Time for a Reboot

Okay, so I'm going to introduce it off. Okay, so yeah, my name is Kate and I'm an old friend of yours, as you know, and I've been involved in web design and web development for God, there's how many years now, but yeah, it's been quite a while. And yeah, you know, right now at this very moment I'm running my small agency, web design digital marketing agency and based on healing. Yes, running operations from here, got a small office and got a little team, got an intern that works for me and I collaborate with other developers and web designers and graphic designers as well on various different projects.

So yeah, that's me and not sure man, I mean, you know, we can get into like, you know, our history and stuff in a bit and how we know about that stuff. But right now at this very moment, that's me, that's what's going on, that's what I'm doing. Okay, cool. And for anyone who's new to the podcast, my name is Ajay and I'm also a designer front end developer, currently based in Buckingham, which is kind of in the central central England.

And I'm currently working for an agency called XIO, which is, but we used to work together and we've been through an agency one of before and then we've kind of both gone a bit freelance and worked for some clients side companies and, you know, in fact, quite a quite genuine. And yeah, the sort of stuff that we get talking about before the internet service. Yeah. The main topic for today was to just discuss the differences between working in an agency or working in a corporate environment or freelancing and working from home.

Things like that, because we both mean through all of those, I guess, at some point. Yeah, I think we've done pretty much the same kind of thing, the same kind of aggression, you know, starting the same kind of place. And I don't know if we do the same steps to where we are now, but I was the same order, but the same steps where they're at some point. Yeah.

And even the sort of work that we both do as well, we start off as designers who have then become developers over time. So I guess very sort of front end developers, very visual designers, UI interfaces and stuff like that. Usual interfaces. Exactly.

So hopefully, you know, with this new format for the podcast and our experience and our similarities, we should be able to get some good conversations going and this will be a good read-in, I guess, or I don't know what we're calling it yet. But yeah, welcome. Cheers, man. And it's good to be doing this as well, man.

I really appreciate it because I've been trying to get my podcast set up for the last few months now. I think I started it last year and just so busy. I mean, it's just so crazy finding time to get, you know, recording done and trying to figure out topics and things I want to talk about. It's just crazy.

You came along with your list of topics. I was like, okay, the homework's done. I mean, today the groundwork's ready. So why don't we just kick start with this, you know, dual podcasting, you mean, and give me some kind of experience and then, you know, I can start being my own ones on the side.

But yeah, my next. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Because obviously, you know, inspectors have been sitting dormant for a while now. The last episode was back in 2017 at some point. And then, you know, life just got in the way, had a baby moved house, checked jobs, and it was just sort of hard to keep up with it. So I always had this long list of topics and always knew that wanted to get going again.

And it's just a bit funny the right time and things have sort of settled down now and should be a bit more consistent. Yeah, and I think this process, I want to see how this goes and definitely try and appreciate it. Brilliant. Okay.

So, yeah, like I said, main topic is about different types of work that we've been doing with, you know, in a different type of setup agency and client side and freelance. So I guess for both of us, we started off in an agency that we confounded, I guess, you know, it started off with just a small team, myself, you and two others. Initially with the original team, that was called PROMMA, just going back about 15 years ago now, I guess, it's been quite a while. Yeah, it was sort of mid 2000, I think early to mid 2000s.

So 15 to 16 years ago. And yeah, we started off as a real small agency where we were kind of working from home, initially the four of us and, you know, we were sort of getting together every now and then meeting and coffee shops and pubs and stuff like that to discuss projects and just all working remotely. And then things were when it took off within the first year and then we ended up getting this office, this like attic office. Yeah.

And yeah, we were there for several years, and that's kind of where our career started, I guess, we were both the designers and the company. And then, so leading up to that point, what was your doing before that, I guess? This is my famous story. So I was a salesman at Carphone Warehouse, and I just come out of uni, and I was literally designing flyers, like I was designing flyers for university parties for from over the London.

All my design work was print design. So everything was in early versions of Photoshop. And even before that I was using a cool paint and cool raw and things like that. So we're talking a long time ago.

So I was doing a lot of this graphic design work and just creating artwork for flyers and a lot of print material really posters and things like that. And I just come out of uni doing multimedia computing, and I didn't really know anything about coding at the time. But what I was good at was the front end visuals. And I did a big part of my degree was human-computer interaction, UX and UI.

So I knew how to do all the design work, but I didn't know how to put stuff together. So there was no coding or anything like that. None of that was there. So working at Carphone, I started to pick up a couple of books here and there, and started to learn a few things, Dreamweaver, learning how to create simple websites and stuff like that.

