Defining Web Roles

[Music]

Lea Alcantara: You are listening to CTRL+CLICK CAST. We inspect the web for you! Today we’re talking about defining web roles with Anton Peck. I’m your host, Lea Alcantara, and I’m joined by my fab co-host:

Emily Lewis: Emily Lewis!

Lea Alcantara: We’re currently looking for episode sponsors, so if you’re interested in promoting something this fall, please visit ctrlclickcast.com/contact.

Emily Lewis: CTRL+CLICK would also like to thank Pixel & Tonic for being our major sponsor.

[Music ends] Today designer and illustrator Anton Peck joins the show to talk about web roles, specifically how we, as web designers and developers, have to balance more and more in our careers. Anton currently works as a UI/UX Director for OneFire Media, Inc., a startup based in Peoria, Illinois, but his 20-year career spans all areas of interactive media, and thanks to his successful Kickstarter campaign, which I myself was proud to support, he published his first graphic novel in 2013 called Gather. Welcome to the show, Anton.

Anton Peck: Well, hello, how are you?

Lea Alcantara: Very good, thanks. So Anton, can you tell our listeners a bit more about yourself?

Anton Peck: Well, my life is pretty boring, but it is fun.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: As you’ve mentioned, I’m from Peoria, Illinois, and I work a lot and I stay at home and I have my wife as my best friend. I have two children, three cats, one of which is very old, and a recently-acquired Dachshund puppy.

Emily Lewis: Oh.

Anton Peck: Oh, not puppy, we call her puppy because she’s so little and so close to the ground.

Lea Alcantara: Oh.

Anton Peck: So I think no matter what age she’s at, she’s just going to be a puppy.

Lea Alcantara: Oh, that’s sweet. You’re amongst friends here. We’re all cat people here. [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: And several cat people. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Yeah, I found that even though I do love the dog, I mean, she’s a sweetheart, I’m still at my heart a cat person, because you can kind of push them around a little easier.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: I think between the three of us, we have eight cats. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: Oh, wow! Yeah.

Anton Peck: Wow! Crazy cat people.

Emily Lewis: Yeah, the best kind.

Lea Alcantara: So before we define web roles, what do you believe the typical roles even are?

Anton Peck: It seems to be that typical roles, there are a lot of different roles, but they tend to filter down into commonly grouped things. For example, when you see roles listed as UI/UX, that encompasses a lot of stuff, and generally what it means is, all we need is a designer.

Lea Alcantara: Yes.

Anton Peck: And we could go off on the whole UX thing not being a part. I mean, that’s a whole different thing. It’s probably a whole different episode actually. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: Just defining user experience.

Anton Peck: Yes, user experience.

Emily Lewis: Yeah.

Anton Peck: That’s like it’s not UI, that’s the experience. That’s how the user what they feel about. It’s not even just the app or the design, but the entire company as a whole. So we have UI/UX. We have front-end design. We have back-end coding development. There are writers. Oh gosh, off the top of my head, there is just so much pressure to try to think of all the different roles. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Yeah, it kind of, like I mentioned, encompasses a lot of group, a whole bunch, that tend to be labeled as singles. Does it make sense?

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, absolutely.

Anton Peck: Okay.

Lea Alcantara: So why don’t we start with the general. Let’s keep it simple, let’s talk about the general definitions of what you just mentioned. Like, well, what is a typical idea of a web designer?

Anton Peck: Typically, the web designer is someone who directs the personality and appearance of a web page. So that could be through Photoshop or even someone who’s still using Fireworks.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: I mean, I know there are a lot of them out there.

Emily Lewis: I’m one, I still use it.

Anton Peck: Fantastic, and there’s the new tool. I don’t have it, the new design tool. It’s like the hot software to have.

Lea Alcantara: Sketch.

Anton Peck: Yeah, Sketch.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: I kind of want to get into that, but time and everything.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: I see what people are creating with it and it’s fantastic. But then web design also sort of falls into people that do front-end coding, so HTML, CSS, maybe some light JavaScript or jQuery, or maybe it’s someone who edits Wordpress themes or any other kind of CMS themes, just the facet of the design that is facing the customer or user.

Lea Alcantara: So then what’s a web developer?

Anton Peck: A web developer traditionally tends to be the person who hooks up the database, or makes the pages dynamic.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: So from a static page to a dynamic page, and that would be the developer side, whether him making all the content appear from a miniscule, all they do is just something else, or working with Ruby on Rails or any of the sort of service-side language.

Lea Alcantara: So that seems pretty close to alignment of what I’ve seen people define web designers and web developers, but I think all three of us would agree that there’s more to it than what you just said.

Anton Peck: Certainly, it is, yes.

Lea Alcantara: Which is kind of the point of this entire show.

Emily Lewis: And even more to it than just those things, but even though we were starting with the general definitions, it’s really rare that like I once upon a time called myself a web designer, but I’ve always been mostly a front-end developer, which is kind of what I refer to myself now.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Emily Lewis: Especially now that you and I are working together, Lea, because you pretty much do all the design.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: But once upon a time, I did the design and the front-end dev, and I would just call myself web designer because from a marketing standpoint, it was easier to sell that to a company that has no knowledge of what the different web roles are. But someone who did PHP programming, they might not even call themselves a web developer, but might call themselves a programmer. It’s kind of a ridiculous.

Lea Alcantara: Well, it’s also interesting you mentioned that because I do primarily call myself a web designer.

Emily Lewis: But you also do print design.

Lea Alcantara: Yes, I also do print design so I’m a graphic designer as well, and I also do branding so I’m a logo designer, and then let’s just add the development part, I also know HTML and CSS, although obviously you’re the expert at it so you’re doing most of that work these days, but I love CMSs.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: So it’s like I jump straight into the “typical” role of a back-end developer and start implementing content management systems, and while I can’t write a program from scratch, I know enough to be dangerous to edit PHP files.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: I know enough to know how to fiddle around with .htaccess and server admins, you know? [Laughs] Stuff like that. It’s very, very chaotic at times when you stop to think about it.

Anton Peck: You certainly can be, yeah.

Emily Lewis: And Anton, is it just as nuanced in the UX area, because that’s your title now, UI/UX director, but is that what you would have called yourself according to what you do for a living?

Anton Peck: Well, that’s a funny thing you should mentioned that. The UI/UX, I am probably more UI than I am UX. I don’t do any user profiles or personas or any of the really deep side of UX. It’s just more examining an interface and understanding what would be easier for the user to understand and get and try to design a page in such a way that it makes sense for the particular audience that I’m targeting, and the UI that I do any more seems to be mostly front-end development.

