Interview With Chris Spooner of Spoon Graphics + Giveaway

Chris: Thanks Brian, I’m Chris Spooner, a designer who enjoys experimenting with all things design related, and blogging about it along the way. I post tutorials, freebies and articles on my main blog; Blog.SpoonGraphics, which has been active for coming up to three years. It all began after seeing a few design blogs spring up at the end of 2006 to 2007. I enjoyed reading the articles on Smashing Magazine and Bittbox, so I decided to give it a go myself. At first it was simply an excuse to try out the WordPress application, and to give myself a place to play around with new techniques. I began posting some tutorials based around this experimentation and the site soon began to pick up traffic. Three years on it has developed quite a name for itself in the design community, and has given my personal profile and career a huge boost. The one thing I’m most proud of is that I’ve managed to grow it by creating every post myself, without outsourcing the content to guest authors etc.

In March 2009, I’d got to a stage where I wanted to share more web design knowledge, but with Blog.SpoonGraphics being a popular destination for Illustrator tutorials and general design topics, I didn’t want to suddenly oversaturate it with web design this and web design that! My solution was to start a fresh blog where all my web design tutorials and articles could go. It also gave me the opportunity to go through the whole process again, but this time armed with all the knowledge I’d developed from growing Blog.SpoonGraphics. So far, Line25 seems to be a great success!

Chris: Video content is a great way to communicate on the web as it has huge advantages when it comes to allowing people to engage with your personality. The vlogs on ChrisSpooner.com are all on a more personal level than the design related stuff I post on my main blogs. The story of how these come about is pretty similar to how I started my blogs – I simply caught onto a few vloggers on YouTube, enjoyed their content and felt like I’d developed a connection with them, so I decided to give it a go myself. Last year we moved into our new home, so this was a great opportunity to share the experience, and to document it all in a kind of video diary for future viewing.

I definitely prefer video over traditional text blogging for this personal kind of content; going back and reliving those moments by watching the videos is great fun. However for design related stuff, I’m definitely more a fan of written articles and tutorials. I’ve tried crossing video with design in the form of screencasts, but I personally can’t reel off my words if I have something specific to say, I end up getting tangled up and forgetting what I’m doing. The personal vlogs are more candid with no script involved, so it’s simply a case of rambling on!

Chris: I guess it’s all about providing something that users want. For instance if you’re setting up a blog, try and post useful content that’s different from the norm. My Blog.SpoonGraphics blog became popular for Illustrator tutorials, as they were quite rare at the time. On Twitter, I’ve always been one of those link sharing people. If you post a lot of quality links to design articles, a user is getting something useful back in return for their follow, they’ll be given interesting links daily and won’t have to open up their RSS feeder reader ever again!

This has actually led to more and more people scrapping their RSS readers altogether in favour of Twitter links. This provides a great opportunity for us that still read their feeds to be a source of this information. It has to come from somewhere!

Chris: There were quite a few reasons behind the development of the members area. Firstly it seemed like a natural next step for my blog. I’ve seen many sites that adopt the ‘freemium’ model, and a few great sites in the design community have seen their premium content take off. It has also given me a place where I can treat the avid followers of my blog to some more sought after goodies such as the WordPress themes I’ve been building lately.

With my blog being fairly popular, the level of email inquiries requesting product features and giveaways had began to increase. I have always tried to avoid posting too many of these on my blog, so the premium section created a great place to promote these schemes, again treating the avid followers to a better chance of winning. Having been lucky enough to develop a name for myself online, the ability to swindle goodies from top design related companies has also increased, I can then pass these discounts onto the members.

Then there’s obviously the financial side. I’ve been moving slowly into a profession of full-time blogger and cutting down on client design work. The members area provides a good fallback should advertising income drop. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is the good old saying.

The members area has grown nicely so far, it’s still in its early days, but there’s plenty of stuff in there for members to get their hands on. Members can recoup their $7 membership within minutes when comparing it with the value of the freebies and discounts that are available, the great thing is as time goes on this value for money only gets higher. The main problem I’ve come across is reassuring a select few people that all the free stuff they’re used to is still available. There were a few comments along the lines of “What?! You’re now charging people to read your blog? Grrrr!”, so it seems like some didn’t catch on that all the free tutorials and articles they’re used to will still be available. It’s just that extra category of content that’s reserved for members – Stuff that I never tended to post on the blog in the past anyway.

Chris: It’s definitely the big topic of the past few months with quite a few blog posts and rants being written on the subject. I’m not entirely sure where I stand. On one hand I do enjoy the list post, and often use the format on my own blogs. When browsing my feeds I’ll be more likely to find a spark of inspiration from a roundup of great designs and enjoy the post, than I would a lengthly text based article. (But that does depend on the topic!)

When writing content myself, the list post is always a good fallback if I’m stuck for ideas or time on a tutorial. Lately my tutorials have began taking 2 or more full days of work, whereas a roundup post may take a few hours and generate higher traffic levels. With this in mind it’s no surprise why they’re so popular, but it’s worth remembering that it’s the long-term exposure an original article develops that really helps a blog grow. There’s tutorials of mine that are still bringing in high traffic from back in 2007/2008. List type posts often aren’t seen again after the first week.

The element of list-type posts that I don’t like (which I think is what started the argument) is their use on brand new blogs. There seems to be hundreds of crappy quality posts, often hosted on crappy looking blogs that all adopt the same layout, and all have 6-8 empty ad spaces or affiliate banners in the sidebar. While it’s great that people are taking to blogging about design, they’re doing it the wrong way! I always recommend that you build up a solid profile by posting sought after content (like I did with Illustrator tutorials), then once your traffic level allows for it, recoup some money for the time you spend writing by offering advertising. It was about a year after the launch of my blog when advertising was introduced. It seems like too many are doing it for the money or the exposure.

I also think the term list-post is now being used out of context. Someone might post a huge article full of original advice titled ’10 Tips to Succeed as a Freelance Designer’, yet because it uses a number to generate the catchy post title, suddenly it’s a list-post and should be burnt at the stake. It’s the topic ’50 Epic Photos of Trees’ that I feel more suits the title ‘list post’. However while this post probably won’t serve any use for me, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t be gold for a… errmm, tree photographer? For every person that hates a post, there’s a collection of readers who enjoy such topics and give them their votes, so it’s a hard one to solve.

One last word on this: It seems like the only the only type of post accepted nowadays, is the post telling others which posts they shouldn’t be writing! List posts have destroyed the community, tutorials have evolved zombie-type designers who don’t think about the process, and giveaways have devalued the service of design.

Chris: Always keep experimenting with new techniques to keep your skills sharp. Network with people online though blogging and Twitter, or maybe use the platform of video to give you an advantage. All in all just have fun doing what you love, then share your knowledge with others along the way. That has pretty much worked for me so far!