Interview: Chris Spooner

Website: Blog.SpoonGraphics.co.uk
Twitter: @chrisspooner
Bio: I’m Chris Spooner, the guy behind design blogs Line25 and Blog.SpoonGraphics. I like zombies, robots and ninjas, I don’t like rabid goats.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a self employed designer/blogger who enjoys experimenting with all things creative. I’m a big fan of Illustrator, and always enjoy playing around with bright vector shapes to produce fun designs. I spend most of my time online keeping my two blogs up to date, as well as browsing my design feeds and chatting with my friends and contacts on Twitter.

When did you realize you wanted to get into design? Did you start with web design?

I always focused on the creative topics right through school, so I decided that Graphic Designer was to be my chosen career path from quite a young age (with superhero and astronaut backup careers). I simply followed this goal right through college and university before landing my first full time job as a Graphic/Web Designer at a small local studio. I took an interest in web design back in the days of GeoCities, but didn’t consider it as a job until midway into my university course. At this point I took more of an interest in CSS, when the big migration from tables was underway, and simply grew and developed my web knowledge from there. 

What’s the story behind SpoonGraphics?

The name SpoonGraphics and the basic branding was something I developed during my university course, and I’ve stuck with it since as a base for my freelance work. During my first design job in April 2007 I set up a blog under the domain and began posting out tutorials and freebies after seeing sites like Smashing Magazine and BittBox spring up. After a short while the posts started gaining popularity and the blog developed more and more exposure to SpoonGraphics and subsequently me as a designer. After a year or so I’d reached a point where I was bringing in lots of freelance work through the blog, so I took the jump into self employment. Nowadays I’m enjoying spending quality time working on personal design projects and sharing any new tips and knowledge I learn through tutorials and articles.

Has Twitter become a major source of traffic to SpoonGraphics?

Twitter is becoming an increasingly more prominent source of traffic for sure. With resources like the Tweetmeme retweet buttons, it now seems to be the most popular social tool alongside StumbleUpon and Digg for people to vote with. Twitter is currently placed 6th in the top traffic sources section of my Analytics stats.

Any tips on Twitter networking?

Just have fun sharing resources with like minded people. I find it’s always great to communicate and chat with fellow designers from around the world. I think some people try to hard to ‘network’ and end up coming across as robotic. Just be yourself and chat with people as you would in person. Aim to help people out whenever you can, whether it’s sharing interesting links, figuring out a problem or offering advice.

A “members only” area is not something you see often on design blogs – how has this worked for you?

The Access All Areas section of Blog.SpoonGraphics is coming along nicely. There’s a good collection of users in there already, who seem to be continuing their membership, so this must be a good sign that the stuff I’m posting in there is proving interesting! It’s still in the fairly early days but there’s quite an extensive range of goodies available already. The great thing is as time goes on, the value only gets higher.

What other blogs do you frequent? Where do you look for ideas and inspiration?

I have stacks of design blog feeds in my RSS reader, but a few that I’ve found great articles on recently include Build Internet, Design Informer, Vectortuts and Vectips. I often find those sparks of inspiration while browsing my feeds. A showcase of artwork from a particular designer might lead to me wanting to try out a new style for myself, or a roundup of print designs might give me an idea for a new WordPress theme. Checking out what others are coming up with always inspired me to experiment and practice more myself.

Favourite tools for the job (hardware/software)?

I use a 15″ MacBook Pro alongside a 24″ LED Cinema Display as my main hardware setup (photo below), and the Adobe Creative Suite as my design tools, with Photoshop and Illustrator being the two places I spend most of my time. Other apps I enjoy using are Coda for any website development, Things for task management and Spotify for daily music.

If you could have done one thing differently when starting your design career, what would it have been?

I’m pretty happy with how my career is working out so far, so there’s nothing drastic I’d change. When looking back at some of the early works and posts on my blog it makes me cringe, and wish that I’d known about certain design rules and best practices, but learning and growing is what it’s all about!