Lea Alcantara: Interesting. So Emily and I kind of touched on the stuff that we’ve evolved through in our own definitions with our career, and you yourself have had a really varied career. Why don’t you explain all the varieties of work you’ve done and are currently doing?

Anton Peck: [Laughs] I’ll try not to take too long. I’m old and crusty and have kind of very long age in career.

Emily Lewis: Seasoned. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Seasoned, yes, I’ll take that.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Seasoned roles. You see, going back, I’m hungry.

Emily Lewis: That term is when we think of food like rolls, croissants, spread. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Yeah. It’s definitely butter roll. That’s how we should define all this stuff now. We’re just going to define it like it is food.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: Nice.

Anton Peck: There we go. It’s done. So back to my career, I’d say that it started, I don’t know, it’s kind of ambiguous, but it was back in the early 90’s, I’m thinking. I don’t exactly what year, but I was working for a company called Dynamic Graphics, and they produced a magazine, and I didn’t do any graphic design for the magazine or anything, but I was…

Emily Lewis: Oh, I used to subscribe to that magazine back in the day.

Anton Peck: Did you?

Emily Lewis: Yeah, wow!

Anton Peck: Well, they had a few magazines. That’s awesome.

Emily Lewis: That’s a blast from the past, Dynamic Graphics, yeah.

Anton Peck: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They produced an interactive CD-ROM that they distributed with the magazine, or it might have been with a couple of their other magazines, and a lot of times they had all the different clip art that they had created that month.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: And part of the CD-ROM, it’s mostly entertainment so we would take the featured clip art and sort of go through it and find some themes that we could work with and we would make this whole, you know, like one month, it would be entirely pirates. So it’s this whole interactive thing.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: And we would go crazy with it too. We had a blue screen studio and we’d record video and we had a couple of guys that were doing music, and I was really just jumping into it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was surrounded by people that were incredibly talented so it was a great experience to learn. We were creating this stuff and burning it on the CDs and then we’d have the CDs printed up and they’d be bunched up with the magazines and shipped out, and it was a lot of fun. That was kind of where it all kicked off. It wasn’t that I really had any experience in print design.

I started off understanding electronic interactive design, like the whole concept of clicking on buttons and making things move and do stuff on the screen, even though we were working with 640 x 480 back then, little bitty things. Not long after that though, I moved on and got into companies where it started getting to be the mid to late 90’s and so the web was starting to become a thing, and that’s where I transitioned, and I worked for a corporation, a lot of big corporations and State Farm, and it was almost all doing internet stuff for them.

So the first real changing moment for me was in 2000, I went to Thunder Lizard Conference, Web Design World 2000. That took place in Denver, Colorado, and I was introduced to Jeffrey Zeldman and Douglas Bowman, and I saw these guys speak and it completely blew my mind with the whole CSS stuff and where the web was eventually going. Now, well, that’s what I want to do, and I did that for a long, long time, but it seems like now I’m starting to dabble around in newer technologies. Yeah, I still do the web kind of stuff, and I’m implementing that a little bit on the mobile side which assuming we will probably talk about it later.

Timestamp: 00:10:16

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: But there’s also augmented reality that’s kind of becoming a new thing, and there’s the Google Glass which is not a huge thing now, but it’s kind of cool to play with the technology because it uses just basic HTML formatting and a JSON script to get the data. So there’s all those same skill sets all bundled right up in there.

Emily Lewis: So from your first job that you would have classified as web to where you are now, do you feel like that first job, the expectations for what you should do in that position were narrowly defined, and would you say that that narrow definition is true today or that it’s gotten broader?

Anton Peck: I would say it was pretty narrowly defined back then with the particular department I was working with, and even the way the sites were set up, the internet was compared to today’s standards for what you can do, it was an extremely primitive. It didn’t have any sort of content management. There was no database or anything. So even though they were running Windows servers, I had access to FTP and I could hand write my HTML.

I would do some design. I would just publish out just raw HTML files to whatever particular department needed a page, and we had thousands of these pages too, but it was kind of an interesting experience learning how to do all this stuff, but there was no back-end connection at all. I mean, I hardly even touched the JavaScript except from back when the days when we would do JavaScript to do image rollovers.

Emily Lewis: Oh yeah.

Anton Peck: Remember that hold image preloading thing that we used to have to do?

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: Like there would be this chunk of code at the top of the page where you had the array and then you could load the images and then you’d have them just sliced out in this really complex nasty table, and as you rolled over it, the image would swap out into something glowing or weird.

Lea Alcantara: And it would take a second for it to even switch to. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Well, not if you preload it properly. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: So that seemed really, really narrow at the very beginning stages of the web, but now, now, it does seem…

Anton Peck: Now, it’s crazy.

Lea Alcantara: Yes, it’s much, much broader. Do you think that was a transition that just happened over time, and do you also believe that it’s a positive change?

Anton Peck: So you are asking if I think the transition specifically from the more simplest…

Lea Alcantara: Narrow…

Anton Peck: To the narrow.

Lea Alcantara: Yes.

Anton Peck: To where it’s more broad was gradual, I think it was and I think it was born from a necessity of deadlines and being more efficient in getting workflows where people wanted to work DRY, the acronym, Don’t Repeat Yourself, to where they started coming up with systems and patterns and libraries of ways of being able to create smaller chunks of code templates that could be reused and then suddenly it started an avalanche of that right there.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: It just sort of started cascading out into people that always thought that they could create any type of workflow for themselves and they would share it, and then based on sites like GitHub and whatever else, those would get forth and then turn into something else, and you have Node Package managers, and look how many different packages you can install with just that. It’s just really amazing how you can increase your productivity and how fast you can build something these days with just a couple of commands.

Emily Lewis: Yeah, we’re increasing our productivity and adding efficiencies and yet we’re still working harder than ever before. [Laughs] I guess that’s because we have all these things that can automate so that’s just assumed that’s part of your job, and then the more specific part of your job that’s kind of to the title or whatever that unique skill set is, that’s on top of just, “Oh, well, you should understand Bootstrap syntax and you should know how to work with the CMS.” That’s just part of it.

Anton Peck: Exactly, and that’s where it’s kind of a caveat. You asked me if I thought it was a good thing or not, and that I think it’s a little bit of both.

Lea Alcantara: Okay.

