Design

My taste in design is ecclectic. I like bright complementary colors set off with copious whitespace, intricate patterns and muted earthtones, rough photography with old-fashioned typefaces. I'm highly creative, and draw my inspiration from all areas of art and design as well as the natural world.

I could be called a perfectionist geek. I actually use things like the golden ratio and the rule of thirds in my design, and set dimensions in factors of two or ten units. I design for the Web at at quadruple screen resolution and downsample for export. In print projects, I set type so that the stems and not the serifs are aligned with the grid.

Some feel that there are no rules in design, only personal stlye and preference. While I agree that there are no hard and fast rules, I do believe in "rules of thumb", such as:

• Make good use of whitespace. (that doesn't mean fill it up)
• Use lines and shapes to lead the eye to what's important, not off into space.
• Line Things Up
• Avoid using every font or every color available.
• Don't mix centered and rag-right or -left copy.

In my experience, good designers understand these rules, either consciously or subconsciously, and only break them when there's a specific reason. I believe that this is what separates good design from bad design. It's a fuzzy line that differs from one person to the next, but most people will agree that a particular work falls on one side or the other.

Code

A quality website must be efficient, easily maintained, and easily improved over time. I believe that the following approaches offer the best way to acheive those goals:

• Templates - They greatly reduce the time needed to enter content, and allow a site to be tweaked or completely redesigned with very little revision of the code. PHP on its own is an excellent template engine.
• Stylesheets - CSS offers powerful ways to lay out and style content that aren't possible with traditional HTML. Along with templates, stylesheets make design changes very efficient.
• Standards - HTML and CSS code that complies with standards can be debugged using automatic validators, and also offers a degree of future-proofing. New browsers will probably be backward-compatible with today's standards. It's much less likely that they will be compatible with today's bugs.
• Reusable libraries and objects - less code, less development time, fewer bugs.

Business

As a designer and coder, I always strive to surpass my clients' expectations. As a freelancer, I also wear other hats at times, engaging in marketing, account management, and (my least favorite) billing and collections. I have found that good business relationships rely mainly on communication and respect. Communicating about a project clearly, early, and often ensures that everyone understands requirements, timelines, and costs. Should any minor issues arise, professionalism and courtesy go a long way toward smoothing the way.