50 Interviews of Popular Web Designers, Developers and Founders
What drives someone to become a success? Why do people persevere when the odds are against them? Is there a secret to becoming successful? The best way to find out is to interview people who have been there, and done that, who have spent their lives in a pursuit of success in one form or another. And that’s exactly what we has done in this amazing collection of interviews.
The top people of yesterday and today offer their insights into their success and into their lives. In a conversational style, these easy-to-read interviews explore the minds and lives of 50 different entrepreneurs, web designers & developers, and design artists, all who have achieved the pinnacle of success in their fields.
The interviews move along at a fast past and the entire collection is a quick read. These aren’t long drawn-out in-depth interviews, but what they may lack in length they make up in substance. They showcase these legends as real people, complete with mistakes and missteps they’ve had along the way.
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Interviews of Popular Designers, Developers and Founders
What’s interesting is that you get a sense of all the various reasons why people become successful. There’s no one ‘formula’, but rather a combination of things. For me, it was fascinating to read about how many picked themselves up after financial and personal disasters only to continue on. So let’s get started and feel free to let us know who your favorite designer is? And of course why?
Interview of Populer Accomplished Founders
01. Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. As a Harvard student, he created the online social website Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates. Facebook is a social networking site popular worldwide. Zuckerberg serves as Facebook’s CEO. Time Magazine added Zuckerberg as one of The World’s Most Influential People of 2008. Zuckerberg fell under the Scientists & Thinkers category for his web phenomenon, Facebook, and ranked 52 out of 101 people
02. SmashingMagazine – Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz
The Smashing Magazine is an online magazine dedicated to designers and web-developers. Its main purpose is to deliver high quality content related to web design regularly. It is maintained by Vitaly Friedman, a freelancing web-developer and Sven Lennartz, the chief-editor of the German web design magazine Dr. Web.
03. Envato – Colliss Ta’eed
Collis Ta’eed founded a little company called Envato back in 2006, and three years later it has flourished into a corporation with 18 extremely successful subsidiaries that employ writers and designers from all over the world. Its diversity ranges from tutorial blogs covering almost every topic in the design world, to successful marketplaces that provide you with all the design materials you will ever need.
04. BuySellAds – Todd Garland
Todd is the founder of BuySellAds.com and shares with us the benefits of using a middleman to sell your advertising, in a very short time his service has become the number one go to company for selling banner advertising on your website.
05. DeviantArt – Angelo-Sotira
Angelo Sotira, DeviantArt’s CEO helped pioneer deviantART after the internet’s “boom days” with Scott Jarkoff and Matt Stephens. Scott ensured that deviantART functioned code-wise and community-wise, Matt focused on making sure that the world knew about what promise deviantART offered to aspiring artists, and Angelo covered the legal and some techinical bases, including directing the business concerns of deviantART as a company.
06. Nick La
Nick is a well known freelance illustrator and web designer based in Toronto. He is the founder of N.Design Studio, and popular blog Web Designer Wall, Design Jobs on the Wall, and Best Web Gallery. He also recently launched his new site Icondock exclusively dedicated to icons.
07. Abduzeedo – Fabio Sasso
Fabio Sasso is widely regarded as one of the best Photoshop tutorial writer in the design world, having written countless articles for PSDTUTS, and for his own hugely popular blog Abduzeedo. He owns his company site, Zee in Brazil with business partner, Fabiano Meneghetti. His design focus is on Graphic and Web design.
08. iStockPhoto – Bruce LivingStone
Bruce is the founder of iStockphoto, the world’s biggest FREE image and stock website on the Internet. Back in 2006 Bruce sold iStockphoto for $50 million to Getty Images and has since stayed on as the CEO and in this interview he shares his top tips and lets us know how he has built up iStockphoto to such a high level.
09. Netvibes – Freddy Mini
Freddy Mini is the CEO of netvibes. He previously served as Chief Operating Officer where he oversaw Netvibes’ worldwide business strategy, while leading the company’s rapid expansion across four continents. This included the establishment of Netvibes US Office in San Francisco in 2006. Prior to Netvibes, he was the co-founder of musicMe (the first music search service), the CEO of Ziff-Davis (France), and the Senior VP and Managing Director of CNET Networks Europe.