Then I got to meet one of the directors, the agency that was started with you guys. And he gave me a shot and he liked the design work. That's what he was looking for, so creating design elements for websites. And literally just gave me an opportunity to come on board and take on project, which I did.

And for me it was a weird kind of environment because I'm doing this design work, but I didn't know how to create artwork for a website at the time, especially for mainstream. Doing it for a unique project and things like that was really simple, but for me to be thrown in straight away to the deep end, it was mind-blowing. And for me it was the big opportunity that I was waiting for. So while I was a salesperson, I was literally moonlighting as a designer.

And I got off in the door with this big project and the rest is history. Yeah, I think that's fairly common, isn't there? People who get into this sort of industry, into web design, graphic design, they are, like you said, moonlighting and tend to have a day job or tend to have a course that they're studying, they are university for some reason, and they're spending their evenings learning these skills. I think when we first started, I don't think it was very common to learn about web design at university.

There was computer science, which was a bit more software programming, but there wasn't really a web development or web design course back then. Not that I was aware of anyway, and I did computer science. And there was a little element of design in that course, but for one module, where you had to just create something visual for the actual program, the software that we were writing. But it was essentially, there was hardly anything to do with interfaces or user interfaces anyway.

So if you did want to learn that sort of thing, you had to just learn in your own time. You had to follow tutorials, you had to have blogs, and this was before YouTube, I think. So it was literally looking at magazines, getting computer arts magazines and things like that, and then just following the tutorials, getting a whole new Photoshop, wherever you could. Just to put it in there, it was like, I did computer science, H&D, and that was at London Global University, and I absolutely hated it.

So what I decided to do was transfer to a university that was closer to home. So I got a place that was minstuck, and the multimedia degree had just started at that point. So it was a brand new course. And I thought, this is more me, because I can apply design skill to it.

But even when we got onto the course, there was nothing whatsoever that taught you how to incorporate your designs into working applications and things like that. It was more development side. It was more how computer graphics created using Visual Basic and things like that, and creating animations in Flash. And the thing is, I knew all about that anyway.

I could create full-blown animations, I could make working applications in Flash, and I was using lingo and director at the time, Mac, Immediately. This is old software. So I could do all of that kind of stuff. So the crazy thing was, in tutorials, none of my class, you had to use software.

So they came to me and asked me to help them with how to use Flash, how do you use Photoshop and things like that. But when it came to development and coding, I had to go to them. They excelled in that kind of stuff. And I did.

So yeah, it was very, very new. So what point did you think that you knew that you wanted to do a development, or other than just design? I think development came a lot later. It got to a point where I think after I left, the agency was working there.

And I got my first client as a freelancer. I kind of started to understand that I can't just be this designer guy. And to excel and to get more business on board and to be able to charge more for work, I needed to become an or rounder. I started hearing that word everywhere.

So when I was going for interviews at agency and things like that, they advised me to start learning skills and to start learning how to code HTML, and to start focusing on becoming an or round individual within the web design sector. Because there was that transition coming in, and I read a lot of articles and computer articles and I just still got it. They bookmarked as well. And there was this time where people were asking questions, I've been a designer for the last 10 years.

But I can see this massive shift going towards online and digital. So all these magazine designers and logo designers and branding guys, that's all they ever knew, that they really to move on to move forwards to get better opportunity out there, job wise and prospects. They knew they had to make this transition. They knew they didn't have to do more than what they were just doing.

Because I was kind of isolating themselves and putting themselves into a box. And that's what I was before. I was always a flyer designer. How far is that going to get you?

Because you obviously went freelance, there was a lot more need to be a jack of all trades and trying to do as much as you could by yourself, otherwise you're obviously outsourcing all the time. Whereas the route that I took, once I left the company, I went to another agency, I went to several agencies actually, whereas I was part of a big team and the skills are always a bit more specialized. So I was able to focus on just design out for a part of my career and then focus just on development for another part, which is mainly what I do now. But having both skill sets still and still using them here and there, but focusing definitely more on one rather than the other.

I think that's probably one of the main differences really of being freelance and then being an employee of any sort of company, whether it is a client side or it is an agency. You tend to focus your skills a bit more. No, that's true. After that freelance scene, then I got a job at an agency, a pretty big agency based on Surrey, Nagilford.

