Chris Pearson, a high profile designer on inspiration, Cutline, and the future

An Interview by Thord Daniel Hedengren

Chris Pearson is a name that brings quality design to mind, as good a verdict as any. Actually, I’d reckon quite a few of the Bloggertalks readers have (or should have) his name in the footer on one or several of their blogs, since the Cutline theme for Wordpress has gotten quite a bit of buzz and is widely used.

Speaking of which, after this interview was done, the Cutline theme was “blatantly ripped off”, to use Chris’ own words. However, it all turned out well in the end and proved to be a great example where the communication methods that blogs offer really pay off. The design thief in question seems truly sorry, and has acted accordingly, and Chris has handled his part well by not holding a grudge. You can read about it in a post over at Chris’ blog.

Anyway, that’s not why I contacted him in the first place. What I wanted to know is how a famous blog designer thinks, what plans he has, where he gets his inspiration and such. My guess is a lot of aspiring designers out there are wondering the same, so happy reading!

Your name is connected with quality blog design nowadays, and I bet a lot of blog owners would want to hire you (for free, but still) to redesign their blogs. Do you design for a living?
When I look back on 2006, I’ll be able to say that I “designed for a living.” I don’t, however, see design as the mainstay of my income in the years ahead. Hopefully it will be just a fraction of my income in 2007.

Really? So what do you want to do then?
I plan to release at least one product through my personal site, and of course, I am also going to be heavily focused on bringing our Tubetorial business model to fruition. When that happens, I won’t need the ancillary income that I’ve been relying on from design work.

At that point, I’ll be able to do design “for the love of the game,” which is something that I am really looking forward to.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?
When I first had aspirations of doing blog designs and whatnot, I would troll the different CSS galleries for hours seeking inspiration. For a while, that worked out nicely, but when you really begin to pay attention to design, you realize that there is so much more to learn from the older, more established design disciplines. Specifically, I’m talking about print work and just the general realm of the visual arts.

Many people seek to become Web site designers, but very few can truly be called students or purveyors of design. This becomes evident when you scan magazines, books, and especially works geared towards educating the design community.

In recent weeks, I’ve drawn much of my inspiration from both Print and Step magazine, two amazing pieces of printed goodness that cater to people involved in the communication arts. Also, I’ve begun to look at book designs for inspiration on ways to develop meaningful, effective text layouts, and I think some of this is beginning to shine through in my work on the Web.

You have released a free Wordpress theme called Cutline, and it sure looks like the community likes it. What made you do it?
I spent a great deal of August working on a site that required extreme customization of the Wordpress template system in order to work like I wanted. At the time, I remember thinking that it was just an absolute pain to work with existing template systems, and I decided that I needed my own Wordpress framework for future development work. I desired to make it fluff-free, and I filled it with a lot of my own personal design/code conventions, which are easy for me to work with when scaling out a new site.

That little project spiraled a bit out of control over the course of one weekend, and it turned into a full-blown theme that ended up serving two purposes:

• First, because of timing, it ended up being the teaching tool of choice for my Tubetorials on Wordpress hacks, and it also has the dual benefit of being a great tool for link generation for Tubetorial.
• Second, I really believed that the theme was one of the best, most friendly themes available – after all, I’ve worked with a ton of them. Because of that, I decided to release it and just see what would happen.

Have you been able to measure how much that little link in the Cutline footer has generated for Tubetorial?
Yes, it’s garnered over 340 links thus far. The Wordpress.com version of the theme was stripped of the Tubetorial link and replaced with one to my site (which is not something I wanted), and that link has generated well over 3,000 inbound links to Pearsonified.

I’m somewhat concerned that Google may be discrediting theme links, so I’m certainly not heartbroken that the Tubetorial link was omitted from the WordPress.com version of Cutline.

While on the subject, has the Cutline theme generated some more design gigs for you?
Yes, but I have turned them all down in an effort to focus on video production and also to take care of clients who I booked in August (which pretty much covered the remainder of 2006).

Another great contribution to the blogging community is Tubetorial, a video tutorial site that you run with Brian Clark of Copyblogger. What were your expectations for Tubetorial, and has it lived up to it so far?
I expected that Tubetorial would be an absolute hotbed for inlinks, and I thought the niche slant of the videos would bring traffic in droves.

Well, now that we’re two months in, the links have been pretty good – I think we’re in the top 3,500 in Technorati already.

Buuut, I think the site has fallen somewhat short of expectations. I guess I anticipated this huge boom right off the bat, but looking back, I can see where that was a bit overzealous. To be honest, I’m glad things are ramping up the way that they are, because the growth is much more organic, and I can literally see different channels and facets of the site gaining momentum.

It looks as though it’s going to be incredibly strong, and I suspect that within six months, the strength of our site in the search engines will allow us total flexibility with the operation.

Where are you going with Tubetorial? Are you satisfied with being a leading video tutorial site in the future, or do you have plans beyond that? A DVD perhaps?
Based on the content we have already produced, I think we are in a great position to become the ultimate point-of-entry for how to set up and run a profitable business on the Web. There’s a huge search market surrounding this topic, and if we are able to leverage our network of friends, contributors, and viewers, then we will have a lot of options and channels available to us for generating revenue. Whether that means packaging info products or selling DVDs, I guess only time will tell.

