Interview With Chris Spooner from Blog Spoon Graphics

September 10th, 2009
Articles

A great interview with a successful blogger and freelance designer. The man behind design bumps spectacular brand new redesign, also the editor and founder of two great blogs Line 25 and Blog Spoon Graphics.

Creative Nerds: 1.Can you give us a brief insight on who you are and what you do?

Chris Spooner: I’m Chris Spooner, I’m a self employed designer slash blogger. I earn my living with a mix of client projects and blogging about the topic of design. Project wise I tend to work mostly on logo and website designs, but also take on a variety of jobs from character designs to skateboard decks.

Creative Nerds: 2. What’s been your proudest work or project you have produced or worked on so far?

Chris Spooner: I always come out with the same answer to this one, but it has to be my blog over at Blog.SpoonGraphics. It has been a brilliant tool in generating exposure online, and bringing in traffic that has allowed almost all of the opportunities I’ve had over the past year or so. When I started it back in April 2007, I never expected it to grow to anything more than just a personal experiment. Now it’s receiving great levels of popularity in the design community.

Although if I had to pick a client project, I’d say it’s the redesign I created for DesignBump. Working with John Campbell was fantastic due to the creative freedom he allowed, so I worked on the site as if it was a site of my own. The new design has received some great feedback, and it’s fantastic to see my little voting button graphic appear on sites across the web.

Creative Nerds: 3. What excites you about web design at the moment?

Chris Spooner says: Right now I’m enjoying experimenting with CSS3 properties to create nifty effects that either weren’t previously possible, or relied heavily on Photoshop imagery. I’m particularly looking forward to multiple background support, which will allow some creative layout designs that also adhere to semantic HTML coding.

Creative Nerds: 4. What advice would you offer for designers considering a career as a freelance designer?

Chris Spooner says: Make sure you can generate enough revenue to cover your basic outgoings before taking the complete plunge. Creating a passive income from blogging, guest writing or selling stock items are great ways to knit a safety net, just in case your work source goes dry. Being a regular contributor to the design community can also help build a profile, naturally providing useful marketing and networking, which can then lead to work.

Creative Nerds: 5. What are your five favourite design sites? Not including Creative Nerds of course Ha ha!

Chris Spooner says: I have an RSS reader full of subscriptions, all of which I’m finding handy content from. It’s hard to pick out favourites, but DesignM.ag, CSS Globe and DesignBump are sites that link through to stacks more articles across the web, so there’s plenty of inspiring content to pick from. A couple of blogs I’ve followed for a long while that also pump out great content are CSS-Tricks and Six Revisions.