Janet Brent is a Filipino born, Pacific Northwest raised Filipino American back in her motherland to pursue her renegade design career online and prides herself in being a “professional hobo” (homeward bound). She blogs at Purple Panda where she recounts the trials and tribulations of “lifestyle design” and tweets @janetbrent and is preparing a new web design launch for her services on November 11th, 2011. To view more of her work, go to byjanet.net.

How did you become interested in design?

I’ve always wanted to be an artist, writer and teacher growing up.

My artistic side seemed strongest since I’ve been drawing at a young age and started painting in high school. A job shadow assignment in high school during my sophomore year got me turned on to “graphic design.” I had no idea what that was but I knew it had to be artistic, so I ended up job shadowing a graphic designer who worked for a sewerage agency. Not the most glamorous job at ALL, but he was so excited about his work and the passion was contagious!

From that moment on, I knew that I would go to school to become a graphic designer. It seemed like the most ‘practical’ profession to do your art and not be such a starving artist.

In what ways do you differ from other designers?

I’ve always had a strong ethical pulse that has pulled me away from the corporate path. I’ve struggled with my role as designer because I didn’t want to be designing ads to promote meaningless consumption. I’ve always felt like a designer with heart and that the regular industry is no way to change the world.

I decided to go renegade and quit my job.

It wasn’t the fulfilling work experience that I had imagined after college. It was more like that dead end Kinkos job, and even though I say I’m anti-corporate, I wouldn’t have minded getting more traditional industry experience and working up the ladder, just to taste the other side and keep up with my skills. Instead, I felt like I was wasting away and not growing as a designer or utilizing my skills.

Now, I find myself rebuilding my career completely from scratch as an indie web designer for the holistic and creative arts. I have never done this professionally until now but I taught myself html way back in the day when I was 13 and updated myself with WordPress expertise. Like so many “lifestyle designers”, I decided I needed to move back to the Philippines where I was born so that I could build my online business in a place where I can basically afford to be broke because of the cheaper standard of living.

My life is completely different now, and I’m living like a local in a poor community while I build my new business and hopefully move out soon, travel and pay off my student loans.

If that’s not renegade, I don’t know what is!

Tell us about your experience at the Art Institute of Portland.

Like I said, I had a strong ethical pulse that even surfaced during college! I had a lot of mixed feelings about my major and what I was getting myself into. A lot of people around me wanted to move to New York and make it big or start off with $50k a year right off the bat.

I just couldn’t relate with that at all.

The art critiques toughen you up though but I had a lot of anxiety about my work and feeling like I wasn’t good enough. I’ve struggled with self-esteem even up to today. It challeged me to be a better designer and I’ve improved a LOT since my very first assignment that I still remember. A menu and logo for a fictitious restaurant called the Dilly Deli. Looking back at this time, it was one of the happiest points of my life even though living it felt like a much different story.

Being in a state of learning and growth is the best way to live and college challenges you to that by default.

How do you feel the web will change in coming years?

That’s a good question. I really have no idea! So far, I know about responsive design which makes it easier to view things in smaller screens like mobile devices and allows images, backgrounds and the whole content structure to resize as you move your window. There will be more of that.

Looking at current trends, the way people deal with SEO will completely change. It will be more about social media and networks than keywords. Google+ will rise and Facebook will be a memory. There might be more rules and regulations as more and more people do business online.

Could you describe a successful “branding” philosophy in just a few sentences?

Branding encapsulates your core values and attracts your target audience by being able to convey your top three personality traits within seconds in a clear and straight to the point manner.

Who you are as a person, brand, or company and what makes you unique is part of a remarkable brand.

What are some of your favorite movies?

I love movies!!

I’m partial to foreign films and indies. Such a cliche, right?

I love I Heart Huckabees, Waking Life, Amelie, American Beauty, Buffalo 66, Brazil, any David Lynch film, and Metropolis (both the Anime and silent 1920′s film). I have so many!

I also love a good 80s movie like my all-time favorite, The Breakfast Club.

Where do you find inspiration?

I try to find inspiration in my life and experiences, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I am inspired by the people around me, my amazing boyfriend, and the awesome clients that I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with.

I’m inspired by bloggers I read, videos, and good typography. I love just grabbing random brochures or flyers that I think have good design.

What has designing taught you about life?

How existential! I think that designing has taught me to see the beauty in life, and disregard the negative. It’s taught me to focus on the details, and I try to be as positive as I can be in my outlook.

My design philosophy goes hand in hand with my life philosophy. Help as many people as I can and make the world a better place… One design at a time!

Samples of Janet’s design work.

Anne Emberline has a Certificate in Writing and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in visual arts, with training in drawing and design. She’s been writing and illustrating since she was a kid, and is currently working on the fifth draft of her first novel. Her freelance art and design work can be seen at EmberlineArts.com.

How long have you been producing art and designs?

I started drawing when I was ten years old and have done it pretty consistently since then.

As for graphic design, I started that in high school when I designed and printed my first self-published magazines of my own writing and illustrations.

