Breaking into web design: Digital careers in the age of AI
This week I'm joined by Andy Bishop who shares his journey from studying typography to leading a digital agency. Andy shares how he taught himself web design during the .com boom, the skills every designer needs today, and why there’s still room for human creativity in an AI-driven world
Participants
- Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Prospects
- Andy Bishop - web designer
Transcript
Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, Prospects. I'm Emily Slade and in this episode, I chat to Andy Bishop, who works as a web designer.
Andy Bishop: I'm Andy, Andy Bishop, and I am managing director of Redder Limited. We are a digital agency, we also do print and graphic design, and we've been going for about 20 years.
Emily Slade: Perfect. So let's start at the very beginning. What was your educational journey?
Andy Bishop: So I come from the South East. I was born in Hastings. But then, moved to Kent. I went to a voluntary aided school. It was part boarding, part day. At that school, it was Cranbrook in Kent, there was very much an expectation that you definitely would go to university. It wasn't a matter of whether you would or not, it was which one. And after I did GCSEs, I'd had no idea what I really wanted to do. When I went and did A-levels, I did two sciences in English and everyone confirmed that I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was quite good at science and I'm reasonably good with words. So that was kind of my thinking behind that. But I also always had a little bit of a thing about drawing, painting and creativity. So I did do a night course in art, an art A-level. at a different local school. I didn't complete it because I just couldn't get enough coursework done. But that did keep my intrigue there for creativity and art. So when it came to looking for university courses, there was something about the sort of creative side that I wanted to pursue. So I looked at media courses and design courses and some art courses and things like that. But when I went to Reading, I went to the typography and graphic communication department there. I went along there. I had very little experience in design, but that's not what they're really looking for. They're looking for people who have some kind of creative spark. And I must have given them that impression because they offered me a place and it suited the grades I finally got. So I went up to Reading and really enjoyed it actually. So then how did you get your first job? Yeah, so from University, at the end of the course, there was, part of the end of it was to do a display of all of your, what you considered your best work. So there's project work where you've done some design work, there would be exploratory stuff, there'd be essays and things, but you just present those. what you're really putting up is what you can do in terms of design and creativity. And each of us would get a space to put that up. And then after that had all been judged and we'd been given our degrees and so on, that was opened up to the public. And a lot of people in the industry are invited to come along and see the work that's being done. And off the back of that, a few people In fact, quite a few people got offered positions at design places, publishing companies and so on. And I was one of two of us from my year that were offered positions at a publishing company in Oxfordshire, which was really interesting because we were taken on by someone who had also done the course. She was their art director. It was a small company. The other guys there, the owners were also from Reading University, but they'd done different courses. And they were growing their company quite quickly. And yeah, we were sort of taken on and swept along with that growth. And during that period, I was taken on as a graphic designer, designing publications, magazines, journals, that kind of thing. But this is late 90s. and the internet had really kind of taken off in 1994, but it was starting to gain traction and popularity in 97 to 2000, which was the time I was at that company. And yeah, I started to get interested in the digital side of it because there is a natural progression. We're doing our designs for magazines on computers anyway, a lot of the graphics we're doing are just higher resolution versions of what you would do for the web. So it seemed a natural progression to move from doing graphic design for print to doing it for digital. So yeah, that's where I kind of got that initial way into the industry.
Emily Slade: Yeah, and then how did you get your current job? Like take us through your career path.
