Name: Andrew Saulter
Title: Web Designer/Developer
Website/Blog: www.tridea-design.com
Location: Brooklyn, NY

Tell us about your educational/professional background.
I graduated from Michigan State in 2006 with a B.A. in Professional Writing (Digital and Technical Writing track.) During my education I gravitated towards all things web/design/technology and really took to it. After graduating, I worked as a web designer for MATRIX, Web Master for Kresge Art Museum, and an Interface Developer for JSTOR. In July of 2008, I packed up and made the move to NYC to be with my fiancée and now work for the NYC Campaign Finance Board. I also run my own design shop, Tridea Design, with fellow PW alums John Phillips and Tyler Smeltekop.

Tell us about your current job.
My day job is as Web Designer/Developer for the Campaign Finance Board in lower Manhattan where I work as the sole front-end web designer/developer. The Campaign Finance Board oversees the public funding program for candidates running for public office in NYC, runs the debates for each election, and publishes the print/web voter guide. I started in October and jumped right in to learning about the company and undertaking projects to improve our website.

At night and on weekends I link up with John and Tyler and work on client projects for our company. This allows me to be more flexible in my role and wear many hats. We do print work, logo design, identity packages, and web design/development.

What does a typical day look like for you?
Day to day I get various documents from different units to make web-ready and push out to the site. I’m also trying to usher the website into a new era where we take advantage of social media technologies and more interactive content with our users. My priorities fluctuate based on the time of year and whether we are in an election year or not. During election years, I’m more focused on getting information out for people to make informed decisions as well as posting data on candidate finance summaries. On off-election years I am afforded more time to analyze the site and work on improvements in our content delivery and the technology we use.

For Tridea, my typical day/week consists of finding and approaching new business leads for projects, communicating with clients, managing our current project workloads, and making sure we are churning out great work in an efficient manner. I do both design work and web development.

What kinds of documents do you produce?
I don’t really produce that many documents myself, rather, I help others improve the documents they’ve made so that the information is more focused for the web and their target audience.

What communication skills are needed for your job?
What I’ve found as a web professional is that it is crucial to be able to explain the benefit of certain design decisions to people with little expertise on web-related content. Through my education and work experience, I’ve picked things up that I know to be industry standards, but it is important to communicate those things to other stakeholders who don’t have the same PW background.

How did you prepare for your job?
For starters, I love technology and I would just play with it and explore. I would mess around in Photoshop and go through tutorials on places like PSDTUTS and Good-tutorials.com. And then when I got into Dreamweaver, I would just mess around with it and make sites for fun.

Then internships and jobs while still in school helped me flesh out my skills and learn more about the profession. I think internships are a crucial tool to get you some experience and try things out in the real world while still being able to learn from your mistakes (and not get fired.)

Probably the biggest thing that has helped me, though, has been running my own company. The experience I’ve gained working with clients and handling every aspect of our business really helps when I’m working at my 9 to 5.

List three of your favorite professional resources/references/tools and tell us why they’re your favorite.
www.smashingmagazine.com — I think this is such a tremendous resource for web professionals AND it’s free. Content is King and Smashing Magazine knows how to bring it day after day, week after week. They really are great at finding good resources.

psdtuts.com and nettuts.com — PSDTUTS is a great resource for Photoshop tutorials and NETTUTS has web design/development tutorials. Both sites are high quality and often interview industry experts.

freelanceswitch.com — I don’t visit here as often as I should, but this is a great resource for freelancers and learning the ins and outs of freelancing.

How do you stay up-to-date in your field?
I read a ton of blogs, tweet with people in my field on Twitter, request and check-out web books from the Brooklyn Public Library, and I attend conferences and seminars. But with all the resources on the web, just digging in and reading Smashing Magazine and others goes quite far.

How would you define professional writing?
Knowing who your target audience is, what your audience is looking for, and tailoring your document to meet those needs. We analyze, synthesize, and deliver. Wow, that sounded like an infomercial.

Do you have any tips to share with other professional designers/writers/editors?
Take pride in what you do and try to master your craft. Find mentors in the world and emulate them. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to the people who inspire you, they are more accessible/approachable than you would think. Meet people and network both online and off. Research. Study. Experiment. Fail. Learn. Improve.

Tags: In the Workplace

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2, 2009 at 6:05 am and is filed under Career, Design, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.