10. Pixel2Life – Dan Richard
A personal interview with the owner of one of the largest websites to date! Dan gives beginners some tips to getting started, and shows how he started his own career. There are lots of good Photoshop tutorial sites but few sites offer the whole enchilada as far as being a developer’s one-stop shop. Pixel2Life does a pretty good job. Not only does it offer a great selection of Photoshop tutorials, the site also features a large collection of tutorials for Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver and a slew of other programs.
11. Tutorial9 – David Leggett
David Leggett, the creative mind behind Tutorial9 and the upcoming BetterBlogger.net. David was recently named by Retire at 21 as one of the web’s top young bloggers – 21 and under. An amazing achievement like this deserves some recognition
12. Mint – Shaun Inman
Shaun Inman is a successful designer and developer living and working out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. His interest in design gradually shifted to web design and development thanks to many well-documented open-source and standards-based technologies. Shaun Inman is the creator of Mint and sIFR image replacement technology. You can learn much more about him in this interview.
13. theFWA – Rob Ford
TheFWA’s founder Rob Ford comes from a background in finance, sales and project management and created the site without external funding. Rob took time out, 9 years on to tell us about his experiences building not only a respected awards site, but a solid business around it.
14. Veerle Pieters
Veerle” does the name rings the bell? I am sure many of you will reply with affirmation! Yes, Veerle Pieters, a web and print designer based in Belgium who runs her prolific studio, Duoh! along with Geert Leyseele. She is also the author of a popular design blog. With a initial background in graphic design and print, before she got involved in web design, she has a well rounded education which has made her one of the most versatile designers in the industry.
15. Vlad Gerasimov
Digital artist, Vlad Gerasimov, who is from Irkutsk, Russia. He runs Vladstudio which specializes in creating wallpapers for computers and mobile devices.
In this interview, Vlad shares with us his humble beginnings as a designer and how he got started with creating wallpapers as full-time self-employment. He also shares his ideas, inspirations, and future plans. Vlad has a unique style of illustration, with simple lines and shapes. His work has great themes, which promises to win the hearts of viewers and make them happy!
Interview of Populer Designers/Developers/Artists
16. Giulia Balladore
Giulia Balladore is an illustrator based in Italy. She has a extraordinary and hyper-realistic style of illustration which possesses the rare talent of breathing personality and life into her vector drawings. Her illustrations are beautiful, alive and captures the spirit of modern women.
17. Cristiano Siqueira
Cristiano Siqueira who is also popularly known as Crisvector is a a highly acclaimed Brazilian designer and illustrator. He specializes in digital and vector illustrations. After some years of working as a graphic designer and art director, in 2005, he started to work full time as freelancer, creating illustrations for advertising, publishing and print design. His illustrations are a style statement on there own and are a great source of inspiration.
18. Chris Coyier
Many of us here at InstnatShift are big fans of Chris Coyier and his work on CSS-Tricks.com. Throughout the years Chris has published many tutorials, websites, and scripts to help designers and developers improve their skills. Today, we will sit down with the man behind these articles, and chat with him about CSS, design, and life in the town of Portland.
19. Simon Oxley
Simon Oxley is a British Illustrator and designer living in Fukuoka, Japan. Simon moved to Japan to work in a design company based in Harajuku, Tokyo. Since 2002, he runs his own design and illustration studio, Idokungfoo, and works for clients from all over the world.
He produces illustrated imagery for iStockphoto and he designed the iStockphoto logo. Simon is also the creator of the cute bird graphic that you see on Twitter’s homepage. His work features strong Japanese influence and his illustrations are simple and refreshing.
20. Elena Savitskaya
Elena Savitskaya is a 22 year-old designer from London. She studied marketing management and graphic design, and became a graphic designer for an oil company prior to working for an online marketing agency. She just quit her job to concentrate 100 percent on freelancing.
21. David Airey
David Airey is a talented self-employed graphic designer in Edinburgh, Scotland, spending the majority of his time creating, and advising on, marketing promotions, such as corporate identity, advertising campaigns, brochures, and running a great logo and graphic design blog. Logo design has been his passion since David was in his teens. He has recently launched his second website – Logo Design Love – dedicated to logo design exclusively.
