As a part of the MacStories Apps Tree event (where you’ll find a huge giveaway worth $10.000 of 450 Mac and iPhone apps licenses), I had the chance to interview Micheal Martin, the editor of ProBlogDesign. Michael is a designer and blogger but unlike many designers I’ve recently interviewed he’s using Windows. What came out was a uber-interesting interview, with awesome responses that will give you a good insight into the blogging / designing scene on Windows.
This is the 8th of many interviews and guest posts I’ll publish on MacStories during this week.
Enjoy!
Hi! Can you please introduce yourself to MacStories readers?
Hello! I’m Michael Martin, and my site is Pro Blog Design. It’s a blog on WordPress, web design and development tricks, but the main business of the site is the design services we offer.
Aside from that, you can find me on Twitter pretty regularly and on the PBD Facebook page, but my StumbleUpon and Digg profiles have been inactive for a while now!
What can you tell us about the design scene in your country?
I live in Northern Ireland (Part of the UK), and to be honest, the design scene here is getting to be pretty awesome. That’s mostly thanks to Andy McMillan, who seems to be a ridiculously good event organizer/designer! Just a few weeks ago he put together the first Build Conference. With names like Eric Meyer, Mark Boulton, Wilson Miner and more speaking at it, that pretty much speaks for itself! On top of that, there are regular smaller events like Refresh Belfast, Open Coffee mornings, and Barcamps. Andy seems to be behind most of those as well I think!
ProBlogDesign has become one of the most popular design blogs out there. Are you doing this all by yourself? Can you please tell us something about your setup?
lol, I was at one point, but not any more! The site is a bit over 2 years old now. For the first year, I wrote everything myself, but as the services side of things grew, the regularity of articles appearing definitely took a dive.
There has to come a point for everyone where you realize you can’t do everything and that you need to take on help. I chose the area I’d like to spend my time on more (developing the business side of things), and started looking for writers to help me with the articles side. That said, I still write articles for the site when I can (It’s fun to write, especially when the pressure to do it is taken away!), and I do the editing for every article that is published. That coincided with adding adverts to the website for the first time. The interesting thing is that those ads have never turned a profit for me, they just offset what I pay for the articles. And as the site grows, the ad revenues grow, and accordingly, I’ve cranked the article payment rate up to $125 now. Hopefully I’ll find even more great designer writers that want to take part now!
Have you ever tried other apps besides Photoshop / Illustrator?
Other graphics apps? I’ve used Gimp, and to be honest, I was pretty surprised by just how feature-complete it is when I first loaded it, even compared with Photoshop! The real problem with Gimp though is just that Photoshop is the standard package in this industry. You can’t send another designer Gimp files, and clients for the most part simply expect to hear you talk about Photoshop.
About a year ago on Pro Blog Design, we published a tutorial for creating a cool screenshot effect in Photoshop. I then added alongside it the instructions for getting the exact same effect in Gimp, to see if readers found that useful. Honestly though, barely anyone noticed it. After a year, there are 2 comments on the post now that mention Gimp. That was the total response, shows just how dominant Photoshop is even among bloggers looking to do a fairly straight-forward effect.
Which are your favourite Windows apps?
iTunes and Safari!
Lol, sorry, just kidding there. I like them both, but FireFox is my browser of choice, and Spotify is a pretty unbeatable music player if your internet connection is up to it!
Aside from the obvious ones (Photoshop and MS Word mostly), the majority of the programs I use are free (Even Word has largely been replaced by Google Docs, and hopefully will be completed replaced someday!)
- Notepad++ for a text editor.
- Filezilla for FTP.
- Pidgin for when I need an IM.
- VLC for playing movies.
- Picasa for organizing photos.
- IETester for testing in different IE versions.
- CDBurnerXP for burning DVDs.
- Syncback for making nightly backups.
- 7zip for compression.
One tool that I have to highlight is Launchy. It’s for loading programs and scripts quickly (e.g. Alt+Space to bring up Launchy, type “s” for shutdown, then hit enter and that’s the computer off). I’m lost without it now!
Is your blog based on WordPress? Which tools do you use on your PC to manage it?
Yep, WordPress all the way!
The main program I use is Windows Live Writer, where I compose all of my posts. The real advantage of it is that I can write the posts directly onto my site’s design, with all of my site’s typography and styling as well. That means I can see exactly how the post will appear on screen, as I’m writing it. It gives you a huge amount of control over the formatting and layout and makes a massive difference (e.g. You will see instantly if there’s too much text in a section, or a paragraph is too long etc.) Texter is a script that lets me define keywords, which it then expands into full paragraphs. It makes responding so some emails very easy, but all in all, I use it more in my coding than in blogging.
Aside from that, Photoshop is still my tool of choice for any image editing, and given how important Twitter has become, I think I can count Tweetdeck as a blogging tool as well!
What’s your opinion about Windows 7?
I’m working from it right now, and I really have been loving it so far! XP’s design never compared to OSX, and Vista’s effects were just un-necessary (I disabled the majority of them altogether because they were pointless).
With Windows 7 though, it feels like there was a reason behind the changes this time. The taskbar is the obvious one; it’s extremely useful and makes window management very easy, but it also looks great. Even little details like the lovely rollover effects that change depending on where your cursor is on each icon make the experience so much more pleasant.
Another example I’m glad of almost every day is joining wifi networks from the taskbar, and being able to disconnect USB devices easily for a change (Granted, the latter one should have been this way from the start, but oh well…)
Let’s talk about the Adobe CS suite for Windows. What’s your opinion about it? What would you change, what would you improve?
The tool I spend the majority of my time with is Photoshop, and with the interface improvements in recent versions, I think that’s the last of my niggles with it mostly gone! And between Photoshop Actions, window layouts, and setting up your own hotkeys with a tool like AutoHotKey, you’re able to customize it quite a lot! I suppose saying that I’d change the price goes without saying though?
Is there something of Windows interface you’d change? Or do you think it’s already good as it is?
I’d love to change Windows Explorer! The Mac Finder is just so much sleeker and so much easier to use. In Explorer, there are too many different menus and it takes too many clicks to get to where you want to be. The file search in 7 is pretty impressive and I’ve started using it more and more to find what I need, but at the end of it all, I’d still rather have a Finder-style setup with the columns etc. :(
Have you ever thought of moving to a Mac?
After every single one of their keynotes!
When you see Steve Jobs or Phil Schiller demo a new product, it’s hard not to want it! But when I get down to it, I can’t see a Mac massively changing the way I work. I’d still be designing in Photoshop, coding in a plaint text editor, and browsing in FireFox. Aside from that, I’ve gotten fairly addicted to all of the little freeware apps I have and I love being able to customize my PC to any way I want it. But of course, there are definitely areas that the Mac wins on, like it does look nicer out of the box, and Keynote looks head and shoulders above Powerpoint. So someday I’ll swap over perhaps!
As a designer / blogger, what would you like to receive for Christmas?
A Macbook! I’d love to finally give Mac a few months to test it out and see what all this fuss is about! :D Failing that, I’d love for someone to find a way of getting Idea Paint to the UK!
Thanks for chatting with us! And keep up the great work!
No problem, thanks for having me on Mac Stories! Keep up the great work yourself as well! :D
