The Geek Talk

Who’s Liam McKay?

Generally just a nice guy & Freelance Web Designer with an overactive need for things to look good. The rest of the time I’m your average 20-year old.

Do you have a Brand?

Nope. I’ve not focused on building a brand, neither my personal brand or that of my blog / design company. There will come a point, this year, where I’m going to build on both of these and put some real effort into building something people can connect and engage with.

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

If I’ve got some clear ideas in my head, I’ll make them known to the client and take it from there. If they or I need some thinking to be done over the style I’ll put together a simple mood-board and put forward some colour ideas, usually from Photographs or colour palettes.

What does your typical day look like?

Currently, we’ve took a little break from client work to build & improve some sites of our own. So I’m spending a lot of time arguing with myself and being overly critical of my own work. Working from home gives me the chance to make the most of my time and fit my day around my mood. I always fit a good amount of hours into my work, but there’s definitely no pattern to my working hours.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

The only thing that really gets used every day without fail is Photoshop. It’s probably too obvious an answer, but really you could take everything else from me and I wouldn’t even notice!

What do you do in your free time?

Work is my free time. I don’t tend to stop. Even on my days off it’s still something I enjoy. There will come a point where I’ll work in some regular time off where I can focus on a hobby or something, but for now – other than the usual daily distractions TV, X-Box, Call of Duty MW2 the only other time I get off is spent with my friends.

Current favorite apps?

Livebrush stands out as the best thing I’ve used recently. I’ve always been on the look for an app with a more organic and realistic brush action. You generate lines based on your mouse movements that give very smooth and organic results, and then you can import the lines into Illustrator. It’s perfect.

What OSs do you prefer?

Currently working on a Mac with OSX. I don’t hate Windows, I’ve used a Windows PC for the majority of my life and maybe one day I’ll return to it. But in terms of user experience, I find that OSX is much better to live and work with on a daily basis.

Small pic for your Workplace?

Favorite: Colors, Font, Languages (PHP, Ruby), JS Framework?

Currently I’m liking dark blue/grays, something around #3b3d49. Futura is a font I keep finding myself using more and more. I’m not really clever enough to delve into development side of things, so CSS is about my limit on the development side.

The things or source that inspired you?

The main thing that inspired me was seeing other people make it work. Seeing other people design neat things, and running great blogs with really useful and focused content really played a big part in sparking my interest in the first place. I love seeing what people are doing, and what people are working on, it’s a big motivation & inspiration.

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

I’ve tried both, and for me Freelance works best. I can see the benefit of both, but for me I’m sort of living in a dream situation. I could never really see myself spending my entire life working in an office environment, maybe it’s something I’d return to later in life for a while, but I’m really happy doing what I do – and it seems to be working at the moment!

Your personal projects and goals for 2010?

Some big things are coming. I can’t really say too much. We’ve already spent a few months working on our big main project, and there’s still a long way to go. But we’re hoping it will be something people will really like. Other than that, a re-design of the blog and a better way of updating it, as well as my own personal blog and a few small projects of our own we’re hoping to launch. So although very vague, you can see that 2010 is more about our own projects and building our own brand. A big risk, but hopefully time well spent.