Andy Bishop: So I, yeah, I was at a publishing company for 2 1/2, three years, something like that. And then a friend of mine who worked at a technology company based in Wokingham in Berkshire, she said that there was a, the company was in the middle of trying to get its first e-commerce platform up and running, which was, you know, that was a big deal in 2000. So she said that there was an opening for someone to come along and do the graphics. And it's mad really because the features that the site that we were developing had and what it launched with, which actually was a tiny subset of what the software that they were using as a whole could do. Yeah, you'd laugh at it now, what it's capable of doing. It was just, it's quite basic now. So yeah, I applied for the job she said was going, went along for the interview, very much not thinking that I would get it because I didn't have what I thought was enough experience. But I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a go. If I got it, would be a sort of decent step up in terms of salary and benefits and so on. And they offered me the job on the spot. So I jumped at it. Only trouble was I didn't really know what I was doing. So I had to very quickly teach myself a lot more about web design. So I could do all the graphic side of it. I could sort of look at how designs work and that kind of thing. But What I couldn't do was the HTML. I couldn't do the styles for the web, translate my designs into something that would work in a browser. So that was where I got a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, as it was then. No longer exists. And yeah, through a process of making changes in the user interface side of it, then going across to the code side of it and seeing what happened, I kind of worked out how to do, how to build a website. And yeah, it went from there. And it was, yeah, it was an interesting time. As I say, it was.com bubble. There was loads of money sloshing about, people throwing all sorts of investment at various things. And yeah, it was a baptism of fire. But I swear by baptisms of fire, because it makes you learn really quickly.
Emily Slade: Yeah. So what advice would you give to someone now looking to move into something like web design?
Andy Bishop: There are so many ways in. Obviously, you could do it. You could sort of just open up Notepad and use some fairly basic graphic software, even back then. And you could still build a basic website. Now, you can get into it. What I would probably avoid for the time being, if you're just starting to get into it and you don't really know what you're doing, I'd probably avoid getting AI to do it all for you because you're not going to know what's going on and you're not going to be able to fix something if it goes wrong. That said, I do think, you know, AI is now a tool. So I've always sort of thought of technology as a way to, and technology basically is how humans overcome difficulties they have. So if they have problems with getting something done, they invent a machine or they develop technology, even clothes and that kind of stuff. to protect them from adverse weather and enable them to do something they couldn't otherwise do. And when it comes to web technology and sort of even sort of from graphic design, so you did graphic design manually, then you involved computers. Computers made it possible to do that design more quickly and go straight to the sort of the printing stage as opposed to doing it manually. Then you have other pieces of software that come on top of that. So you have the Quark Express or then Adobe InDesign. You have the graphics packages, they go on top of that. And when it came to web design, when it first came about, you'd have to do it HTML, CSS. So you'd build it from the code and something to make it look the way you want it to. Then you have Macromedia Dreamweaver, and that's another layer on top of that, and that does that for you. Then you have PHP, you have.NET, you have C#, whatever, the sort of languages that enable you to do some code that will then build the HTML that will build the website for you. So AI is just another step on that. It's just another layer where it takes some of that away from you and just speeds the process. But as I say, it's important to know the fundamentals of it. It's a bit like knowing not necessarily how your car works. You don't have to be able to build an engine to drive your car, but you do need to know where to put the oil and where to put the fuel and that kind of thing for the time being. Where to plug it in. to be able to make it go. So yeah, it's about knowing sort of fundamentals of that. So that's my advice about how to sort of get started in it. But immerse yourself in it. And I would say immerse yourself in websites as opposed to social media. There's a lot of social media stuff. There are a lot of people who talk about design and they are really good and there are some great sort of tutorials about how to do things. But Rather than sort of taking other people's advice about how to do things, I've always thought about design as something you immerse yourself in. So look at magazines, look at books and publications, look at the world around you, look at things online, websites, the sites you use, the apps you use on your phone or your tablet, how you interact with those, especially how they work badly. If you can see something that doesn't work the way you would hope it would or makes it difficult for you to do something, think about how you could make that better. And I think in studying that and thinking about these things, you learn to problem solve. And as a designer, your main mission is to solve problems. It's to look at something that doesn't work or look at information that can't get from one place to another. and work out how to solve that and how to make it better.
Emily Slade: And is there still a need for web designers in a world of AI, even things like Squarespace now, is there still a big market for people that are building from scratch web pages?