What do you do to produce blog traffic?

My blog is relatively new so I haven’t hyped it up much yet, but I’ve had some good traffic from Twitter.

In the future, when I’ve got more content up, I’d like to start doing guest posts and maybe some art giveaways on other blogs.

 Where were you trained in your skills?

I went to university for visual arts and specialized in drawing and digital art. Even though digital art was a focus at school, I’d say I picked up most of my skill with design software after I graduated.

Being a musician, artist, and writer, I always had a project to promote, so I was designing promo materials for my own projects all the time and gained a lot of expertise with the software along the way.

 What’s helped most in improving your art?

Practice!

I wish there was an easier way to get good at drawing, but there isn’t. In my 3rd and 4th years of university, I drew almost every day, which went a long way towards honing my drawing skill. I did life drawing, drawings from photos, drawings from imagination, abstract drawings, conceptual drawings, self-portraits, digital drawings, etc.

Doing all that helped me build a great foundation of technical skill, but it also helped me find my style as an artist.

What are some of your passions?

Reading! A couple months ago, I started keeping a log of all the books I read, and I average about five or six books a month, half novels and half non-fiction. Psychology is one of my favourite topics, particularly anything that involves brain science. I’m a sucker for that!

I’m also really passionate about my other creative pursuits in writing and music. Right now, most of my non-art creative energy is going into the fifth draft of a novel that I’ve been working on almost daily for two years now. You definitely need passion to get through an epic project like that.

You have 60 minutes of spare time, what do you do?

Well, I’m adamant about having lots of empty space in my day to let creative ideas simmer, so if I have 60 minutes of spare time, I’ll probably just sit on the couch with my brain set to “off” and avoid doing anything productive.

Or, if it’s around four or five o’clock, I’ll take a nap! (I recently blogged about how I use naps to fuel my creative work)

To the beginning artist, what advice would you give?

You’re going to make a lot of bad art. Get used to it!

It’s not the end of the world, and it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to make “bad art” forever. It means you’re learning, and the more you can let yourself fail in your art making, the faster you’ll learn. It’s a fact! So go make something awful, figure out why it’s awful, and then make something slightly less awful.

In a nutshell, those are the baby steps to greatness.

Some of Anne’s art & designs…

If you’re interested in showcasing your work and being interviewed on Smart Boy Designs, just contact us here.

WebGuru India has been a pioneer in the field of website design and flash design services since 2005. We have written and published numerous articles on logo design, graphic design, web development and SEO and internet marketing.

There was a time when the website designers made websites keeping in mind compatibility with Internet Explorer- the web browser that comes bundled with Microsoft Windows. They did not have much choice for website designing either. IE became the dominant browser in the late 1990s and dominated the market for a few more years owing to Microsoft’s aggressive promotion and marketing strategies. The rival browsers were not strong enough to take on IE and they did not enjoy the backing of a software behemoth either.

However, things changed drastically after 2005-06. Firefox emerged on the horizon and in 2008 Google Chrome made a powerful entry in web browser segment. The sheer speed and functionality of these browsers gave Microsoft enough reason to worry and its developers went back to the drawing board to revamp IE.

The Birth of IE7 & IE9

The result, IE7, was an improvement on the sluggish and buggy IE6 by a margin but it was still not good enough to thwart the march of the rivals. IE 8, its successor was another big improvement but its market share did not grow phenomenally either. With a large section of users switching loyalty to Google and Mozilla candidates, Microsoft realized the need for an overhaul in browser development. The result was IE 9 which was touted as the next best thing by the company in web development and browsing.

The web developers have agreed that IE9 is a much faster and feature rich browser but they have doubts on its ability to cater to the need of modern website design. This is because the web design industry has been going through significant turmoil and changes in recent times. Several new standards have been embraced by the web designers that are not fully compatible with IE9.

Microsoft boasted of the hardware acceleration capacity of IE9 before its release which takes advantage of the GPU in a PC to display complex graphics and web animations. This can help the online gamers for sure but for business websites this feature remains a glorified calculator.

IE9 Doesn’t Support Windows XP

The number of users sticking to the 10 year old OS, Windows XP is not insignificant! After the failure of Windows Vista a lot of Windows users decided to stick with the old OS and many of them are unlikely to upgrade in near future. Sadly, in its attempt to make IE9 future ready, Microsoft dropped support for XP. Therefore, making a website compatible with IE 9 is equivalent to largely ignoring the people who use Windows XP. In fact, the number of Windows XP users worldwide is more than the Vista and Win 7 users combined. This is what a website design company should consider while making websites that leverage exclusive features in IE9.

The major caveat of IE9 is undoubtedly its lackluster support for CSS3. A web design company that makes use of CSS3 for dynamic website development will find several compatibility issues with IE9. This is where the rival browsers have left IE9 behind by a large margin.

In conclusion.

Despite the brouhaha made by Microsoft about IE9 being a ‘modern’ browser, it falls short on several counts from a web designer’s perspective.

The CSS 3 incompatibility issues may thwart its success as a web development platform.