On October 30th, 1999 I was a 17-year-old high-school student with a passion for internet, graphics and design. On that day I published my very first website.

It was a personal website, it was called Jek Web Site, Jek being my nickname, and was hosted on a incredibly poor free service (Digilander, an italian service similar to Geocities). It was built with tables, crappy markup and required me months on work using Microsoft Frontpage 2000 (yes, it’s a shame, but I wasn’t a Mac user at that time yet). Essentially it was a 4-page website about my hobbies, favourite music and videogames. I made it mostly to play around with this new internet thing.

I already knew I liked it, but definitely had no idea it would have turned out to be my fulltime job a few years later.

One year later I decided to buy a domain for my website and wanted to get jek.com. However that domain name was already registered, so, as it was year 2000, I opted for jek2k.com. Since then the domain itself has become the name of my website.

During time it went from totally personal hobby/fun site to a music-related site to Flash site to portfolio site.
In 2006, as I already had a professional website and portfolio at gnvpartners.com, I decided to turn jek2k.com into a blog and jump on the WordPress bandwagon, which was emerging as one of the most talked-about blogging platforms.

Six months later, the WordPress customization of jek2k.com had been featured on pretty much all the CSS galleries and led me to designing WordPress themes for international clients and for Matt Mullenweg, WordPress in person.

And this is the story of jek2k.com. At least of these first 10 years…

Even if it’s not our primary business, in the last six months my studio was tasked to design a bunch of logos for companies, start-ups and web apps. During this period of time we’ve been putting together a simple sketchboard template to display concepts and show design previews to clients.

I’m finding this template very useful and use it regularly for logo design – it could be used for icon design as well.

I’m sharing the layered PSD file here, so you can grab it and use it.

The template comes half white and half black, to display logos on both backgrounds. The background is composed of several layers, so you can easily exclude the squared paper pattern or the shadows.

It already includes guides to easily center and align things and has text headings that you can adapt to your needs. Finally, this PSD template lets you layout up to 4 concepts at a time (each in white and black versions) and comes at 300dpi resolution so it will work for hi-res images or for printing.

Download PSD template (26.2 MB, ZIP)

I usually spend some hours talking with my partner and brainstorming about the client, the brand, the website goals and target, trying to jot down a list of keywords and trying to understand the role of visual design for the specific project. Sometimes it needs to be very creative, since visual design set the tone and style for the site, sometimes it just needs to be minimal and clean. Every project has different needs and every client has different expectations, so every design has a different role.
As a general (and very generic) rule, I think visual design has to be appropriate for the brand of the client, for the site’s target and for the site’s tone.

Said that, before opening Photoshop, I usually tend to sketch some rough concepts on paper and discussing those ideas with my team, in order to get feedback and refine my ideas.
Sometimes this sketches are very basic and their purpose is just to be a guideline for the Photoshop work. Sometimes I end up with more refined sketches and drawings, that serve as a starting point for illustrations or layouts.

In this post I gathered some scans of some sketches from the last 12 months. I’m posting this mostly to share with you part of my workflow and to show a part of my work that is often completely invisible, even if nearly as important as Photoshop skills.

Each of the sketches comes with the final design, so you can see how the very first idea turned into a real website.

Pestaola.gr
The very first sketch has been followed very closely to make the footer illustration for Pestaola.gr.
It has been scanned and then traced in Photoshop, adding colors, shadows and lights.
It served as a basis also for the alternate, winter-ish version.

Omis.me
Om Malik’s new personal blog is an example of how a very rough sketch turned into an actual design. Even if very basic, the layout of the sketch has been kept: ratios, position of elements and overall shapes are very similar in the final design.

ColorFever
This is more like the Pestaola project, where the sketch has been followed closely. This time, when working in Photoshop, I changed the size and position of many elements, to adapt the very first concept to a 1024-optimized web layout. Some of the objects in my drawing also were discarded by the client, so I ended up with a simplified composition.

Rikorda.it
Rikorda is a different example: in this particular care, the sketch wasn’t done for a visual design design purpose, but to evaluate different a user interfaces.
The products tree was a key feature of the new site and we spent quite a lot of time discussing how it could be integrated into the layout.
We sketched different ideas and the drop-down panel below made it to the final design.

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

Go to A List Apart and take the 2007 Web Design survey!

Freelance Switch
Freelance Switch is a newly born blog and resource for freelancers. It has plenty of articles and guides to start freelancing or to boost up your freelance business. Very useful.

eBook: “Web Designer’s Success Guide” by Kevin Airgid
Award-winning designer Kevin Airgid shared some wisdom in his book “Web Designer’s Success Guide”. Now the book is available as a free eBook to download, so you have no excuses not to read it!

Get the free eBook here.

AIGA Salary Survey 2006
Thanks to Alessandro for letting me know about this.
AIGA, the professional association for design, has released an annual salary survey for creative jobs. It is quite interesting browsing it and finding out how much a freelance web designer like me is supposed to earn. However, it deals only with the USA market. It would be very interesting to see the results for an Italian or European survey.

Get the PDF here.

Some months ago Daniele, developer of dBlog, the most important Italian open-source blogging app, asked me to design some badges like the one you see in the upper right corner of this site. Yesterday the dBlog badges went live.
If you want to support the dBlog project, go and grab one!

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Qualche mese fa Daniele, creatore di dBlog, la più importante piattaforma di blogging open-source tutta italiana, mi ha chiesto di realizzare alcuni badge come quello che vedete nell’angolo in alto a destra di questo sito. Ieri Daniele ha pubblicato i badge sul suo sito.
Se volete sostenere il progetto dBlog, andate a scaricarli!

Here we go again.

Some days ago, during the Christmas holidays, AJ of Devlounge interviewed me about my background, design trends in 2006 and my latest projects.
Today the interview went live.

It is an incredible honour to be featured on Devlounge and see my interview among the others with some of the most influent designers in the world.

Should you have any questions, I’m available to answer comments (posted both here at Jek2k.com or at Devlounge) and emails.

Recently, Andrew Faulkner from Fadtastic contacted me for an interview about myself and my redesign for Photomatt.
That was a big and unexpected surprise. And also my first interview.

Tonight the interview finally went live on Fadtastic.

I wish to thank Andrew once again for giving me this opportunity.

For any question and comment, post it here. I will be glad to answer.

Ta-da! The redesign of PhotoMatt goes live. Yes, that PhotoMatt.
I had the honor to design the new graphic theme of Matt Mullenweg’s personal website. I still have problems believing it… it is kind of a dream.

However, the website is still under constrution, as Matt and I we’re still working on designing (me) and coding (Matt) secondary pages and making small changes here and there.

Here are a couple of articles and reviews:
- New Blog Design on PhotoMatt
- Matt Mullenweg gets new clothes on Lorelle on Wordpress
- Un riminese per Photomatt su Disordine.com
- a quick review on If…Else
- PhotoMatt on Css Remix, on Css Mania and Css Bloom .

Whoa!

Also the new skin of MintPages went live in the last few days. MintPages is a private community for designers and developers I’m a proud member of.
I designed the new skin for the forums and this is another great honor for me.

Here is an article that appeared on DevLounge to celebrate the launch of the new MintPages.

As you can see I also added the small icons at the bottom, in the Portfolio section.

Guess what, last night I couldn’t get to sleep…
You know, it’s not easy to go to sleep when you have hundreds of ideas, thoughts and worries about things to do that cross your mind.

So I opened Photoshop and designed this wallpaper for all of you out there that have the same problem (don’t try to hide, I know you’re a lot!!)

Here are the files:
Download wallpaper @ 1280×1024
Download wallpaper @ 1600×1200