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Today WebM.ag is Speaking with Andy Budd, Andy is the MD at ClearLeft and does a great deal in the design community, Andy and his team organise conferences such as Dconstruct and UX London. Andy is also a frequent speaker at events and even squeezes time to write a few books such as CSS Mastery!

WebM.ag: So Andy, Tell our readers a little about yourself and what you do?
AB: I currently run a user experience consultancy in Brighton which helps international organisations like eBay, NBC Universal and WWF (the panda lovers, not the wrestlers) improve the online experience their users have. So doing everything from improving the usability and conversion rates on registration and check-out processes through to planning and designing completely new digital products and services. So we’re sort of like architects or products designers for the web.

On top of the consultancy work we organise a couple of big web design conferences like dconstruct.org and the upcoming uxlondon.com. We also develop silverbackapp.com, a low cost usability testing tool for the Mac. Oh, and we’re in the process of launching fontdeck.com, a new font embedding service. It sounds like a lot but there are really just fun side projects and our way of giving something back to the community.

Talking about the community, I’m also very active on the conference circuit, speaking at events like SXSW, An Event Apart and the Web 2.0 Expo. Despite being more of a user experience guy these days, a lot of your readers will know me as a web standards advocate. In fact I recently published an update to my book, CSS Mastery, so it’s now chocked full of CSS3 goodness.

WebM.ag: What would you say where the best and worse experiences of your career?
AB: Well I’m pretty chuffed at being awarded agency of the year by the readers of .Net magazine a few weeks ago. Seeing our first ever dConstruct.org conference come together was also a bit of a high point for me. However I think the best experience had to be visiting (and speaking at) SXSW for the first time. It was an amazing event and I got to meet, and eventually become friends with, some of my web design heroes.

I terms of worst experiences, it may sound a little trite but I don’t think I’ve had any particularly bad experiences. Sure we’ve had our share of tricky clients or difficult projects, but nothing that stands out.

WebM.ag: Is there anyone in the web industry who you look up to or inspires you?
AB: I guess the two most influential people for me were Jeffrey Zeldman and Jeff Veen. I pretty much learnt my craft from reading Zeldman’s “Ask Dr Web” column back in the late 90s, while Jeffry Veen’s “The Art and Science of Web Design” opened my eyes to usability and showed me that successful websites were more than just skin deep. So I feel incredibly lucky to count both of them as friends.

That being said, there are just so many people out there doing amazing work it’s impossible to list them, all.

WebM.ag: Fastforward 10 years, what’s happening with the web?
AB: I think the web has reached a level of maturity (Digg Nation aside), so I don’t expect the web of 2020 to look much different to the web we currently know and love. We’ll see the web leaking out of the desktop and onto more and more devices, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the TV finally becomes the web portal all the big technology manufacturers had hoped it would be. We’ll also see web technologies leaking into other devices with HTML, CSS and Javascript being used as the fundamental tools for UI design. Lastly, we’ll see the web take on a more desktop like interface. Of course none of this is new. It’ll just become more prominent and more evenly distributed.

WebM.ag: What gadgets and software can you not live without?
AB: My iPhone has become indispensable surprisingly quickly, as has the iPlayer.

WebM.ag: Can you name one aspect of web design that you wouldn’t miss?
AB: The obvious answer would be browser inconsistencies, or possibly Flash. However I think the biggest problem is the mistaken belief that designing for the web is easy, and therefore cheap. The reality is that the low barrier to entry and quick learning curve hides a level of complexity and subtlety that most people just don’t get. So while most people can knock up a basic website in no time at all, there are surprisingly few people that understand how to build complex online applications that people actually want and enjoy using.

WebM.ag: You played a role in the birth of the The Web Standards Awards, what prompted you to do this?
AB: Wow, that’s going back a bit, so I’d be surprised if any of your readers remember the Web Standards Awards. We basically set the site up at a time when standards based sites were still an anomaly. The CSS Zen Garden probably had about 40 designs at the time and was a great place to showcase the power of CSS to other designers and developers. However there was nowhere you could send your clients to see commercial sites at the time, so we set up the worlds first CSS gallery site. The site ran for around a year and a half, prompting the creation of other gallery sites like the CSS Vault, CSS Drive and CSS Beauty. We closed the doors in 2006 thinking that the world didn’t really need more than a handful of CSS galleries. Funny really as there are now hundreds of gallery sites out there and more being created every month.

WebM.ag: You work alot in the community with Skillswap, what’s the response like from the locals and what got you into the idea?
AB: Back in the early naughties, Brighton had a very active mailing list called the Brighton New Media mailing list of BNM for short. In fact it still does. I noticed how willing people were to give their time and expertise to help out other designers and developers free of charge, despite many of them working for competing companies. Around the same time I heard about a few big companies running brown bag lunches whereby members of their staff would give informal presentations to the rest of the company to help with knowledge sharing. I thought if knowledge sharing could work across big companies, why couldn’t it work across a digitally connected community, so set up one of the first regular tech community events. Every 6 weeks somebody in the community would run a workshop on a subject that interested them, to a group of their peers. We have everything from basic introductions to Flash and Photoshop through to hardcore object oriented programming and application security. The response was great and the project has now been running for almost 5 years.

WebM.ag: There are some great designers coming out of the UK at present, anyone who stands our for you?
AB: That’s a toughie as on one level there are far too many good people to choose from, while on another level we’re constantly struggling to find designers who live up to our ridiculously high standards.

WebM.ag: What advice would you give to a newbie starting out in design?
AB: I think it’s a really tough time to enter into the industry at the moment. You basically need to work your arse off and get really good at one thing, be that a particular style of design, a particular language or toolset, or a particular field like usability or user experience design. Basically, with so many generalists out there you need to specialise.

WebM.ag: Tell us something about you that you haven’t mentioned in an interview before?
AB: I used to work as a dive guide in the Indonesian archipelago, taking tourists on dives around active underwater volcanoes. I also learnt to fly before I was legally allowed to drive on my own. So my dad would drive me to the airport where I’d fly solo for an hour, then drive me back home again.

WebM.ag: So what can we expect from you going into 2010 and beyond?
AB: More of the same, but better

Quickfire!

Music Of Choice? Either Indie, shoegaze, Post punk or dark-ambient, electroklash trance with a spot of big beat thrown in on the side.
What are you reading? I’m currently reading outliers by Malcom Gladwell.
IE6, love or hate? You mean there’s more than one answer here?
PC or MAC? Mac
Facebook or Twitter? Twitter

A Big Thank You To Andy!

Thank you for taking time out to chat with WebM.ag, if you wish to read more about Andy or ClearLeft and what they do you can visit ClearLeft here: clearleft.com or you can keep up to date with or speak to Andy via Twitter: @andybudd

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