t bad, except you could get a lot of opposite opinions about how things should work because it really slows down the development products. One of the first things I did was get everybody together and decide on a style guide, then we were able to focus on higher level problems like, How code is structured? Is it structured well, will it lead to more bugs at the future?

After that I headed up a team called frontend frameworks and what we did was look at how we could start to create some decoupled pieces in our frontend. One of the complaints we heard a lot was “I’m afraid to make changes because when I do It tends to break something that is unrelated to what I’m working on, and we don’t find that, until a customer reports an error in productions.” And that’s a very bad situation to be in for an engineer. That was a top priority to solve, we have to give people confidence in the changes that they are making so that we will fix changes and they will fix bugs.In this case I knew that there was no possibility that we would be given time to rewrite the entire application. You rarely get to rewrite something from scratch that brings in a lot of revenue. IT just doesn’t happen. What you have to do is look for a path forward that you can do in an incremental way. We had to figure out a path, from the mess that we have now, to a pristine future knowing that you’re not going to get it all at once.

What we did was create a very small framework called T3, which is now open sourced. It’s primary goal was to create loosely coupled components that had very specific jobs; so that when you had to create something new you asked one question, Is this a behaviour, module, or a service? By limiting people’s choices, you give them confidence. Each of those component restrict and prevent you from negatively affecting your code or other people’s code. Essentially you are replacing small pieces of the application with T3 components without needing to rewrite everything with everything else continuing to work.

“We very slowly built up and continued to created Islands of sanity in an ocean of insanity, until eventually you had a giant island where people could function with a high level of confidence and get get to the point where they could write test without fear.”

I‘m not really trying to compete with ReactJS, AngularJS, or Backbone.JS. That was never the goal to get into a framework war or to convince that T3 was better. It was meant to help those who were in a similar situation to the one we were in, where you cannot afford to do a full rewrite; and you need something that can help you to organize your code and you need work alongside any other framework you already have, then T3 might be something that could help you make that transition to get to a better state.

What are you most excited about regarding new technologies that interest you?

The thing that I’m most excited about is how tooling has been improving by leaps and bounds for frontend engineers. I remember when I was first (in 2000) full time job doing web development if you had any sort of problem it was a nightmare trying to figure out what the problem was and how to prevent it in the future. Back then we put in alert statements everywhere in Javascript, to figure out where you code was going. In CSS you had to keep deleting things until you found what was causing you bad layout. It could literally take week to debug a typo! Because you didn’t have any insight to what was going on.

Looking at tools for front end engineers now is incredibly exciting! You have the Chrome DevTools, Firefox Developer Tools, even the new Microsoft Edge tools are incredible! You have things like Fiddler, a free debugging proxy, that lets you look really close at the HTDD that’s going in and out. There is a lot better linting tools, to toot my own horn, CSS Lint. There is a lot more in terms of testing, better automated testing solutions for JavaScript like Mocha, Tape and istanbul which gives you code coverage for JavaScript. I find myself relying on these tools do much now to give myself confidence that I have run enough tests. I rely on Webpack, module bundler and Browserify that make it easier to create JavaScript that can run on an brower and a server. I’m so excited about all this because the productivity gains we are getting out of our frontend engineers now and will continue to get as we move forward are really what I think is helping to push the web as a whole forward. The reason we are able to continue to evolve, and introduce new features to the web platform is because the tooling has gotten so good. It goes back to confidence, the better confidence that you can give engineers in what they are doing on a day to day basis, the more they will feel free to try new things, innovate, and fix old things. As a result you see the feedback loop becoming a lot tighter, even with ECMAScript 6 (ES6) which long time to finalize, you have tools like Babel (JavaScript compiler tool) that people started using and where able to give feedback into the process, in order to find problems, so when ES6 was finalized people wouldn’t run into those same issues.

Do you see potentially a book on some of these tools you use, to help other people learn tools before they need to know this?

IT’s been a thought. I’m working on a book on ECMAScript 6 that should come out next year, that’s where I’m focusing a lot of my energy. I did make a brief attempt at doing an overview of tooling in my book Maintainable JavaScript, which is really about working on a large JavaScript code base as a team, and what that entails. It talks about the importance of style guides, code conventions, as well as splitting out different types of functionality and loose coupling. These are all things that are really important when working in a team to be able to work in the same codebase without stepping on each other toes. In the last section of the book is actually on tooling and putting together a build process for JavaScript where I talk about linting and testing. Basically it was the javascript ecosystem at the time that I wrote the book and how to put a build process together using ANT, which nobody uses anymore, because now everybody is using Grunt, Gulp, or Broccoli the latest build tools that are out there.

