An Interview with… Elliot Jay Stocks
Elliot Jay Stocks, (www.elliotjaystocks.com) very kindly agreed to answer questions for GG, and here they are!
About Elliot:
Ex senior designer at Bath based Carsonified, Elliot has recently moved to Norway to start his own Web Business. He also writes monthly for .Net magazine and his blog, www.elliotjaystocks.com, has been featured on many showcase websites.
Your comments are most welcome:
You’ve recently left Carsonified and moved to Norway to start your own business. Was there any particular reason that made you move?
I left full-time employment because I needed to work towards my own dreams and not somebody else’s. I’d been toying with the idea of starting my own business for a long time, and it just made so much sense, in terms of timing. I settled on Norway as I have some friends here, and it’s a beautiful place that I got the taste for during a short visit last year. I’m here for just over two months and return to England in mid July, when my girlfriend gets back from her travels in the far east.
Windows or Mac? And Why?
Mac, all the way. Not only do they look beautiful, but they just work, as the adverts claim. I know we could all argue about Mac vs. PC until the cows come home, but there’s one thing I’ll say: nearly all Mac users were once PC users, but how many PC users were once Mac users? Once you’ve had Mac, you don’t go back…
When did you first get into Web Design/Development and how did it come about?
I startled dabbling with it in 2001, in my year out before uni. I released a record with a few friends (who were also in bands at the time) and we needed a website to promote the release. I was using ‘Homestead Site Builder’, which was a horrible WYSIWYG thing, but good enough at the time. Then I went to uni and gradually started getting into Flash, which I used to create my final project when I graduated in 2004. I then landed a job at EMI as a Web Designer and have never looked back! Since those early days, I’ve moved from being an all-Flash guy to an all-Standards guy. I don’t have anything against Flash at all - I love it - but it’s just not my delivery method of choice these days.
When starting a blog, many people struggle to get started and when comments don’t fly in straight away, they lose motivation. How did you manage to keep going when you first set up your blog?
It’s difficult, and getting comments is a kind of affirmation of whether the blog is successful or not, but my site got featured on a lot of ‘inspiration’ galleries not long after the blog seriously started (before that it was more of a travelog), so comments started coming in pretty fast after that. Writing about things that people find useful (such as tutorials) or things that people can discuss in depth (like design piracy) is a way of keeping reader and commenter levels up. Not that you should write stuff just to get comments, of course! That just becomes spam.
With the browser war still raging stronger than ever, why is IE significantly further behind all other competitors on CSS support?
I’m not sure I have an answer for this one. However, I’ve heard some very good things about CSS support in IE8, so here’s hoping…
And finally, if you didn’t do Web Design, what would your dream job be?
Without question, I’d be a comic book illustrator. It’s something I thought I was going to get into for a long time (almost right up before going to uni, really), and it’s definitely something I’d like to do again at some point. With a couple of recent client projects, I’ve had the chance to start incorporating illustration into my work again, which makes me very happy. You should see some evidence of this once I eventually release my new site later this year!
Many thanks to Elliot, and feel free to discuss!
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3 Responses to “An Interview with… Elliot Jay Stocks”
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The png images in IE 6 anger me
How did you manage to secure your first major project?
Haha….I love his answer to the Mac or PC question, it’s GREAT!