Anton Peck: It’s a good thing if you know what you’re doing and you’re able to embrace some of this stuff, and you can use it to your advantage to where you can manage a bunch of stuff with different types of workflows and get your code done efficiently and manage your projects, but it’s maybe not so good thing because you have to learn all this stuff while you’re working because you don’t always have time to research.

Emily Lewis: Yeah, right.

Anton Peck: I mean, I have been myself looking into further use of things like Grunt and Gulp, which I don’t really know a lot about.

Emily Lewis: Yeah.

Anton Peck: But I know that they can make a big difference. I’ve used Node Package manager to create cordova libraries, and I assumed that it’s very similar. You can have them watch your folders for your people that use Sass, compile it down into a minified CSS. That’s really useful stuff when you actually get to where that’s part of your average thing and you can just set it up.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Emily Lewis: You’re right though, it takes time to get that into your workflow. I mean, Lea, what, I’ve been using Sass for maybe a year and a half. Is that about it?

Lea Alcantara: On a regular use.

Emily Lewis: Yeah.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: And even us, getting Version Control into our workflow.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: These things were important and we knew they would save us time. We knew they’d save our asses.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: But finding the time, and at this point, especially because we don’t get paid to do research.

Lea Alcantara: Yes.

Emily Lewis: Because we don’t have like the benefit of an hourly or salaried position so it’s also trying to find the project that we can be like, “Okay, let’s do work Version Control in this project and the client is going to pay for it on top of that because they’d get the benefit of it.”

Anton Peck: Exactly, yes.

Emily Lewis: It’s kind of crazy, and at the same time, I know that there still are periods of time where I’m like I should be doing this, but I just do not have time to try and learn that right now.

Lea Alcantara: I feel like there’s this kind of tension between what web professionals should, like that word is I think kind of loaded, that “should” or “should not” do.

Anton Peck: Oh, it’s very loaded, yeah.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: Yeah.

Lea Alcantara: Because like, I mean, we were “fine” not using Version Control for the longest time because Emily and I were separate and we had our own individual workflows and so our clients only had one point of contact. That has its own pros and cons. But the moment you have a team like even just one extra person, that hugely complicates it, so Version Control had to be added to our workflow, and now that it’s part of our workflow, I really can’t imagine not ever, losing it ever again.

Emily Lewis: Yeah.

Anton Peck: Yeah, exactly, and I don’t even use Version Control on every project. Maybe it’s kind of a dependence thing, and I don’t mean the diapers. [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: Yeah. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: It’s totally where my mind went… [Laughs]

Anton Peck: It’s kind of vivid one, yeah. [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: There was a commercial on the other day that just came into my head. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: [Laughs] So…

Emily Lewis: Well, I think it’s good though that you can kind of select whether to add it to a project or not, because it is true that the Version Control specifically introduces some efficiencies and obviously the backup capability is huge, but it adds time to every project to set it all up, to go through to that, you know?

Anton Peck: Exactly.

Emily Lewis: So adding all that up, does it save you time? It’s choosing when it’s the right fit or not versus the “well, it should always be.” Nothing is ever that black and white.

Anton Peck: Exactly, and one branch that can sort of bring the whole thing crashing down is accelerated timelines or the pressure to get something done and you’re still setting up your stuff.

Emily Lewis: Right.

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: A great example is this morning I had a list of a whole bunch of different things, and in my head I’m thinking what I wanted to do was create a JSON Object and then just have a little chunk of JavaScript all the way through and it automatically build this particular system for me because I was using Bootstrap, so it had all these panels and these <div>s inside <div>s, and it was kind of crazy, but because of time constraints, I ended up just copying and pasting and building it out manually because I didn’t want to spend too much time messing with the JavaScript or a JSON Object.

Lea Alcantara: I’ve done similar things too where sometimes it’s actually faster to do copy paste.

Anton Peck: Yeah, and it was 35 items.

Emily Lewis: Yeah.

Anton Peck: And I thought, “You know what, the heck with it, I’m just going to do this old school.” And I just created it and built it in raw HTML and it was done.

Emily Lewis: Do you think the accelerate timelines, because I feel like I see that a lot too, even the expectations that our clients may have is tied to the fact that, I don’t know, when I started my career 20 years ago, no one knew what I did.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: The company who hired me, they knew they need a website, but they weren’t really sure what was involved. They just knew that there was something magical behind the scenes with code, and in a lot of ways, you could get away with being like this is going to take me six months. Give me six months, you have no idea what it takes to make all this. But nowadays, people are like, “Oh, well, that person launch it this fast and this came out.” There is this hot new thing always coming out and so expectations are, “Well, shouldn’t we all be able to produce that quickly?”

Anton Peck: Well, yes, we should. Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t. But it really depends on what we’re producing. There are a couple of things we can just crank out in a week or so, but some of the bigger things that are far more complex or have different levels of hierarchy with lots and lots of content, sure, that will take six months.

Timestamp: 00:19:50

Emily Lewis: At least in my experience, some of the clients I worked with and even when I was working with an employer, the managers who were driving the project, they had their goals and objectives that they needed to meet. They don’t actually understand how any of it happens. They don’t know the technical side of things, and so they make an assumption in their own mind about, “Oh, well, that should take you a week,” regardless of whether the scope of it is reasonable for a week.

It seems like, to me, at least, I feel like that has become more of an issue than it was back in the day when I first started in this field because everyone thinks they know what they’re talking about. People who aren’t actually web developers or web designers, but more like project managers or managers who they committed to something and they said it was a week and it’s going to get done and it’s going to kill everyone to get it done.

Lea Alcantara: Well, I guess if I could jump in here, I feel like it’s a bit of a double-edged sword because part of the reason why those expectations were raised or confused is or part of the reason why the web is so great is that there is all these new tools out there as we mentioned that can automate and make things happen right away.

What I feel like needs more education for our clients is that they don’t understand that those solutions tend to be for one-click, smaller-scope items. So like they have a perception that’s warped when they see like a free Wordpress blog with a free template come up in less than an hour which all three of us can do without blinking really. Just sign it up and press go, and when they see that, it’s like, “Well, why can’t you make me a custom website with the same sort of speed and quality or whatever,” without actually understanding that the scope is different because for some clients, a website is a website is a website. They don’t even understand the difference of being a blog or an e-commerce site, right?

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: It’s just like it’s all the same.

Anton Peck: Or one of my pet peeves is when you have a blog entry and they call that their blog.

Emily Lewis: Oh, it drives me nuts too.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Like, “I posted a new blog today.”