It also showed me the difficulting for writing a book for tooling in JavaScript because of how rapidly that landscape changes. which is a general problem when writing about technology anyway. When writing one of my books, I was about to finish it then Chrome was released, which is an entirely new browser. so I had to stop the presses and go back and update the entire book for Chrome. It involves a lot of deep thinking to make sure the book is still relevant by the time the book hit the presses.

You’ve kept yourself busy with Yahoo!, Box, and writing books. I read on your blog that you have been fighting with Lyme disease, can you share some of the struggles you’ve had dealing with that along with work/life balance?

It’s definitely been a struggle for a long time. I first developed symptoms in 1998, they are primarily fatigue and flu like symptoms: nausea, headaches and body aches. When it initially hit me I was sick for about a year and nobody at the time knew what it was. I wasn’t diagnosed until about two years ago. I would feel relatively normal for about two or three months, and then I would relapse again feel very ill. It comes and goes as part of the disease process. For the beginning of my career I was living a normal live and had a lot of energy. At 22 years old if you took half of my energy away due to the disease I still had a lot of energy. At the beginning of my career I got into such a bad state I was forced to take short term disability for 12 weeks, That is really hard, at a young age 23/24 years old, for your ego go through something like that. I felt like I could still do everything I needed to do. It wasn’t until I got closer to 30, I really started struggling and was sick for an extended period of time.

Once I got through that, I took a job at Yahoo! moved out to California by myself. The stress of the move across the country to an area where I didn’t know anybody caused my health to get worse.

Being caught up in this new job where I was trying to learn and adapt to a large, new company. Really, I ended up struggling with depression for the first year. For every almost everyday of that first year, I would go home after work and just cry because it felt like too much and I didn’t know how to make anything better.

There was several conversation with my Mom where she would tell me “this is just too much” and I keep saying “No, I need to make it at least one year!” that was really important to me. After one year it did start to get a little easier, work started to calm down, I felt more confident and like I actually belonged. work became my haven, it was what was holding me together. I was spending a lot of time going to doctors getting test done, and not getting anything out of that while continuing to get sick. Work became something where I could focus my attention on and I actually had control over. I found going into work as something I would look forward to because I could occupy my mind with thoughts other than how tired or sick I felt.

That started to bleed into my non-work hours because I felt too sick to go out and do something, I would stay in and think about what I had learned recently that I could write about. Writing became a great escape for me. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to optimize the way that I work.

Given that I didn’t have the energy to do absolutely everything, what are the things that I should be spending my energy on?

In that way the lyme disease help me become a better engineer, In that I stopped focusing on low impact things and started focusing on the areas that would make a big difference. As it turns out those are the traits of a good engineer.

The difference between high-performance engineers and everyone else is that they choose to spend their time on things that have a bigger impact than the other engineers do.

Once I realized that it’s a typical occurrence when you have a scare resource. You are required to find better ways to use that resource. I ended up focusing a lot of my energy on more high impact things, more books, blogs, talks and ended burning myself out.

I went through a period where I worked for myself. When you work for yourself the days all blend together and there is no end to your work day. I had to limit myself with a 9-5 work day and I got into much better habits that way. It is important not just when you are struggling with an illness, it is important as a human being to focus on other things besides coding. That allowed me to have room other things I was interested in, I got into meditating, took cooking classes, pilates, Yoga. As it turned out that was really good because the past year and a half I was too weak to leave my house and had to be able to take better care of myself by cooking healthy food and doing little exercising as I could to stay active as that is part of the healing process. The people at Box would say “Wow you are producing so much!” I was really not working 40 hrs a week, instead working between 30 – 35 hours a week based on what I could physically do. When I was working I was focusing my energy on high impact tasks so that the results of my work where a lot bigger, versus just doing every random thing that came up.

looking back, I can’t say it has been fun having Lyme disease but by having these constraints on me has been the driver that has enabled my success. Without it I can’t say that I would have been able to find the work/life balance I need or the ability to ruthlessly prioritize the things that I needed to spend my energy on.

Nicholas C. Zakas blogs regularly at http://www.nczonline.net/ and can be followed on Twitter via @slicknet. He is the author of resourceful books in the development of best practices for progressive enhancement, accessibility, performance, scalability, and maintainability.

Check out  Nicholas’ five-star rated books!

Maintainable JavaScript (O’Reilly, 2012), Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox, 2012), High Performance JavaScript (O’Reilly, 2010), and Professional Ajax (Wrox, 2007).

The vast significance and impring that WordPress has left on the design community is practically incalculable. It’s one of the most popular open source CMS engines for building any website from a simple blog to a business with e-commerce capabilities.