And this is where I started to learn a lot more coding and development, the PHP, the JavaScript. And I was actually working with a small team, there was literally three of us, two developers, and these guys are pretty much what you call an alpha stack. And I was like the front end guy. So at the time when you had to put websites together using HTML bar saying that my skills weren't amazing, the guys I was working with, the team I was putting were these guys were amazing.

So I learned everything that I know today and more from that point onwards working with this agency. And I was only a year and that helped develop me a lot. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the agency model, although it's got its downsides as well in terms of pressure and the amount of focus that you can give to projects sometimes because you do tend to switch.

You're trying to thought a lot, but the amount of exposure you just get to different people and different skill sets and different projects. You just can't get that anywhere else really, I don't think. And I think it was really important to work for various agencies throughout my career, especially in the early days as well. Obviously we were quite fortunate to actually start our own agency from a very young age.

I don't know. What do you think? How do you think people could get into the industry these days if they haven't got that luxury of starting their own company? If you were to give advice to say a new someone who wants to get into the web industry, fresh out of university or something, would you recommend that they try and do some freelance work first or work for an agency or try and get something like a client side job?

The thing is it's hard on the last bit because if you're fresh out of uni, trying to get a job is really really difficult. They want experience and if you don't give your role, how you're going to get experience is that whole circle that people get stuck in. I was lucky having some kind of skill set beforehand and I could translate that skill set of design into digital media. For me, people that I've spoken to quite a few people at the moment and what I've found is a lot of them are stuck.

What they find solace is that they can easily get involved in agency as an intern. You won't find every single agency out there, but there are a few agencies out there who will allow you to learn on the job. So you're not pressured and you're not doing the rubbish on your team and photocopies and all that kind of stuff. You're actually involved and you're actually picking up skills.

That doesn't just apply to juniors because the job I currently as well, what the actual job this thing was, was above my skill set at the time. I was fairly honest about it saying that this is what I can do, this is what I haven't got experience in and that's fine. We can see the potential and we're happy to help you with training on the job and stuff like that. It's good.

I'm going on a training course in a couple of weeks to abroad as well in Croatia. It's good having that as well. I don't think that ever changes, but it's important to find that early on as well. Like you said, you can't get a job with that experience, but you can't get experience with that job.

So you start, which is why a lot of people are spending time in the evenings and trying to learn things. I do know that they do teach web development and design and coding out much younger Ascios in primary school. In fact, it's not as pretty early, which is a good thing, obviously. You've got companies like Apple who do this Hour of Code, I don't know if it's just Apple, but they do this.

A lot of companies do this coding workshops for kids and try to encourage them to get into development from a very young age. The industry has changed from when we face that, obviously. I think web development is kind of seen as one of the cool jobs to have now. I think a lot of people do aspire to make apps and build websites.

I think back then as well, I was a creative person. I was at college doing a lot with computer science and economics. I was advised to go to college. My auntie just said, I want you to go to some Martin's College of Art.

I can see you being a fine artist or a graphic designer. I'd rather you do that than waste your time doing something like computer science. You're going to be a wasted individual. I was like, well, the whole parents thing at the time, the parents were a very traditional one.

They want you to go and do something to the economics or something to do with computer science. But finding that mix was good. It was always a lovely relationship with, I loved creativity. I loved to be creative and hands on to go to draw and design things that were visual and that pleased people.

Anything to do with code, anything that involved maths, anything that involved logic, I just wanted to keep our arms on. I did not want to touch it. I did not want to get involved. But I had to learn afterwards because I could see them coming together.

When you see it coming together, you write a little bit of HTML and then you can control that how it looks. You can see CSS. That would be my mind. I was like, wow, this is amazing.

The love came on later on. I love it. I embraced it fully. But with kids now in school, they have no option but to learn it now.

You probably got more and more people out there, children, who are going to fully love the coding and development. As old, it's going to be another language. As opposed to that, they can talk a computer language. I think it's amazing.

By the age of 15, 16, some of these kids are going to be fluent in C-sharp or PHP or whatever. It's really good now. Kids don't know how they're going right now. My daughter is using a language called Scratch.

It's a programming language you give instructions. They tend to use it to control characters on screen, for example. You've got a maze design. Then you can say up three, left two, turn, rotate 180 degrees.

That's the sort of thing. It's logical steps. She's learning that at the moment, which is really interesting. I need to, at some point, introduce a JavaScript.

That's the one I've had. I've never picked up JavaScript early enough. Although I do write a lot of it now, it's always playing a bit of a touch-up. I just wish I got into JavaScript a bit earlier.

That's the topic for another day. Have you ever worked in a client-side role? Were you working on a single product? An internal project?