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: No, you didn’t, you idiot. [Laughs] You made a post.

Anton Peck: Yes.

Lea Alcantara: You posted an article. I will take article.

Anton Peck: An entry, an article, whatever you want to call it on your blog.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: The blog is the container.

Lea Alcantara: The Blog, yeah. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: And a blog is not a CMS.

Lea Alcantara: Yes, there you go.

Anton Peck: Oh, I know.

Lea Alcantara: And I feel like that’s a double-edged sword because I benefitted from these types of templated items, and I think the web has benefitted because instead of really crappy static HTML pages, people are empowered to publish their content without as much technical knowledge, because really at the end of the day, we’re facilitators. As web designers and developers, we’re facilitators to people’s businesses and thoughts and their ideas, and we help make it happen. We help their businesses, right?

Anton Peck: Yes.

Lea Alcantara: And sometimes their scope is much smaller, but the problem happens is when their scope expands, but they still have that smaller mentality in terms of like cost or expectation.

Anton Peck: Exactly.

Lea Alcantara: That’s where like the disconnect starts to happen, which I find a little bit weird because coming from like the graphic design field, it’s like, “Yes, I will pay this much for brochures and business cards and everything, and I’m going to set aside some money to go pay for that, but how dare you demand more than X amount of money so I could have a Wordpress blog or something like that.”

Which is far more complicated in my opinion is someone who comes from print, creating something with moving parts essentially than like a static printed object, and I just feel like it’s a complicated issue because part of it is an industry-wide issue that there’s a lot of us perpetuating these ideas.

Anton Peck: Yes.

Lea Alcantara: Yes, I will make your website for a $100, you know?

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: But then that’s when you get the unexpected surprise that you now have to modify this little theme template thing into something it was never meant to be, you know?

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: Which some clients may do. They might surprise you with new types of content and they’ll say, “Hey, can you put this on my blog?” And you look at it and you say, “Well, that is a complete scope change.” And then you sort of estimate it out, and they’re like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, how did you get that much money out of that? It’s just a different content.”

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m curious though, with all these types of complications like, let’s say, a new graduate from a design or web program is just entering the web field, what would you tell this person with the current expectations with their current skill set they should have compared to someone like us, like who’s been here for a while? Or do you think that’s just it depends? [Laughs]

Anton Peck: More than that, I was pondering this question and thinking that the current expectations are just a little bit broken, but yes, it does depend. It depends on where you go and who you talk to. Some places get it. Some don’t. But it’s possible that the current expectations just generically are that someone comes in knowing maybe some basic HTML, but for the most part, as long as they know how to edit some Wordpress themes. I know that sounds kind of hard core than that.

Emily Lewis: It just seems like low expectations for someone entering the web field. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: It’s interesting though, and this could be a total other podcast episode, but my husband is a computer scientist. He’s got a degree in Computer Science, and he works for Amazon and all that fun stuff, and we were chatting with a friend of ours who currently teaches at his old university, and they were talking about how certain courses are being cut out of the requirements of the CompSci degree. So Rob had to, when he went to university, complete more complicated university courses in order to earn his degree than current people leaving now, and you know how some people are saying like, “Oh, you need a Master’s degree these days to do stuff.”

It’s because at least whenever I talk to my husband about this discussion, he thinks it’s just because the Bachelor’s degree courses are no longer the quality it is anymore, and this is him as even just like observing any new hires or anybody that’s applying for positions and it’s like there’s a lot of people being taught very, very specific skill sets like you need to learn HTML, but you don’t actually understand why and you don’t understand like applications, and they’re making code monkeys as opposed to looking at the entire industry more holistically, and yeah, I think that’s like an academic-wide problem in general.

Anton Peck: It could be. It could be. I was more going from the mindset that there is an expectation that they know how to possibly edit code.

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: But for the most part, I think it’s because there are so many tools these days that help you automate that whole process.

Emily Lewis: I do not want to hijack this conversation, but I just want to say that I think that’s terrible. I think as important as it may be for the person that you’re hiring to edit, to be able to work with, let’s say, a Wordpress theme because that’s what your site is running off of or whatever, a fundamental understanding of what that code means, like the semantics of HTML, the document outline, accessibility, like all of those things make you a better web developer, that should just be fundamentals, and it breaks my heart to think that there are programs that could be saying, “Well, you can use these tools to edit your HTML.” Use the tools when you get the job, but understand the fundamentals long before.

Anton Peck: Exactly. It’s not even so much programs. It’s a frameworks and libraries with things, and I’ve had this conversation with friends before that personally I like to jQuery once in a while, and I’ll concede that it does speed up my process and it’s gotten a lot lighter so I used to complain about heavy the load was, and everybody has got it cached anyway from the Google CDN, and so jQuery is nice, however, it really is helpful to know just basic fundamental JavaScript before you get in because there are people that are probably learning jQuery that have no idea, like if you took away the jQuery and you said, “Write something in JavaScript,” they wouldn’t know how.

Emily Lewis: Right.

Anton Peck: Or if you’re talking about maybe a grid framework that they go for either Bootstrap and Foundation, they’re kind of competitive, but for the most part, it’s Bootstrap everywhere.

Lea Alcantara: So who is this person then? Is this the web designer, a web developer, what is this mythical person we’re talking about?

Anton Peck: That person who’s creating the Bootstrap site with the jQuery and stuff?

Lea Alcantara: Well, I’m saying like we’re talking about somebody who understands this, that or the other. If somebody is coming to you like a student and they’re like, “I want to work for the web,” and you tell them, “Here are your tools and here are things you need to do,” and right now it seems like some people are just like implementing Bootstrap and now you’re a web designer, or is that a web developer, like who is this person?

Emily Lewis: Well, they’re neither in my opinion. I mean, if all you can do is manipulate a tool, you’re not a developer. You’re not a designer.

Anton Peck: Yeah. That’s not a recommendation I would personally make.

Lea Alcantara: Sure.

Anton Peck: I would never tell anybody that if somebody ask what tools they wanted or what knowledge they needed in order to get started in the industry, like just right at the beginning – get started – I would just point them to some really solid publications or some Lynda tutorials on how to write basic HTML, how to start styling HTML with just the basic CSS, and then maybe start working with DOM manipulation with some basic JavaScript, and then just start expanding upon that, and then after you learn those things, then you can start adding in the other stuff.

Timestamp: 00:29:59

Lea Alcantara: And so this is for a web designer, not a web developer.