22. Oksana Grivina
Oksana’s is a talented illustrations designer from Russia. Her technique and style is simply adorable, not to mention the perfect color palette she uses in each and everyone of her creations.
23. Hajnrich
Maciej Hajnrich, AKA Valp Nietylko, is a designer who embraces the merging of chaos and color. He has a great sense of free-flowing composition. Look at his work long enough, and your eyes will turn into shattered rainbows. Valp is a freelancer with the ability to create unique and stylish work while being grounded in a strong work ethic
24. Adam Spizak
Adam Spizak is a unique breed of designer, from the first glance at his work you will be engulfed by very strong emotions that are just pouring out of his art. He prides himself on creating art that is visually stimulating that will make you feel something you’ve never felt as well.
Each one of his illustrations has it’s own personal background story along with a whole group of emotions that are meant to be expressed.
25. Riccardo Sabatini
Riccardo Sabatini is an interesting person and amazing designer from Italy. At a young age of 26, he had already won many design awards with his professional artworks.
26. Nathan Jurevicius
Nathan Jurevicius is one of the industry’s hardest working illustrators. Not only is he the creative force behind a swag of collectible figures, various mini comics, solo exhibitions in both Australia and overseas, a graphic novel (due to be released October ’09) and a proposed feature film. He is also responsible for the lavish styling of the newly released Scarygirl online game.
27. James White
Jame is a very talented, experienced designer from Nova Scotia, you probably have already seen his work and if you are like me you must have gotten very impressed with his style. And now we can learn a bit more from him.
28. Tessar Lo
Indonesian-Canadian artist/illustrator Tessar Lo has already been making waves in the magazine and gallery circuit. His paintings, combining Asian elements with themes of dreams, nature and human concepts, have an almost mystical aura which surely resonates with his fans.
29. Jacob Cass
Jacob Cass, the blogger behing Just Creative Design. JCD is a very famous design blog launched in November 2007 that focuses on all areas of design and creativity. Also, Jacob is a freelancer designer working in the fields of logo design, print design, web design and branding.
30. Phil Dunne
Phil Dunne is an illustrator from Dublin, Ireland, which spent the last 29 years drawing, painting, doodling and having amazingly creative thoughts. From 1999 to 2003 Phil was studying at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin to get his degree in Visual Communications. After graduating he started to built his portfolio with several different projects and clients. Since then, Phil has already produced great pieces that you probably already seen around the web or at depthCORE.
31. Charlene Chua
Charlene Chua (who is also known by her nick-name, Sygnin) is a Toronto based illustrator and a digital artist. She worked as a graphic designer, a web producer and an interactive project manager before taking the plunge into illustrations full-time. Charlene has a varied and effective commercial style of illustration.
32. Javier Ocasio
The special interview features a well-known deviant of all time Javier Ocasio, known as ‘-kol’. Every single person that uses a PC have seen at least one of his works and enjoyed the quality and detail on them. He is a real legend, and his continous efforts to amaze the community awarded him with a Seniorship status some time ago. He runs a great website and offers a wide range of options for potential clients
33. Chuck Anderson
Chuck Anderson (aka NoPattern) is a 24-years-old graphic designer that has managed to cull a list of clients that would make a seasoned designer envious. Nike, 555Soul, Pepsi, Sony, Garcia Marquez, and Reebok- just to name a few. If you ask him to, he’ll talk your head off. With a new NoPattern book- 28-pages offering a vividly saturated cross-section of his time, style, and genre- fresh off the presses, we talked to Chuck about his inspiration, his work on products and spaces, and why his world is so shiny.
34. Nate Williams
Nate Williams who is also known as Alexander Blue is an artist, illustrator and designer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nate is an incredibly prolific artist and has worked extensively in various facets of the illustration industry with a wide variety of clients.
His illustrations have a unique whimsical style, filled with vibrant colors, imagery which combines creatures and doodles. His work has appeared in magazines, advertising and products.
35. Jacob Souva
Jacob Souva is a New York based illustrator and a digital artist. After a brief hiatus away from the profession, He decided to jump into the world of freelance illustration and design. He enjoy the challenges of rendering ideas into images and love working with other creative people. He live and work from my home in Binghamton, New York.
