Web designers feeling flush

Matthew Buchanan (L) and Karl von Randow of web design firm Cactuslab.

A quick glimpse at the world of web designers will reveal a sizeable gaggle of crazed geeks. But if the loons put you off, the salary won't. Top freelancers are in demand, and in-house designers earn good salaries.

All this for a job you need no formal qualifications to do, and one that has become more exciting than ever with the greater uptake of broadband, adding music, film and games to the web designer's palette.

It's all a long way from the old Usenet that Rob Manuel was addicted to as an English student, wasting many a late night in the computer room chatting on text message boards. The arrival of the web was a chance to put those hours to good use.

"I stuck up a site, just to see how to do it," he says. "I named it the Cow Liberation Front, and as we were at the height of the BSE crisis [in Britain], it got into the papers."

It opened the way to his career route ever since. Manuel dropped out of university and has won publicity and commissions with his outrageously puerile but very funny website, b3ta.co.uk. He calls it the "bedroom nutter against the world" approach.

It's not quite as nutty as it sounds. Ad agencies regularly scour the net for new styles to use to promote brands, and if you strike a chord it's better than any diploma in a marketplace where skills become outdated within months.

Alongside the anarchy of b3ta, there are many more functional, informative sites on the web that need to be designed - and nothing is more irritating for a user than trying to book a flight or find a fact and being barraged with a stash of Flash animations.

"I pride myself on my minimalist sites," says Steve Tearle, a freelancer who's designed sites for everyone from London restaurants to major banks. "I like sites that provide information quickly and easily."

This pragmatic approach reflects Tearle's route into the industry. "I'd just done the whole round-the-world thing and then I'd done a bit of dillying and dallying," he says. "And I just thought, 'I quite like the sound of that [web page design].' I used to like drawing at school. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision."

Tearle did a 12-week web design course at a computing skills college in Britain, and - even during the dot.com crash - has never been out of work for long since.

Auckland web design firm Cactuslab is run by business partners Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow. Among their clients are NZ Listener, 95bFM, Public Address and music download site Amplifier.

Buchanan says a skilled freelance web designer can earn around $500 a day or $60 an hour and says he likes the way the industry is ever-evolving and changing.

"The web designer's job is one of the few that needs both sides of the brain," he says. "A designer needs to be visually creative and have strong technical ability - the web page has to look attractive as well as function perfectly. But companies tend to recruit on artistic flair.

"People who are serious about this career are best advised to take a more complete design course, but it's also fair to say that everything a web designer needs [to learn the business] is available online."

However, he recommends budding designers opt for the three year Bachelor of Computer Graphic Design offered by The Wanganui School of Design and the University of Waikato who jointly award the degree.

When working for larger companies, much of the more techy nitty-gritty of programming and upkeep is left to web developers. What's more important for a site creator is a sense of how design works, and indeed many web designers have started their careers in graphic design.

Buchanan started designing web pages six years ago but formed his company in 2002.

"There's no one tool that's used to design web pages," he says. "A lot of developers simply use a text editor for HTML coding, and then programs such as Photoshop, Imageready and Fireworks for other elements.

"So much has changed in the last five years, and especially in the past 18 months - there are a lot of 'old school' designers out there."


- INDEPENDENT

additional reporting Steve Hart

* The New Zealand Qualifications Authority has a list of accredited web design course providers at the NZQA website.  Click on the link below and type in the keywords 'web design' on the home page.