Anton Peck: Oh, okay. I know I always…

Lea Alcantara: See, do you see? This is what I’m trying to point out, huh? Huh?

Anton Peck: Yeah, yeah. I’m slipping into your sand trap here.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: But don’t you guys both think, at least I think, whether you’re a designer or a developer, I mean it’s like a doctor. The doctor has to take organic chemistry in their Bachelor’s program.

Lea Alcantara: Sure.

Emily Lewis: That’s a fundamental skill.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: He doesn’t know what kind of doctor he’s going to be, but he’s got to understand biology, but if you’re going to be a designer or a developer, like a designer has to have some information about what a front-end developer does.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Emily Lewis: The front-end developer has to have some understanding of where a designer is coming from. I mean, and then even aside from like actual skills you can develop through practice like coding kind of skills. I mean, there are also the skills that are almost never asked for in job descriptions, but can you talk to a designer.

Lea Alcantara: Yes.

Emily Lewis: Do you understand the language they are using?

Lea Alcantara: The terms.

Emily Lewis: Can you a designer talk to a developer? Can you manage your time? Can you manage your tasks in your projects? I mean, those are the kind of skills that I’m thinking that if you’re entering the web field right now, those should be what you have. Not can you work with a theme, and yet I think that at least when I see job postings and such, it’s like, “Yeah, you can work with Bootstrap.” Like anyone who can read HTML, CSS and JavaScript can work with Bootstrap. That should be the skill, reading the fundamental language, not using the tool.

Anton Peck: Yes, absolutely, and that kind of the answer too is that if you are a web designer getting into the industry, you can’t be a visual designer anymore. I mean, you have to understand that you’re outputting some sort of code that’s going to be used on the site.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: So here’s the real complicated question, to what extent should these skills overlap? Because at some point, there’s got to be like a breaking point where I might start knowing some fundamentals of JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean I can create a web app or some sort of crazy object-oriented concoction of sorts, or should I? Right?

Anton Peck: Well, that’s up to you. I mean, if that’s something that interests you, I think that’s an individual decision.

Lea Alcantara: Well, sure, but I’m just saying like in terms of what extent should employers, should clients expect these skills to overlap because, I mean, I feel like all three of us are on the same page that everyone should, whether you’re design focused, you should still understand HTML, CSS and programming and all that stuff, and if you are a web developer, even if you’re a back-end developer or programmer, you should have some fundamentals of hierarchy of visual importance and design and contrast and all that kind of fun stuff, so that you’re able to talk to each other, and that’s in general terms of like where the overlap is. Is there any like really specific skills overlap, or is there just at some point…

Emily Lewis: Oh.

Lea Alcantara: Do you know what I’m saying?

Anton Peck: Yes, I do.

Lea Alcantara: Like at some point…

Anton Peck: And I think I might be able to answer that with a little tidbit from my history.

Lea Alcantara: Excellent.

Anton Peck: One of the companies that I worked for used a custom MVC so it’s Model View Controller type of content management system, and the back end, I mean, it was very divided between the developers and the front-end designers. So I would be the front-end designer writing my HTML on stuff, and the back-end programmer would be writing all Perl, and in order for me to create the templates that would go into this system, it was essential for me to at least understand how to put something together that the programmer could use without coming back to me and saying, “Dude, this isn’t going to work.”

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: It’s those overlaps, even if whether you’re working with another teammate, a programmer that can do all the really heavy duty lifting, it’s still good to know what they’re doing and what they need, and it’s good for them to kind of understand what you’re doing and what you need. It’s all about communication.

Emily Lewis: I think that’s one of the more salient points about the overlap discussion because, sure, you can say that the designer needs to know HTML and CSS or that the front-end dev needs to understand design, but I think, Anton, your point is far more accurate. You need to know how to communicate with the people who have the skills that aren’t yours.

Lea Alcantara: Absolutely.

Emily Lewis: Because at some point you’re working on the project together.

Anton Peck: Right, and at some point, you’re going to hit your limit on what you’re going to be capable of producing depending on what the demands of the project are, and if you do hit that limit, then you’re going to have to pull somebody in that can possibly finish it up with their particular skills. In order to know who you’re going to be working with, you’re going to have to understand what those skills are.

Lea Alcantara: So I feel like we’ve been discussing the benefits of overlapping skills and all that great stuff, but now I’m just trying to figure out in actual practice. Because it’s one thing where somebody could be primarily a visual designer and they know HTML and CSS and they can discuss clear goals with the front-end developer and all that’s great, but should the visual designer also be the front-end developer at this point? Or would it be better to have a visual designer that understands HTML and CSS separate from a front-end developer that may understand design, or is that one and of the same at this point in our industry’s trajectory?

Anton Peck: There are cases where it can be one and the same. Personal projects that I’ve worked on, and even from my own stuff, I like to do the design work. I really enjoy it as well as much as I like to do front-end development. But at OneFire, we have an art director who is a fantastic designer. He’s a great designer, and what he’ll do is he’ll mark stuff up and then I can take that and I’ll just convert it into HTML and CSS, and it works fine. So even though I have the capabilities of doing design, I have no problem letting our art director take it over.

Lea Alcantara: Do you think that’s a better way forward? Because I feel like when I’m looking at job roles and back when I taught in the university for students trying to figure out, well, what do they need to know, it seems like a lot of agencies and places wants, “You’re going to be a visual designer, but you’re going to do all the front-end developer because we haven’t hired a front-end developer.” It’s like you’re everything. Is that a mistake? Should they have asked for two separate positions?

Anton Peck: It’s only a mistake if a couple of conditions are happening. So if there are too many projects coming in at one time and then you’re going to end up putting too much pressure on that particular person, so they’re going to have to do design and development for multiple projects that are speeding in, then that’s maybe a point where they need to rethink the possibility of adding a teammate on there and whether it’s somebody else who can do both or it’s somebody who can do one or the other and they just split their job up.

The other thing is whether just the burden and the timeline of when things are needing to be done, because basically it’s a lot of work to do both of those, to do both sides. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are conditions where it can become a bad thing.

Emily Lewis: Yeah, I think certainly what you described with, if too much is on a single person’s plate, I mean, that’s not good for anyone regardless of what their job title and responsibilities are.

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Emily Lewis: But I do think that the question of like what’s the way forward, like what’s this best way? I think that we’re never going to have an answer. Let’s take a big agency.

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Emily Lewis: Big agencies probably have people working in silos, like you come on, you crank out comps all day long and then they’ve got someone who does wireframes and then they’ve got someone who does front end.

