The Geek Talk

Who’s Jonathan Christopher?

I’m a 25 year old Web developer and designer living and working in Albany, NY. I’m currently the Lead Front End Developer at Overit Media and I’m engaged to be married to the love of my life Carrie in just a few short months.

Designer or Developer?

My roots are without a doubt in development. I’m fascinated with front end engineering, but also spend my days working in PHP and MySQL. Over the past couple years, however, I’ve been focusing mostly on design and information architecture. As it currently stands, I’m writing markup, style, and code all day every day, but my personal projects allow me the luxury of designing and implementing projects from the ground up, start to finish.

How do you choose the idea and the colors in any new project?

To be honest, I let the project dictate the details. One thing I try to do is abstract myself from what the latest and greatest is in Web design (trend or not) and do my best to focus on the project at hand. Once you truly understand the project on a deep enough level, the aesthetic details for the most part fall into place.

What does your typical day look like?

My typical day starts with trying to wake up as early as possible. I find that making solid use of early morning really gets the ball rolling for the day and truly helps me get things done. I’ll get up, hop in the shower, run out and start the car if it’s the dead of winter to sit down and have a bowl of cereal while catching up on local news. My commute to work is about 10 minutes and one of the first things I do when I sit down for the day is have a cup of coffee and browse RSS headlines for about 15 minutes. If something catches my eye I’ll flag it to read later, and it really helps to get my mind running for the day.

The first part of the work day involves responding to emails and taking care of project management. I’ll also organize my to-do list for the day and tackle it as soon as possible. The day can be interrupted by any number of fires blaring up, or I may find myself sitting in a client meeting or two. Three days a week after work I’ll go to the gym with a couple of co-workers. After that I head home to have dinner with my fiancee and we’ll spend the bulk of the evening together. More often than not, though, we both have additional things we’d like to take care of in the evening so I’ll usually find myself in my office to take care of some other things each night.

I’ll sometimes end the day playing a bit of Xbox to let my brain wind down enough so I can get some sleep and do it all over again tomorrow.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

In my day to day life I couldn’t live without a select few tools I’d be severely handicapped should they go missing. First and foremost is TextMate. I fell in love with TextMate long before I switched to OS X and it’s still near and dear to me. I’ve got high hopes for the new kids on the block, but none have stood the test of time like TextMate. I’d also be depressed if Fireworks didn’t exist. It’s by far my favorite tool in which to design. Additionally, VMWare Fusion has provided me the ability to not maintain a dedicated Windows machine for a number of years now, and for that I’m super grateful. The last tool that’s made a huge impact on my day to day work is OmniFocus. I’ve come to depend on OmniFocus to help me get things done in a timely and organized way.

What do you do in your free time?

I try to spend as much of my free time with my fiancee, family, and friends. I honestly try to get away from the computer as much as possible because I never want to find myself burnt out with Web design. I play soccer year round, and try to get to a golf course whenever I can. My fiancee and I love to go jetskiing, and a bigger hobby of mine is photography.

Current favorite apps?

In line with the tools I couldn’t live without, my favorite apps are:

- TextMate
- Fireworks
- OmniFocus
- VMWare Fusion
- 1Password

What OS do you prefer?

As with the vast majority, I started out working on Windows. After I couldn’t take the stress any longer, I adopted Ubuntu Linux as it quickly matured into a really powerful alternative to Windows. As of about three years ago I took the plunge to OS X, and all I can say is that there’s definitely a reason most Web designers prefer Macs. I don’t see myself switching away from OS X at any time soon.

Small pic for your Workplace?

My fiancee and I just bought our first house not too long ago, so the office has taken a bit of a back seat until we can make the rest of the house ours, but here’s where I’m working when I’m at home.

Favorite: Colors, Font, Languages, JS Framework?

I’m a sucker for tans. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I enjoy the passiveness and the natural feeling tans convey.

Over the past year or so, I’ve fallen head over heels for slab serif type. One typeface which broke that mold was Tungsten, I really really like Tungsten.

I’ve come to know and love HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. I can’t really segment it any further because front end development is definitely my specialty, and I need all three to truly put forward my best work.

I adopted jQuery so long ago that if a project dictates the need for a library, that’s what I go for. I do have a few other tools in my back pocket, but time after time jQuery has done the job and done it so very well.

The things or source that inspired you?

Without a doubt the work other designers I look up to is completely inspirational to me. I try to limit the inspiration I gather from the Web, however. I find that you’ll avoid lots of trend traps if you look for inspiration in the real world. There is so much to take in everywhere you look, adapting it to your designs will definitely give your work that extra bit of uniqueness everyone is after. I tend to get a lot of inspiration from photography, video games (specifically the menus) and oddly enough: storefronts. If you’re ever scratching your head about type, take a walk down the busiest street you can.

What’s do you prefer, the freelance work or the full time employee?

I’ve never taken the plunge into full time freelance work, so I can’t really give a solid answer there. I totally love my company and the people working there. I wouldn’t have it any other way at this point as the creativeness in that office is simply overflowing and it’s something I feed on each and every day I sit at my desk.

Your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

My first personal project and goal for 2010 was to redesign Monday By Noon, my weekly publication on Web design and development. I’m quite happy with how it turned out and I’m ready to tackle the rest of my list. I’d like to take photography much more seriously this year, and have a number of ways to accomplish that. Another bigger goal of mine is to be the best husband I can be, and I’m terribly excited about something so new to happen in just a few short months. On the back burners I’ve got a few Web applications I’ve had in the works for a while now, but haven’t had the time or energy to focus fully on them. Perhaps there will come a time where I can flesh out the details and bring one or two to fruition, but that’s not set in stone quite yet.