There have been a lot of discussions about branding in the blog network world, and the actual layout and design of a network sure is part of the brand. So what are they doing wrong, the blog networks out there?
That’s an issue that is really difficult to address, mostly because it’s a dynamic scenario — it changes based on the network in question, the type of sites in question, and the members of the network itself.

So, although it’s certainly not a “made for TV” answer, I really think that if a design and layout works for a particular network, then who’s to say it’s wrong? If it works for its members and it yields positive results (aka profits), then I suppose it’s a good design.

Frankly, I don’t even think the subjective aspects of the designs are even worth discussing. Sure, I wish everybody got their sites “pearsonified,” but I might be biased on that one…What do you think?

I think the web would do a lot better if it indeed got “pearsonified”, but only if you’ll save a piece for me… Let’s focus the topic a bit then. What should the upcoming blogger think about when it comes to designing his blog?
Honestly, for those folks out there who are just stepping into the game, I think the best thing they can do is start with a great theme. Generate content and gain a base of readers while on that theme, and once you’ve got an idea of the scope of your content, then you can make intelligent decisions about the direction your design should take.

Ultimately, the design of your site should facilitate the reader’s ability to digest your content. In the best case scenario, the design lends credence to the things that you say, and it may add to the “authoritative” qualities of the information you put out there.

The bottom line is that I don’t think anyone can start from scratch (with no content and no design) and make intelligent design decisions.

It’s not about pretty; it’s about effective.

There are quite a few Wordpress themes out there, some more used than others. Do you think it hurts a blogger if he uses a widespread theme? It’s bound to take a toll on his blog’s brand at least?
In the last few months, I’ve been able to see thousands of iterations of my themes. One thing that continually amazes me is how great some implementations look versus how poor others turn out.

A theme is all about what you make of it, and for my money, themes that really focus on content presentation and enable the author to publish professionally are head and shoulders above the rest (check here and here to see what I mean regarding quality implementations).

If you make great use of a theme, then the quality and attention to detail that you bring to the table are probably the characteristics which go the furthest towards defining your brand. But, for some folks, designs are much more important than they are for others. In my case, for instance, it’s much easier to pick up clients if my site is both striking and unique.

In most cases, though, I think a great theme can only help your brand, if for no other reason than because it should provide you with more options to publish content in a detailed, professional manner.

So finally, what would be the ideal make-over project, if you got to pick it yourself?
I would love to conduct the redesign of a major newspaper’s Web site. I’m still amazed by how bad a lot of newspaper sites are, and I’m even more amazed that some really prominent papers have such terrible (and ugly) sites. I think part of the problem there is that you get art direction from people who have print backgrounds, and the bottom line is that print techniques, although fundamental too much of design, aren’t always the best choice for the Web.

It’s funny if you go and examine most newspaper sites — their desire to cram as much crap as possible above the fold is almost laughable. Clearly, it’s something so totally paramount in print design that these same art directors just cannot shake it when they are forced to apply their talents to the Web.

I’d love to see newspaper sites become more vertical, more accessible, and more beautiful, and I’d just love the challenge if somebody were to throw that my way.

Good choice. This whole “above the fold” thing is something that I find to be a bother when doing work for clients, especially when it comes to blogs or forums since the visitors are bound to scroll on such sites. Do you get a lot of “above the fold” requirements from your clients? And how do you tackle ads in your designs, they can be a real bother, can’t they?
I think the “above the fold” debate stems from a fundamental lack of understanding the Web as a medium. If the natural flow of a design pushes readers downhill, then you don’t really lose all that much by having important information fall below the fold.

However, if your content is poorly arranged and you have not established a rational flow of information on the page, then yes, having important items above the fold becomes critical.

Personally, I haven’t had many clients voice huge concerns over “above the fold” material, but most of my clients have also been publishing on the Web for quite a while.

Ads are an entirely different beast altogether. I used to drink the kool aid and believe that ads were pretty much the enemy of design, but I have really relaxed my position on this one.

I think the thing that probably irritates designers the most is simply the fact that they have to account for yet another element, and that serves to complicate the entire design process. My feeling, however, is that a well-constructed, well-planned page layout can easily accommodate ads within the flow of the content, and it really shouldn’t be that big of a deal when all is said and done.

I mean, sure, having a Google ad on a page is not an ideal design situation, but running a Web site without revenue isn’t exactly ideal either. At this point, I simply assume that any well-respected blog is going to accommodate ads of some sort, so I just do the best I can to provide seamless integration with the content and refrain from interrupting the natural flow of information.

I’d like to thank Chris for taking the time to do this interview, and wish him all the best in the future. You can check out this multi-talented guru’s website at Pearsonified.com. And don’t forget Tubetorial and the Cutline theme.

This Interview was published on November 17, 2006 at 10:34 am • Did you like it? Subscribe!
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