Anton Peck: Definitely.

Emily Lewis: I would hope that those people all talk the same language and understand what each one is doing, but the roles are really defined, but then there are some agencies, I wouldn’t really call us an agency, Lea. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: But in a way we work very siloed. There’s no point in me doing design when you’re 20 times better at it than me.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: But there’s also when I’m overwhelmed, I’m like, “Lea, I need you to pick this up,” and so then we’re not siloed.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: Then we work on something in a very back and forth sort of way. I think it’s always going to depend on the company that you’re working for. I think one of the things that I would personally love to see, although I hope I never see it because I hope I never have to work for someone again, is if I were still back in my last employer, that there would be a better appreciation for the kind of skills that are involved in a given position. For example, if they just hire a web designer, that they understood what that entailed as opposed to a really misinformed HR recruiter hiring someone to fill a spot and not really understanding what the skills should be for that given role.

Lea Alcantara: Well, speaking of that, like the HR recruiters, it’s almost like an inside joke for industry of how bad they are.

Anton Peck: [Laughs] It is. It is.

Lea Alcantara: About being educated about our web roles. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: I wanted to really quickly jump back though and talk about these silos. I know we want to push forward too, but there is a point we make here that if they can work with agile development and it is fine. So if everybody can stay liquid enough and not be so siloed that they’re just sitting there bored and the next to him is overworked, being able to jump in and help out is a fantastic thing.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: And I’ve had that in the past with silos that didn’t communicate very well and didn’t have those sort of things established. Just on a fundamental level, it didn’t work very well. Now, I can see some silos that happened and do work well, but again, it comes down to communications.

Emily Lewis: Right.

Anton Peck: So if you want a siloed system to actually work the way it’s supposed to, then you have to have your communication nailed down perfect.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: Because otherwise it’s just going to crash and burn.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, I like that idea of the fluidity really because I feel like, as Emily already kind of mentioned, it’s where I tend to do more of the design, Emily tends to do more of the development. Although I think we do pretty much 50/50 with the CMS.

Timestamp: 00:39:57

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: Like I think we pretty much do 50/50 there, but if there was ever any issue where I’m busy with like a deliverable that needs to be done yesterday and there’s this other thing that needs to be done, most likely either of us could pick up the slack for the other simply because we do have a broader skill set as opposed to just like the one thing.

Emily Lewis: Well, and also to Anton’s point, because we communicate, you know?

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: Yes.

Emily Lewis: You and I are communicators, so it’s exactly what Anton was saying about.

Lea Alcantara: And we’re in a safe environment where we’re okay with asking for help. I think this is the other thing that is an issue with teams.

Emily Lewis: Yeah, not only encouraging communication, but encouraging openness and transparency and sharing.

Anton Peck: Oh, definitely, yes, sharing out, yeah. [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, pretty much saying, “I don’t know what I’m doing, help me.” [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Well, yeah, the way that people get along too, that’s essential. I mean, if they can’t talk to each other…

Emily Lewis: That in and of itself is like another web role. Do you play well with others? Seriously, I’ve worked with some really great devs who are miserable to work with because they just, for whatever reason, our personalities didn’t work, but it’s like we have to be really great technically at what we do, but I think we forget that we also need to be really great as being people and communicating with others.

Anton Peck: Well, I’ll admit, I am guilty of not always being able to think in terms of a team, and I think it’s just from my background.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: I’m used to doing so many different things and have been doing it for so long, that is sort of turned me into a bitter control freak.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: Right, and more like yes.

Anton Peck: And getting me to share my work with somebody else with this trust that they’re not just going to walk through with these big boots stomping all over whatever I just did, it takes a great amount of trust, and that, it can happen, and I do work on that and I do work well with my current teammates, and I think they’re fantastic because they might be listening so I love you guys.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: So it does come down to that, can you trust the person that you’re working with too?

Emily Lewis: That’s huge too. It’s a very good point. So I kind of want to see what you guys think about narrow aspect of this conversation, which we sort of talked on about the beginning, but since we mentioned HR recruiters, I’m just wondering, do either of you have any opinions about what our titles should be in this field? Like if there’s…

Lea Alcantara: Oh God. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: Do you know what I mean?

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: Like do we call ourselves? What should someone, if you’re looking for a job, what do look for? What’s the job title that you’re looking for?

Anton Peck: Anything but a ninja.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: Oh God, or rock star. [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: Rock star. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Yeah, I mean, let’s not get overly cheesy with it. That turns it into a joke to me. I think these are our careers we’re talking about. We want to kind of take it a little bit more seriously.

Emily Lewis: And we want our clients and employers to take us seriously.

Anton Peck: Yeah. I mean, they’re going to find it clever if you handed a business card over and it says “design ninja” or whatever on it, but at the same time, what do you think they’re considering in the back of that mind? I don’t know. But maybe less important than the job titles is the descriptions and the hiring managers.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: So maybe not the HR person, they would be overwhelmed with all the information of having to understand the nuances of what we do in order to try to describe it in such a way that they can filter out their resumes and things like that. But the hiring manager at any rate should absolutely know what kind of person they’re looking for and be able to specify those needs within the job description. So I think the description and the role that’s described is probably more important than the title. Because I play the part of a UI/UX director, but at the same time, I’m flexible enough to do all kinds of things, so that’s my description.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: And I don’t really think so much about the title.

Lea Alcantara: How do you think these hiring managers can do a better job about being better educated about the reality of these roles?

Anton Peck: Well, I think it’s going to be just something that happens with a lot more time. It’s going to have to result to something because of education. I mean, there’s a lot of hiring managers out there, a lot of HR people, and I don’t know how you can do it. There’s no magical recipe on making them suddenly just know what to do or know how to write this stuff.

Lea Alcantara: Sure.

Anton Peck: But at the same time, it’s going to grow to a point, because it’s still also new. If you really think about it, we are only in this ten to fifteen years of or.

Emily Lewis: Right.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: And that’s really new for people that are not in our field. I’m thinking of a career that has been around for very long time and that’s the roles needed to build a house.

Emily Lewis: Yeah.

Anton Peck: And we don’t know how to do that, but we understand like what an architect is, an electrician, a plumber, the guy who does construction, interior decoration, so on and so on, and so you say those titles and you’d know what those roles are, and you can certainly have a guy who does construction understand the needs of the electrician because he has to drill the holes into the wood to make sure that all the wiring is going to work right.