36. Erik Johansson
Photo Manipulations are always very interesting to watch because – and that’s what is important – they give a realistic view of an unreal picture. Erik Johansson, a 23-year-old computer engineering student, from sweden has a sense for good ideas for manipulations. You can found many of his work example in one of our recent article named 80 Excellent Examples of Photo Manipulation Art.
37. Luke Feldman
Luke Feldman is an Australian artist working professionally as a multimedia designer. He has developed SKAFFS, a collection of vibrant and quirky ideas which can be best described as beautiful, elegant and colorful. His original and distinctive style of illustration makes his work easily recognizable and immediately succeeds in grabbing full attention of a viewer.
This freelance illustrator, animator and sound producer has worked for huge companies like Coca Cola, Apple, and Facebook among others. Being fun, colorful and attractive his work quite naturally translates into sculpture, animation, skate deck lines, vinyl adhesive lines, toys, and more.
38. Kyle T
Illustrator, rapper and YouTube marketeer – Kyle T. Webster has done it all. His versatile portfolio exudes the vibrancy of a rock concert (though he’s quick to note he does more than just music artwork), yet also displays a clever understanding of personalities and current affairs. Currently living in Winston-Salem, NC, Kyle works his magic on the computer for his client pieces, reserving more traditional mediums for personal projects.
39. João Oliveira
As one of the members of the worlds largest design collectives The KDU, João Oliveira strives to further advance his skills in designing. With only three years of design experience João has already perfected his own style of creating art.
A lot of his work features his signature style of simple 2D shapes mixed with vivid colors. He describes this style as being very time efficient. If he only has a limited amount of time, he can still quickly make a visually stimulating design for his client. In this interview, João talks about his involvement in the KDU, as well as where he looks for inspiration.
40. Andrio Abero
Andrio Abero, who runs 33rpmdesign.com, he kinda makes me nervous. Technically skilled, devilishly creative, and smart as a whip, there are no holes in his game. When you meet him, he’s super friendly and polite. You don’t even get the vibe that he knows how brilliant he is. He’s either an angel or some kind of robot from the future sent to prevent the art apocalypse. And scarier still, he keeps getting better!
41. Adelle Charles
Designer, blogger and devoted Twitterer Adelle Charles. Adelle, is the talented individual behind Fuel Your Creativity, and the principal creative director for the Fuel Brand Group. Also co-founder of Just Tweet It. She is also a very talented designer with an amazing portfolio.
42. Christopher Haines
Christopher Haines is a young graphic artists from Australia that brings a whole new level of digital art on to the table with his unbelievable style mixed somewhere between 3d and photo manipulation.
43. Chris Spooner
Chris Spooner, a graphic and web designer from the UK. He started out in the design field after studying for Art & Design through school, college and university. After which he landed his first full time position as a designer at a local studio before heading off into his freelance career in the later half of last year.
44. Nelson Balaban
At only 19 years of age Nelson Balaban has already done what a lot of designers find extremely difficult to do, set up a good client base and get hired for commissions. Nelson has a strong hunger to surpass himself and explore the vast world of design. “Learning is never enough” he says, showing his true dedication to his art. In this interview, Nelson will share some of his insight on attracting clients and what designers should focus on!
45. Jelle Gijsberts
Jelle Gijsberts is a illustrator, designer and animator born and raised in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. Since his graduation, he has been freelancing in the field of illustration and animation. He has illustrated a bunch of children’s books, worked with clients like Chupa Chups and Unicef.
He makes some really adorable artworks that take you through many adventures and captivating stories. His fun, bright and colorful illustrations can easily win the heart of children and grown-ups alike and will put a smile on your face!
46. Rik Oostenbroek
Rik Oostenbroek, also known as Nkeo, is an awesome graphic designer from the Netherlands. His abstract arts are famous and brought his artwork to the cover of the Computer Arts Magazine. And now the tricky part: He’s only 19 years old.
47. Marko Dugonjic
Marko Dugonjic is a web professional from Velika Gorica, Croatia. He’s recognized as an expert on web standards and standards-based web sites. By focusing on simplicity, he creates accessible and easy to use web interfaces which are both visually appealing and highly usable. He’s also the creator of the famous Typetester.