Jonathan Torke is a professional web designer & developer who recently broke out into launching his own professional WordPress theme site JotoThemes. In this interview we cover a little about Jonathan’s background and how he got started as a developer, later delving into the complexities of WordPress and his tips for young developers on how they can improve their knowledge of WordPress theme construction.

Q: Can you share a little about your history working on the web? How did you get into building websites & what kept you interested in the field?

One year after finishing school I started work in 2008 in a young online business. At first I had designed flyers and screen designs. I had no idea about how to write HTML, CSS, or PHP. But I had great support from the management.

The technical knowledge of web design and the administrative aspects I could catch up with very quickly.

Starting with Joomla and Drupal I was immediately fascinated by template design. This fascination grew into a substantial part of my life, both professionally and privately.

Eventually the company needed a multisite system for various projects. I was looking for the solution, and so I came to WordPress.

It was finally the solution for multi-site systems which were also easy to maintain. WordPress captivated me from the very beginning. That was a major turning point.

Q: Why did you gravitate towards WordPress theme development? And why did you choose WordPress over another CMS like Drupal?

Before I discovered WordPress I worked exclusively with Joomla and Drupal.

Joomla was complicated and the user interface was overloaded. To create multilingual menus was very difficult (to name just one example). When facing problems that could not be answered by the community, it took a long time for me to locate competent solutions.

With Drupal I actually had a very positive development experience. It was so easy to realize very complex systems with a large number of members. Drupal gives you a big empty house with solid ground. Drupal allows you maximum freedom. The only limiting factors are your ideas and creativity.

But Drupal updates were tedious, not to mention the setup required a lot of preparatory work and time. For example, you had to install modules for the use of a text editor or to integrate media into webpages.

Also Drupal maintenance took a lot of time and often got on my nerves. Because of this I have not worked with Drupal for serval years.

Today I’m certain Drupal would be much better than it was til 2011.

WordPress is just much easier to use and easier to program. The WordPress Codex is very logical and the theming structure is very clear.

Q: How did you get the idea for JotoThemes & how long has it been online?

JotoThemes is very young. The website first launched in mid-April of 2015.

I had worked for several years as a web designer and front-end developer. During that time I had many different tasks, but my greatest passion was online marketing and creating CMS templates (Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress). With WordPress I had the most fun.

I just could not stop working on themes. Even in my spare time I spent countless hours trying to understand and love WordPress. At that time I wanted to do nothing more than create WordPress Themes.

At the company where I worked we eventually moved from Joomla to WordPress, and we slowly became experts on WordPress sites.

In 2011 i was finally allowed to completely specialize on developing WordPress Themes. In autumn of 2012 I started this idea of WordPress theme development on paper & worked out a business plan.

In spring 2013 I had started my own business. And 18 months later I published my first WordPress Theme on jotothemes.com. The second theme is already in development.

Q: How do you choose which features to add into each theme? Do you always include WP features like shortcodes, custom widgets, etc?

Over the past few years I’ve been working on customer sites and have talked with many customers about their wishes. During this time I’ve learned which functions are often needed for certain websites.

In addition I run my own websites. As a blogger(http://pixeltuner.de/) I look at each theme from the user’s perspective, and not from the perspective of a developer. This reminds me of which features I find most useful while blogging.

These can be small things like any of these ideas:

• disable the sidebar or header
• show a visitor count on a page/pages
• link Twitter usernames when mentioned
• reserve Premium content for logged in users
• or e-mail address encryption

My Theme library includes more than 40 different shortcodes to allow such functions.

Other additional functions such as colors, font settings, Google Analytics tracking code, 1-Click Child theme Auto Installer and much more can be enabled+configured in the Theme Settings area.

We also have many additional features that you can show via widgets such as Customer Testimonials, popular social networks, a Flickr-powered photo gallery, custom calendar, recent comments and a whole lot more.

Q: What’s your typical workflow from start-to-finish for building a new WordPress theme?

At the beginning I create the layout and design with Photoshop. Then I program the theme.

Basically, my themes consist of two components:

1. A self-made basic theme, including templates
2. A library/framework with a variety of useful options and plugins. The theme library is integrated into the functions.php file.

Q: It also looks like some of your themes support WooCommerce. What are your thoughts on WooCommerce? Do you think it can compete with eCommerce CMS’ like Magento?

If you‘re planning a larger series of products when you start an online store, then you should rely on the system with the largest possibilities. If your online business’ e-commerce needs are generally limited, then WooCommerce offers a quick & easy solution.

Both systems have their pros and cons.

In summary it can be said that the website owners can accomplish quite a lot alone with WooCommerce. While Magento makes professional help needed due to its complexity and its own structure,  WooCommerce works completely in the frame, which is specified by WordPress and is considered a lightweight application.