Yeah, I was working for... After I was working at agency in Guilford, I left off for it. I wasn't liking where they were headed. I went back to freelancing and got a role with a PR company.

They were working with the likes of L'Oreal and other big brands. They had multiple internal projects. They had an internet site. They had their own website.

They had the time to developing visuals for an application that they were going to be using with a partner. That was my first stint working client-side and working on-site. It was kind of like a contracting role, but all the work being done, it was specifically for these guys. I've done it a couple of times.

I do enjoy it, actually. You do get to really focus on a project. You get to know the ins and outs of it in a lot of depth, which is something that you don't always get with an agency. There's a lot of history that you can use to your advantage as well, which you don't always have when you're an agency getting clients.

On the flipside, it does potentially get a bit of an optimist. You tend to work on smaller tasks throughout the week, whereas agencies, you tend to take on these bigger projects and generally see it a little bit more exciting, but then a bit more high pressure as well. I think they both got their merits, and there'll be certain people who are suited to the other. I don't know which one I prefer, I think at the moment I'm working for an agency and I'm really enjoying it.

I wouldn't change it really. Overall, maybe the agency is what I prefer overall. It's interesting because I've been there and done it and when I was working with the agency, I just didn't like it. I think I was many down to the people who were the directors and people in charge and stuff, and I didn't really like their mindset of how they were working.

We were literally churning projects out, so it was literally an as a creative designer. My role needed me to become a very, very close client, find out their requirements and to start creating visuals that they liked, making sure we're working according to websites and stuff like that. This is the full response of designers, I think. It was a lot easier.

What was happening was it was turning into production line, so a lot of the work that was coming in was just being forced to just get it done and to completely use touch with the client to just stop creating templates that we could use everywhere. It became Monday, so I had to leave that. Instead, I've never been working with agencies and I started my own work. Do you fully sell it now, right?

Yes, yes. You've got some people working for you, but I mean, you're essentially your own boss now. Correct. I've been like that for the last seven years or so.

Yes, excellent. How do you find it working in isolation? I work a couple of days from home as well, so I do two days in the office and three days from home, so I get a bit of a mixture of both. I've tried to balance it.

Once I left that agency, I had to find an office space pretty quick because I went to, you know, still have that professional appeal to clients and a lot of the clients that I took on offered that agency were actually clients of that agency and they didn't want to work with those guys. Listen, you're such a great person to work with you. You're so easy to talk to and we like the work that you doings with Robert. You know, leave them to work with you.

So I found an office in the comfort cloud center and it was taking me now to drive every morning from Southall, you know, so every morning took about an hour, maybe an hour and a half to get there, but I had this office in this beautiful period building in the basement. And I was by myself. And for the first month I was excited, you know, because I got my own office, you know, I got my environment, a kitchen there, you know, I get out meeting, the clients will come down and it felt really good. But within, you know, by the month or two, I was feeling really, really lonely.

And I just wasn't motivated. The motivation was, you know, drying up. I just couldn't get work done. So I don't know, working from home.

Okay. And I was still paying rent for this place. And then what happened was one of the clients, one of my clients over there, she turned around and said, I'm looking for office space. What's your space like?

I said, yes, we can get three desks in there. And so she decided to come along and we split the bill. So I had a client showing office with me. So I went back to the office and then I realized that I need someone there kind of thing.

You know, when it's just me by myself, it's great for a minute. But then after that, it just becomes really, really important. Yeah. Yeah.

It's quite important to have the team around you, which is quite, quite like the way mine is set up, you know, go two days into the office. I'll get a chance to catch up with the team and just see what basically is happening in the company, you know, get an update on any announcements or, you know, just anything really, any new starters. Sometimes I don't get to meet them as they start on a Tuesday, Wednesday. I'm going to meet them for a week.

So it's just, it's good to just pop in now then. But then, you know, being at home for the rest of the week, I get to really sort of focus and just have quite time and, you know, I've got a nice desk set up in my dining room. So it's good. You know, it's comfortable place to work from home.

I think it's very important to have a desk at home and have your workspace set up in a way that's, you know, designed for you to work at rather than just sitting on a dining table or sitting on the sofa. Yeah. Well, I've got at home in the loft, I've set up a desk with, you know, a decent set up of all the details on the Sherlockboard that we're sharing. It's not as fancy as yours, but, you know, it's organized and it's clean.