48. Jared Nickerson
Jared Nickerson is a freelance illustrator based in Seattle, Washington. I am sure you have heard about him or might have seen his brilliant vector artworks which are a constant source of inspiration. Jared specializes in character, editorial, video games, product design and runs his design studio J3Concepts.
49. Masha Gubar
Masha Gubar (AKA Limkis) is a talented digital artist from Russia. Her painterly style of vector illustrations are like poetry in visual form. Her vivid artworks are the indicators of what immense possibilities vector illustrations and programs like Adobe Illustrator are capable of.
50. Heiko Klug
Heiko Klug is a extremely bright designer residing from Germany. Heiko has a background in Graffiti that spills over into some of his current art. In this interview we discuss the equipment that is used to make his amazing art as well as Heiko’s inspirations.
Find Something Missing?
While compiling this list, it’s always a possibility that we missed some other great resources. Feel free to share it with us.
There’s a few people you’ve got listed here that I’m a big fan of. I’m definitely going to be reading those.
great list, very inspirational. It will take me a few days to follow every single link.
But istockphoto provides royalty-free images, not free pictures as mentionned.
awsome list
Nice article!
Thank you for the mention amongst these great designers / entrepreneurs and for putting the list together. -JC
Whao, this is amazing and going to be my weekend reading.
There’s always one who’ll point out an error. ;) My “workspace” link is broken (number 21). Thanks a lot!
@David Airey – Link fixed.. Thanks for the heads up !!
As a designer, business owner and general nosy get, I love interviews by people who’ve done well in this industry. This list is awesome. Might lose a few hours of worktime though.. don’t tell my wife.
Fantastic List… Got to know about the Masters….
Really nice collection! I have tons of interviews like these on my web 2.0 blog http://www.insidethewebb.com/
What an excellent compilation of interviews of some of the best representative people on the design community.
Thanks for this article
Jon Yongfook from tokio missed in the developers list. – http://www.sinanata.com/innovation/jon-yongfook-cockle-interview-rockstar-serie-2/
Damn, this is amazing list – I thought of creating such article too, but i think you’ve done it anyway better than I could! Thanks, bookmarking!
I think this great designer should also be in this list
http://dsdesign.be/
Very inspiring list. There are some illustrators I haven’t heard of. Masha Gubar’s work is amazing.
Excelent article! very inspirational…
I want to show you our work as illustrators in our site.
Please feel free to leave us a comment.
Thanks!
This article has been shared on favSHARE.net.
super and usefull
Wow, amazing list.. thanks for including me too :) Now let me start reading them.
Oh Great list and Awesome Interviews..
I guess you missed the guy Ryan Putnam (Rype) from Vectips :P
This list is simply priceless!! Never have I come across such a collective array of inspiring interviews.
Great stuff.
Ah! man the list is stunning. Thanks heaps.
Really inspiring.
Such an inclusion strategy helps to shift the responsibility for preventing problems away from professionals and agencies to the youth themselves becoming responsible for decisions that affect their lives. ,
Every community is different and every school partnership needs to find its own vision and path forward. ,
Really great list and very inspirational. I am a personal deviantART fan. and get a lot of my own stock images and so on from there.
this is a great list, thanks for all the inspiration. I hope to get on that list one of these days.
I think you missed out another great web designer. His name is Soh Tanaka.
this is a great list, thanks for all the inspiration. I hope to get on that list someday!
OMG!! love the list!! Great article, exactly what i was looking for, i have some favorites here, but there are others i haven’t heard from and I can’t wait to start my readin!! THNNXX!!
cheers!
This collection is really great. thanks for this. i find so much information that i can use myself to succeed on what am i doing.
thanks again.
Great List…
Only 7 Women out of 50 people!…It is still hard for women to get noticed in most industries…I would love to see a more balanced representation of success! :) I know these women exist…
Thanx for the list….
wah ane kok ngak dicantumin? :D
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I looked into about half of these, and half of those I viewed source on, WORD PRESS. Word Press does not impress. These people don’t belong on this list.