One Minute With…
Chris Spooner
Hi Chris, thanks for taking time to chat with One Minute With. Tell us a little about yourself and your work.
Thanks, I’m Chris Spooner, I’m a designer/blogger who runs two design blogs on the Interwebs: Blog.SpoonGraphics.co.uk and Line25.com. Blog.SpoonGraphics is home to general design tutorials where Line25 has a focus on web design.
Walk us through a typical day in the life of Chris Spooner.
I wake up, eat breakfast then head out with Jake the Dog for a mini adventure. When we return my work day will start. Until lunch I’ll either purge my email inbox or begin working on a blog post for one of my two sites. I’ll break off for lunch and catch up on my YouTube subscriptions, then return to work for a few more hours before starting my daily workout at my little home gym. This usually takes me up to dinner time, after which I have the kitchen to clean up! In the evening my fiancee and I either watch a movie in front of the TV or head out to the cinema.
How did you get into design?
I’ve always had an interest in design and excelled at the art and design topics in school so it was kind of natural for me to head into the design industry.
Most (if not all) of your work is self-initiated projects and work on your two blogs. Did you start out hoping to make blogging a full-time career, or was it something which just spiralled out of control?
I simply started my blog just to give myself a place to practice and experiment. It wasn’t until years later that I realised it could be a full time career.
Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years? Are you still hoping to be making tutorials and writing for blogs, or do you want to have moved onto to something else?
It’s a difficult one to answer because if we think back 5-10 years blogging wasn’t even around so who knows what the Internet will be like the future. I like to just take each day at a time and worry about the future when it arrives.
What design tools could you not live without?
The Adobe Suite, my Mac and my Xbox are my most prized possessions!
Aside from design, what do you like to do in your free time?
I’m quite a keen gamer and enjoy playing and sharing my Call of Duty videos and guides on my gaming channel on YouTube. Otherwise my other main hobby or interest is my gym work. Eating and working out has become a daily activity which I enjoy, especially when I see my hard work paying off in the mirror.
And finally, what tips would you give to anybody who is looking to get started in design or blogging?
The main ingredients I recommend are firstly to make sure you’re doing it out of passion for the subject as you’ll have to create and post content for a whole year or more before you see anything from it, those who do it for fame or fortune often cut themselves short because they run out of motivation. Secondly try and create content that will help people out, and thirdly aim to do something different. I fell on my feet creating Adobe Illustrator tutorials because there wasn’t many others covering the subject at the time, which helped me stand out as an ‘expert’ or go-to site/person for that particular topic.
Thanks Chris!
Thanks so much to Chris to take time out of his schedule to talk to One Minute With. I personally found his answers very interesting, and hopefully you do too!
Why not check out Chris’s site, and follow him on Dribbble and Twitter?