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: So there are overlaps probably in that field, but the job titles are just there, maybe it’s because they have been established over such a long period of time.

Emily Lewis: Generations.

Anton Peck: Yeah, generations. I really feel that if we give this generations, then we’re going to have the same thing. These titles are just going to settle, because everybody is sort of making up their own titles.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: There are some that stick, and some that don’t, and eventually, it’s going to settle, the dust will settle, and there’s going to be job titles that we all sort of agree that this is the appropriate job title.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, I think that’s why whenever people ask me like in person, “What do you do,” I just say I’m a designer. I don’t even say web designer or print designer until they actually ask.

Anton Peck: Yes.

Lea Alcantara: I could say I do all of the above. I’m not an interior designer, you know? [Laughs]

Anton Peck: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: That might be the only thing that sometimes some people like jump to conclusion when I just say I’m a designer. But in Seattle, most people will assume you’re a web designer. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Yeah. [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: Yeah, it’s one of those things that if they ask, you can sort of explain it with any further conversation.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: Yeah.

Anton Peck: But even recently, I’ve been sort of redesigning my brand, so to speak.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: And now, my logo is this green A without the slash, and my subtitle, I agonized about this for the longest time like, “What do I call myself?” I do so many things, and I have almost a paragraph of things, I’m like, “Oh no, I can’t write this on there,” and it boiled down through a suggestion of a friend of mine to just take it down to the core, and it’s design plus illustration. It’s two things, you know?

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: And if I want to talk about some of the other stuff I can do, that’s fine.

Lea Alcantara: Man, I feel like we can talk about literally this subject forever. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: And we probably could, and I’m so glad that we didn’t dip into the pit of depth that is UX. [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: I feel like UX is just like branding, like a lot of things can fall underneath it, and it’s so misunderstood.

Emily Lewis: Well, and then adding to Anton’s point about how long something has been around, I feel like UX is even newer than like a web designer.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Emily Lewis: Like in terms of qualifying it, quantifying it, coming up with a job role that focuses on personas in UX.

Anton Peck: Well, yes.

Emily Lewis: I mean, I certainly didn’t learn any of that when I was going to school for web. I didn’t even know that was something we should think about.

Anton Peck: Okay, we’ll dip into that just a little bit here because I really have to.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs] It sounds good.

Anton Peck: I did a talk recently locally. We have a Startup Peoria community, and I talked about UX and very specifically describing what it is, and I came up with the examples that UX is the user experience. So I took it beyond the website, beyond any electronic devices. I started comparing it to things like in the bathroom at work, there are these faucets that you put your hand under and you wait for it to come on.

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: And then that’s an experience with the automated faucet.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: And then the positioning of the paper dispenser to dry off your hands with. If it’s across the other side of the room, you’re dripping water across the floor, and then the floor gets wet.

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: That’s UX. This is all UX because we’re having an experience in the things that we interact with, and we interact with things beyond our devices, our tablets, our computers, our phones. We interact with objects. We interact with utensils, things in our kitchen in our home. We interact with stuff all the time and our perception of what we feel about things is a direct reflection on a company that made that particular thing. So UX sort of is a very, very broad topic.

Emily Lewis: There’s I think it’s called Objectified. It’s a documentary. It’s available on Netflix right now.

Lea Alcantara: Oh, I think I know what you’re talking about.

Anton Peck: Yes.

Emily Lewis: Yeah. What you’re describing, Anton, makes me think of that documentary, how the experience of objects and how you’re interacting with it through the course of your given day.

Anton Peck: I have not watched that yet, but now I want to.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, I just googled it and it’s got like Jonathan Ive in it, and yeah, I think I’m going to put that on my queue as well.

Anton Peck: Excellent.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, I know we’ve been talking a lot about this, and maybe we should have you on our show again to delve into UX.

Anton Peck: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: Part Deux!

Lea Alcantara: Part Deux: Tackling UX! But before we finish up, we do have our rapid fire ten questions.

Anton Peck: Oh, rapid fire.

Emily Lewis: So…

Lea Alcantara: Yes, so our listeners can get…

Anton Peck: Rapid fire rolls, I’m hungry. Give me rolls fast.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: All right, all right, all right, let’s go, are you ready?

Anton Peck: Yes.

Lea Alcantara: Question one, Mac OS or Windows?

Anton Peck: Oh…

Emily Lewis: Gosh…

Anton Peck: Probably I’m leaning more toward Mac OS, but I don’t know. I’m probably unique in that I tend to be a little not flippant about what I’m using. I mean, because really when I’m in a program, so okay, when I’m using Sublime Texts, it’s the same on any platform, Linux, Mac, Windows. When I’m in Photoshop, it’s the same in all those platforms. So anyway, it’s a rapid fire thing, number two.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: Oh no, actually, I think it’s interesting that you as an illustrator could go either way because most people who have come from a design background that I’ve met are diehard Mac users.

Timestamp: 00:49:52

Anton Peck: Oh, but I will tell you there are some fantastic illustration programs on the PC.

Emily Lewis: I think that just proves the point that fanboyism is silly. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Well, and additionally, you know I do a lot of 3D illustration. I mean, even the stuff I was doing for Bryan Veloso.

Lea Alcantara: Yeah, you did his new Avalonstar logo.

Anton Peck: Yeah, the Avalonstar thing, so I used Blender 3D for that.

Emily Lewis: Nice.

Anton Peck: And it has a particular Nvidia drivers that when I’m rendering, oh my God, that rendering time on my PC is just blazingly fast.

Emily Lewis: Cool. It doesn’t surprise me.

Anton Peck: Because it’s a custom built with this Nvidia card.

Emily Lewis: Right.

Anton Peck: But if I try to render it on my MacBook Pro, because it doesn’t have that GPU acceleration, then it just starts crashing down because it has to render off the CPU, so there are major performance differences there.

Emily Lewis: All right, so next question, what is your favorite mobile app?

Anton Peck: My favorite mobile app? Currently or all time?

Emily Lewis: You pick. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: There’s also what mobile app do I use most often, which would probably be Gmail. I’m a huge fan of Wunderlist.

Lea Alcantara: Wunderlist, interesting.

Anton Peck: Well, I’m sort of a list fanatic now. I had this issue with poor memory, so I couldn’t remember anything and I would always end up dropping the ball on stuff, and I’ve gotten into the habit like in the past year and half or so of just everything I make a list out of. It’s going to be like taking notes. So instead of taking notes, I take lists.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: I list things because it’s faster, and then the nice thing about Wunderlist is you can just tap the little box and make it go away, and I also use Evernote quite a bit too.