Q: Are there any designers or particular websites that inspire your own work?

There are so many creative minds out there. It’s very difficult to decide on certain designer.

Let me say that I am open to anyone with good ideas.

Q: Do you have any resources or tips for a frontend developer who wants to learn how to build WordPress themes? Where would you suggest they start?

As a WordPress theme developer you should have fun while learning to write code.

The most important languages are:

• HTML: This is the context in which all page elements are housed
• CSS: Ensures that HTML looks pretty. Your theme design will depend on CSS to stand out from all the other themes.
• JavaScript: JS Fundamentals are useful to know because WordPress works with JS scripts & plugins. JavaScript can be used within theme files and Child Themes.
• PHP: To be able to write any CMS code in WordPress, you need PHP. WordPress is built on PHP with its own internal functions and classes.

You cannot know everything, especially not at first.

Beginners only need to know where to get their questions answered. With a bit of research you’ll find many well-known free online resources such Tuts+ or Treehouse, along with many others.

The best way to become a good WordPress theme developer is by simply doing it. To understand what‘s important in Theme Development, try to build a few themes from scratch.Use simple Photoshop web design templates and try to remake them into a WordPress theme.

Note: Start with a very simple design (header, main content, sidebar, footer), nothing too complex. Frameworks such bootstrap are very useful when creating mobile friendly WordPress themes.

I always start with a piece of paper and sketch the layout. Then I create a design in Photoshop for the homepage & internal pages before I even write my first line of code. This is vital so that I can visualize my design idea before trying to make it.

Plus making updates is a lot easier and faster using Photoshop rather than code.

My proven method is: Sketching -> Mockups -> Screen Design -> Code

In summary:

• Learning by doing. Do not be afraid of doing something wrong. Start out by editing a simple WP install, either locally or on a test server. Never on a live site.
• In the beginning work locally to save on server resources. Use tools such as MAMP or XAMPP.
• Start with a good Blank Theme. I recommend a starter theme such as Underscores(_s)
• Reference the WordPress Codex: https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
• Learn from the community. WordPress is famous for its large and active community. If you have questions, turn to them. You’ll often receive competent answers in a very short period of time.

Q: Do you still have time to practice & improve your skills? Are there any new techniques or dev languages you hope to learn?

It’s not about time. It’s about hurdles that must be overcome in order to reach a next higher level.

The technical requirements are becoming more complex. At first I was up all night long busy optimizing websites for IE 6. Today all mobile devices must be integrated into the web design as well. And the most important thing is to ensure optimum performance.

If I need to learn a new dev language for that goal or to improve my skills, I do so with great joy. In this way I multiply my knowledge and experience to build a better version of myself.

Although web technology is becoming more complex, the beauty of it is that you’re not alone with your problems. Today there are more and more tools, frameworks, and libraries provided for free by enthusiastic developers. Open source has truly changed the way we build websites.

Q: In your opinion what changes do you think we’ll see over the next 3-5 years in the field of web design/development?

Overall I find it very difficult to assess trends for the next 3-5 years. Technologies are becoming more complex. Every innovation is difficult to learn and becomes obsolete within a few years.

I think that WordPress themes are increasingly no longer built the old way (quasi from zero).

Frameworks, Theme generators, and libraries deliver excellent preparatory work into which developers can incorporate their skills and ideas. These tools include default web standards to considerably optimize the workflow.

Although web projects can’t be realized that much more more quickly, there is more time for quality assurance. The future will show that there will be less bad design, bad code, and overall fewer bad projects.

The job of a web designer initially suffered bad reputation and has recently gone through a re-professionalisation.

Times have changed in our favor and the demand continues to grow. Customers and users are now increasingly able to recognize good quality work. Customers do not just want a website – they want a responsive, well-designed & well-maintained website.

Q: And finally can you offer some parting advice for other web designers/developers?:

Don’t invest too much time in the planning of ideas. Start today, so that your visions become reality tomorrow.

Have you thought hard about working as a web designer or WordPress theme developer? Today is the perfect day to start. And if you’ve already started, now is the best time to test your current knowledge, improve your abilies, and continue to learn. Open your eyes to new ideas. Look at old things from a new perspective.

As a web designer, theme developer, or any other kind of designer/developer you will find your future in this industry if you’re willing to continously improve yourself.

Your job should be fun. And that’s the point – doing something that you believe & that you love. No matter how bad your future looks in this industry, hard work & perserverence will ensure that you’ll find your place in it.

Many thanks to Jonathan for taking his time out for this great interview. If you’d like to learn more about him you’ll find info on his personal website Pixelturner(German), or you can follow him on Twitter @jonathantorke.