And sometimes, I'm in the office here in Ealing. You know, I get to a point where my head starts to wander and I can't focus. And then I just think, you know what, tomorrow I want to go on and I'll come again, I'll just work from home. And then I'll find like a kickstart, you know, and I'm able to just become fresh again, it's a keen slate because I'm working from home.

And that desk has been touched for a while. You know, the desk is cold kind of thing. And it's not been used, clean. And I just find that vibe really cool.

But the problem from working from home is that, you know, I've got my dog there, I've got to look after him, he wants attention. And it becomes too much. So, you know, I'm here a majority of the time, but then I do like to be, you know, in a space where I'm probably my own. Or I've got things going on behind me.

So for example, I'm the office space on the moment. It's a regis, spaces, one of their sublands. And like we work, they have co-working environments in this building. So, although I'm in an office space, you can leave the office space and go and sit down like on a bean bag or a couch and casually, you know, crack on with your work.

And there'll be other people and their little pods doing their work as well. So you can hear a little murmur in the background, a little chat going on, you know, you can hear the lift pinging and stuff like that. And I find that really cool and I can actually work really well in that environment. Okay.

Yeah. Just to know that you're not completely isolated. It's probably handy as well. I think just a few people around as well, you know, you can network and build connections, maybe get some new work out of them as well.

Definitely. Never know. It's already happened, but I've been here for like a month or two from, you know, here. The whole place is new.

There's always a new face. It's one of the first people who signed up. And so the co-working space, I mean, is actually a lot of office space and it's excluded from the co-working environment where everyone else is. So we've got the quiet space with my own destiny.

You know, we've got the benefit of being in there and kind of having to chat with each other kind of thing while we work or they don't want everyone else in the bigger space. It kind of fits the kind of working environment that I enjoy. So I get the best of both worlds. No, excellent.

All right. Do you think you'll carry on with this sort of model for the foreseeable future or are you planning to look at agencies ever again? It's hard to say. I think it all boils down to what I want to achieve from the business that I'm running.

My goal is to at least get one or two people on board, a developer, a designer. At the moment, I have an intern and she specializes in social media management. I've taken her own board as an intern and she's done three formats now. And we want to extend that on a paid capacity where she's actually paid to work.

She's learned quite a lot and she's taught me quite a lot as well. But I need to make a decision on the type of people that I want to be on board and how I'm going to be on board and what capacity as well. So they're going to be full time employees or is it going to be contractual? Is it going to be on a freelance basis or project basis?

I've got to figure it out. I'm going to make that decision pretty quick because that's my goal. I want to add these two people on board. And at least say that I've tried to get there and create a small kind of agency or collaborative unit if you like.

And I can't see myself doing this for the next 10, 15 years. I want to try and get out of here something else. I like to link my digital sketching and things like that. You're doing a lot of that recently and I'm just doing a disorientation.

Disorientation. I'm probably talking about that some other time. I think it's about setting up, I know what I want from this business and I know what the next steps are. It's just about making it happen.

So just doing a small team, that's the next step. Yeah. Okay. Well, you heard it here.

I'm in a round at the West London area or don't mind commuting to West London. Yeah. And you can get in touch with K. Yeah, any fun.

All right. Well, yeah, I think that's a good place to wrap up for this first episode. And then we'll catch up again soon. But in the meantime, is there anything else you want to share?

And how do people find you? At the moment, you can, the best place to see what I'm wrong, most of the vocal is on Instagram. We are Delve. We are a new team, we are Delve.

We are Delve. We are Delve. We are Delve. We are Delve.

We are Delve. We are Delve. We are Delve. We use them on Instagram.

The website is Delve Design. I've got a UK, but that website, like all other designers out there is, it's just, you know, not falling apart. It's lacking a lot of new content. And it's kind of just there for a second being where it's, you know, so I've gone for a rebrand recently.

So the business name is Delve Design, but I've rebranded to we are Delve, hence the whole cricket team. and ask for your feedback to come from. So I'm on Facebook as well, we are Delph, and it's very quiet on Twitter, but Instagram, if you hit me up on Instagram, you'll see a lot of the work that I'm actually working on, not just me, but other developers I'm working alongside on various different projects, so you'll get an insight on what's going on. Yeah, we'll put all these links and stuff in Shonuts, as well, the Shonuts are on the website, which is inspect.fm, and we'll look for the latest episode, or you can probably see the Shonuts in your podcast player as well.

Thanks for joining, and we'll catch up again shortly. So yeah, my name's Ajay, and you can find me on Twitter. My username is Ajay, and then I'll talk to you next episode. Yeah, let's see that.