Lea Alcantara: It sounds good. So what’s your least favorite thing about social media?

Anton Peck: My least favorite thing about social media?

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: Oh, I don’t know, that drive toward popularity that you always seem to get sucked into. It’s like you tell yourself that this is not a popularity contest, that you’re not trying to do it for the clicks, that you’re not trying to do it to get more followers, and yet at the same time throughout the day, there’s a little guilty pleasure when you get more followers.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: It’s what it does on the inside that I don’t like.

Emily Lewis: What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?

Anton Peck: Oh gosh, I do play a little guitar so I guess it would be music, to be a musician or I love to cook.

Lea Alcantara: Oh.

Anton Peck: So be a chef.

Lea Alcantara: Very cool.

Anton Peck: Yeah, my specialties are either lasagna or an omelet.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs] Yum. What profession would you not like to do?

Anton Peck: Anything that requires physical activity outside.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: I feel bad for the road crews that are working, and Illinois is terrible about its roads. I’ll tell you that right now, and so we have just road construction constantly all over the place, and I feel bad for some of these guys because the weather can either get kind of chilly or it’s really hot or it’s raining, whatever, it’s just miserable to work in, and I just have a lot of sympathy for them because they’re out there busting their butt trying to get this stuff done, and sometimes the weather doesn’t always work out.

Emily Lewis: All right, who is the web professional you admire the most?

Anton Peck: Oh, a close friend of all of us, Mr. Jonathan Snook, I believe.

Emily Lewis: He’s my second favorite Canadian.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs] Thanks.

Anton Peck: Or Jeremy Keith is up there.

Lea Alcantara: Thanks Emily. [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Yeah.

Lea Alcantara: Who else did you say?

Anton Peck: Jeremy Keith.

Lea Alcantara: Jeremy Keith.

Emily Lewis: Oh,yeah.

Anton Peck: Yeah.

Lea Alcantara: Right.

Anton Peck: And Lea and Emily or both of you.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs] Nice.

Anton Peck: I’ve got a list, and it’s confessionally, a list of people that are my friends too.

Lea Alcantara: Nice. So, what music do you like to code to?

Anton Peck: Well, there are times when I listen to all kinds of stuff, but it seems like I am drawn mostly to scores, like movie scores, soundtracks, things like that.

Emily Lewis: Oh.

Lea Alcantara: Very nice.

Anton Peck: An example is, did you ever watch Battlestar Galactica?

Lea Alcantara: Yeah.

Anton Peck: Okay, so Bear McCreary, I have a whole playlist set up. Well, I’ll start at station in rdio for that, and it will just come out with the most amazing songs.

Lea Alcantara: Cool.

Anton Peck: I have a hard time listening to music that has lyrics in it, and I end up getting just like two second in the music and I find myself being less productive.

Lea Alcantara: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: So it’s got to have a little bit of beat. Sometimes I listen to, if I really want to rock it out in like some trance, techno or dub step or I’ll just go old school and throw in some metal. Do you know that?

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: Yes, metal has lyrics in it, but you can’t always understand it.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: What your secret talent?

Anton Peck: My secret talent?

Emily Lewis: [Agrees]

Anton Peck: I don’t know that I have one. That’s a tough question, my gosh.

Lea Alcantara: Reveal all your talents.

Anton Peck: Huh?

Lea Alcantara: You reveal all your talents.

Anton Peck: I tend to be pretty transparent about stuff.

Emily Lewis: [Laughs]

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Emily Lewis: That’s tough, and that could be a talent in and of itself. Not everyone is very open.

Anton Peck: Well, yeah.

Lea Alcantara: It’s all good. You’re a talented guy openly.

Anton Peck: That’s what I do, and then doing that, I make a crap ton of mistakes, but so be it.

Lea Alcantara: That works too. What’s the most recent book you’ve read?

Anton Peck: The most recent book I’ve read? I think I was reading a book on Unity development recently, and I know I’ve got one coming too. It was ordered for me because I’m trying to learn more about Unity 3D game development for mobile devices.

Emily Lewis: So last question, Anton, Star Wars or Star Trek?

Anton Peck: Well, they both have advantages.

Lea Alcantara: [Laughs]

Anton Peck: Because it’s geek love all around. I would say probably Star Wars, and not so much the movies in mind, it’s because there was a pretty time where I was completely addicted to this. They have a huge library of books based on the Star Wars universe.

Lea Alcantara: Oh cool.

Anton Peck: And there’s a whole department, but Lucas, the Lucas Ranch or whatever, that is in charge of making sure that the books are consistent throughout the universe, so they very specifically hire certain writers to write a story that they’re either way back to the past or maybe ahead in time, like there are some great books that are Han and Leia have kids and those kids grow up and there’s a whole bunch of their adventures and stuff, and it’s really cool. But yeah, the books are really fun to read.

Lea Alcantara: Very cool. Well, that’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining us, Anton.

Anton Peck: Well, thank you for having me.

Emily Lewis: In case our listeners want to follow up with you, where can they find you online?

Anton Peck: Okay, well, I have an About Me page, which is about.me/antonpeck or whatever it is, but Anton Peck is the username, and my website, which is currently under some massive reconstruction, it’s a pretty much basic shell right now is antonpeck.com, and if they want to shoot me an email, that’s my first name, [email protected].

Emily Lewis: Awesome. Thanks, Anton. It was so great talking with you today.

Anton Peck: Well, thank you.

[Music starts]

Lea Alcantara: We’d now like to thank our sponsor for this podcast, Pixel & Tonic.

Emily Lewis: And thanks to our partners, Arcustech, Devot:ee and EE Insider.

Lea Alcantara: We also want to thank our listeners for tuning in! If you want to know more about CTRL+CLICK, make sure you follow us on Twitter @ctrlclickcast or visit our website, ctrlclickcast.com, and if you like this episode, please give us a review on Stitcher or iTunes or both.

Emily Lewis: Don’t forget to tune in to our next episode when Denise Jacobs is joining us to talk about the cycle of perfectionism and procrastination that some of us, including me, struggle with. Be sure to check out our schedule on our site, ctrlclickcast.com/schedule for more upcoming topics.

Lea Alcantara: This is Lea Alcantara …

Emily Lewis: And Emily Lewis …

Lea Alcantara: Signing off for CTRL+CLICK CAST. See you next time!

Emily Lewis: Cheers!

[Music stops]

Timestamp: 00:57:14