Andy Bishop: Yeah, I think there is. Obviously, one of the things about AI, as it's called, obviously it's large language models, it's LLM, it's a predictor. So it will take what it's seen before And it will apply a certain amount of calculation to it, but it doesn't have human ingenuity and it won't have for a while yet. And in terms of problem solving, yes, it could sort of look at millions of ways of doing something and say, this is the best one. But it can't look at something and say, actually, there's all those millions of ways of doing it, but actually there's another way that I've just realised by sort of putting these different ideas together. So it's the ingenuity that I think it's missing. And it's that humans can still bring to the process. And it's the way that you look at something from a human perspective. So the other thing that AI can't do is look at it from that human perspective, think about how it would do something, because all it knows is you've asked it a question and it wants to give you the answer. It's not thinking about how the world works. how things might be in the future, how something environmental might affect what you're doing. And yeah, you need to sort of think about all these things when you're doing design. Who's going to use it? Where are they going to use it? How? That's the sort of thing where unless you're, you spend a good few days writing a prompt to an AI to explain exactly what you wanted to do. And by then you might as well have done it yourself. So I would sort of say, you can start something off and then you can just use AI to add and enhance. That's the best way I think of doing it and using it. will get more advanced and it will take more in the same way as technology has replaced humans in the past. But humans are endlessly ingenious. So I think there's a lot of space for us still.
Emily Slade: And in terms of a career path, are there options within the industry to go freelance or to work within companies like in-house?
Andy Bishop: Absolutely. I think there's something to be said for working for a company first because you get a sense, it's very It's very unusual to start off as a freelancer and get the sorts of clients that will teach you, because clients do teach you, as I was saying about baptisms of fire. I think we've probably got more knowledge from difficult clients than from anyone else, because squeaky wheels get the grease. We have found that the people who are the most demanding have pushed us. So one of our first clients, he came to us, I think he was early 50s, maybe sort of 52, 53. And he said that he'd been a programmer himself, but he'd decided to pack it all in because he realised that he wasn't going to kind of get to where he wanted to be through that. So he decided that he would start his own business, selling underfloor heating, electric underfloor heating. He had found the products. He wanted us to build him a brand and the website to sell them. And his plan was in 10 years, sell the business and retire to Cyprus. And to be fair, that's exactly what he did. He was so driven. And yeah, it was all because every single day I think I spent so long talking to him every day. The phone would go, probably three or four times, and he would say, I want to do this with the website. And it was great for us because we got lots of work out of it. But it also pushed us because he would ask us for things we'd never done before. So it pushed us to work out how to do things and how to solve problems. But having done that, I think, working with clients in a company where, you would be given those kinds of problems to solve, that then gives you the grounding and the basis after which to become a freelancer. So I think I would advise people to do, you could do agency work even, might just go to an agency, become a regular there, and work for that agency, basically as a freelancer, but you still get the experience of the clients they've got. And then go out on your own and just say, I'll work for whoever. And I have colleagues that I've worked with in the past. They have moved on. They've worked for us. They've worked for a couple of other clients. sorry, a couple of other companies, and then moved on and become freelance. And they, tick along nicely and make a decent living. So it's not a bad course of action. And it enables you to become very kind of agile and adaptive to sort of demands and what's happening, that kind of thing.
Emily Slade: If people listening want to reach out with any questions, can they?
Andy Bishop: Absolutely. Yeah, I'd be very happy to. Yeah, I like to sort of keep myself busy and I do tend to be kept quite busy, but I'm quite happy to answer questions and give advice or whatever, wherever I can.
Emily Slade: Perfect. Is there anything else that you wanted to add?
Andy Bishop: No, I think that I've talked a lot. So yeah, I've probably said all I have to say. But yeah, there's probably stuff that will occur to me at some point. But yeah, if people have got questions, then I'm quite happy to answer them.
Emily Slade: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time today.
Andy Bishop: Yeah, it's a pleasure, absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Emily Slade: Thanks again to Andy for their time. For more information on becoming a web designer, head to prospects.ac.uk. For a full-length video version of this episode, check out. our YouTube channel at Future You Pod. If you enjoyed the episode, do feel free to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Thank you as always for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.
Notes on transcript
This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.
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