Text Box: Interview with a creative web designer: Nick Brogna How did you get into what you do creatively? I floundered in college, flipping back and forth between majoring in Fine Arts and Computer Science – trying to appease what I figured to be the classic left brain / right brain dichotomy. I always thought I would follow in my mother's footsteps as a computer graphic designer, however it wasn't until I discovered web design that everything clicked into place and I found that not only did I have an innate talent in being able to break a design down into it's component structures, but the work was immensely satisfying for both halves of my brain. What inspires you? As far as classical art goes, I am a huge fan of the dutch De Stijl (neoplasticism) movement of the early 20th century, as well as the German Bauhaus and Russian Constructivist movements that followed. The grid-based works done by Piet Mondrian in particular are some of my biggest influences, and the concepts of line and form refined by him translate amazingly well into the “box-model” based world of semantic, accessible XHTML. I am also a tremendous fan of natural patterns; the golden ratio, as it pertains to things like the growth of mollusk shells and plant stalks, tessellations, statistical distribution pertaining to reflected light (“starbursts”), chaos theory, etc. I also love whitespace, so I make it a point to visit as many “modern art” museums as possible. What do you do to get into your creative zone? Clean up my apartment (or at least the area around where I plan to be working – clutter kills my creativity), pour myself a glass of wine and turn up some music real loud. If I find myself stuck on a problem for a while, I find that exercise (a hike or bike ride) usually clears my mind. Do you ever create hidden meanings or messages in your work? Explain. Sometimes I take creative liberties in the comments I write in my code, as 99.99999% of the time no one will ever see them but me. This is more likely to happen when I am writing in an interpreted language such as PHP, where the runtime compiler will ensure that no one will ever see the comments once the page is rendered. I have somewhat scaled back on this after an embarrassing incident with an (obscene) error message at the end of a wildly complicated control structure that I thought would never be thrown; sure enough the client managed to throw it during the demo. Do you enjoy sharing your work with others or do you prefer to go unnoticed? Why? It really depends on what I am writing. Most of my stuff is boring and corporate enough that I am not particularly proud of it and I simply show it to the client and move on. But occasionally, I will write something so awesome that I get excited and try to show it to my obviously un-excited friends. This is more often the case with things that I write for myself to scratch a personal itch than things I create for clients. Do you pay attention to others' strong reactions to your work? Does that affect what you create? I used to take everything really personally, especially when I first got started and did things that I though were really cool because they pushed my personal limits at the time. Not so much anymore, although I do sometimes get really giddy when working on an especially fun and challenging project.