Freelance, Boiler plate, Up-to-date and Alternatives with Antoine Wolff.
Discussion with an experimented french freelancer and UX/UI designer with lot of skills, in Albi, who has lot of stories to share…
1. Can you talk about your job?
Before, the border between web graphics and development trades was not perfectly clear. Generally the web designer was a bit of both. Today, they are two different professions. And in addition, there is a distinction between UX and UI. The UI works more on the graphic part itself and my perception of the job is that the UX will deliver structural models. These are model ideas that do not have a purely graphic dimension, like black and white models, a kind of rough prototypes.
There are a lot of specialized softwares to make them interactive. There is Sketch or Adobe XD but, there are plenty of new ones coming out all the time. There, you can see how to navigate from page to page.
2. But you do not use those protoyping softwares all the time?
No, I do not want to go that far. It takes lot of time, which costs more money to the customer. You spend half a day doing an interactive prototype like that, it depends on the size of the application. It’s a lot of work. It can be necessary if the project is of a sufficient scale with a lot of informations to integrate, and if the client can put the money in front.
If there is a bunch of administrators and decision makers who want to be well treated, making an interactive prototypes why not? Or if there are real issues in the UX and you really should not screw up, it can be useful to make this kind of prototypes but I think it’s a bit of luxury. You can spend as much time doing your prototyping as developing the site itself.
How do you present the project in the end?
I just make PDF models. The advantage is that it’s easy, portable and the customer can follow with you when you share your screen.
3. Are you UX or UI?
So me, actually, I come from graphic design. I did a school in applied arts in Paris. I worked a lot on typography, composition, logo and design in general. I also studied a little packaging and animation. And at the same time, I started to learn web development very early. At first, I learned HTML, pure CSS, a bit of JavaScript, and then, I tackled PHP.
And then 2, 3 years after my studies, I started a collaboration with a computer engineer friend who had just left the Canadian army, who had studied there. He brought me his methods of work. I learned what a CRM was, a request or an organized status.
4. Did you learn by working with him?
Yes. He’s the one who trained me. He taught me how to manage a development project. So at the beginning, we worked from a distance, and then after, he moved to France. We were freelancers in my apartment in Toulouse. We had the idea to create a basic site, a Boiler plate, with an overlay of a framework called YII (a PHP framework). And all that was a great discovery for me at that time. Before I was always doing PHP from scratch.
It’s actually about giving a base with a system to manage menus, pages and to create any type of object. We take an example with shoes. Shoes? What’s this? It’s a shoe name, a color, a material, a shoe size. And in fact, you could create things like that and then quickly, create views in front to display, with a number of already pre-set choices that would redo everything.
It’s like a WordPress theme, in a way, as if WordPress was the framework. And we had created a kind of WordPress theme, but very advanced, that can do much more than a wordpress theme with forms, with an object management system, a migration system, all of this .
And also, the advantage is that we capitalized on previous developments: we improved our boiler plate each time we had found a solution to a given problem. We could integrate our discovery to our template. We started like this and we continued for several years.
After that it was difficult because we did not sell our work at a price high enough. Secondly, we have put a lot of energy into developing this project, we got tired . We did not have enough customers and it was difficult to make it profitable all the time. And besides that, when we were paid, it was not huge, especially that we divided the benefits by two.
There were doubts about the viability of our approach. What did my partner at that moment? He went on a trip, and when he came back, he went to medical school. He still keeps his computer stuff because now he has created a medical wiki (Wikimedica), which makes medical articles accessible and free of charge for the public in open data, which is rare today. Normally scientific articles are not available to everyone. You have to pay for super expensive subscriptions to access their database.
5. How was your approach different?
In fact, it was a boiler plate approach, capitalizing on development. It was not necessarily a bad thing, we did not start completely from scratch. In fact, we already used an existing engine, but there was still a lot of work. And besides, we were both new in this world. So, we made a lot of mistakes. We did not necessarily make the best choices right away, we started on a framework that was not very well known in the West because it was used in Russia or China. It was very exotic. At the end all this project didn’t work well.
6. What was the implementation of this boiler plate?
The advantage is that we always started on the same mold. I still use it today. If you ask me to develop a website in 3 days, I would start with this solution today because it is the best method I have on hand, since I know it by heart. It will not necessarily be the best proposal in terms of up-to-date technology. But if it’s for a friend who wants a site quickly, it’s more than enough.
This allowed me to also create quite complex websites where I was not limited, as on WordPress, for example. With WordPress, you can do everything in theory, since it’s PHP behind, but basically, WordPress is not made for that. It’s done to have a site that installs a theme on a blog base that is rather a presentation site. At the same time, there are lots of e-commerce sites that are based on WordPress that are not bad. The advantage is that we were on a pure PHP framework, which aims to make complex applications.
At some point, I really wondered if I was going to stop the web development because I felt that I was clearly outdated. It goes very fast, in fact, we must update ourselves regularly. I did not want to make this effort. I think I’ve been fighting for 10 years. There are many people who are self-taught. It is an investment in time and energy. And it’s because I met several people in a co-working space, who work as a team, and who have good methods of development, it pushed me, it helped me through several projects that we did together, to upgrade me as well. I speak the language of today’s developers, but it was hard.
“This allowed me to also create quite complex websites where I was not limited, as on WordPress, for example.”
Yet you are not old?
You know that after ten years of development we are considered already as senor developper?
But your knowledge from before can serve you as a base, no?
Of course, it’s like that. It’s always the same gymnastics, it’s always the same rigor. It’s like when you put your room away. If there is a lot of disorder you can not find anything. You have difficulties, you loose stuff, you duplicated stuff. It’s the same. And then, you have good reflexes.
You do not have to reinvent the wheel. It must be assumed that everything already exists. So maybe there are things that are not necessarily well done, that can be done better. But everything already exists on the Internet. And it’s also good to work with others rather than working alone.
Before I had the profile of a full stack developer, I was doing UX, UI, HTML, CSS and JavaScript integration, PHP development, also marketing strategy, SEO in all trades, all caps. And I’m always a bit like that with customers. But I’m selling myself less like this now because I realize that I’m more comfortable with UI and integration. Now, PHP, I know ! SEO I have good reflexes ! In strategy I can advise someone ! But I want to say that I stop selling myself as the handyman.
7. I feel that today people are becoming more and more specialized?
It depends because there are more and more freelancers and people do not necessarily have the budget to pay several people at the same time. Often, just because people know how to do everything does not mean they get paid more ! Whereas they should. In the end, it’s more when you sell yourself for your specialty that you manage to sell yourself at a good price. It’s a kind of paradox. So when you work for associations or for small businesses that do not have a lot of money, they will not hire four, five people, you know…
8. How do you find your customers?
It has always been through my personal network. During my training when I had not even get my diploma yet, I had already setv up a company. I realized that it was super heavy, I had to keep the bills, to take care of the papers … etc. I called the best guys of my design school to set up this graphic design studio together. In fact, it was a bit in the continuity of what we learned during our training.
At that time, the big dream, was a collective of freelance graphic designers, free and without boss. And so, that’s what we tried to do. After two months, once everyone had slept together and no one had really worked, it stopped. And then, we did not have any money. There was a moment when we had to pay the rent. So everyone got out of the project..
Me, I ended up managing alone my company.I was selling my work for 25 euros an hour, so it was a disaster. It was the coup de grace! At the time, I was quite ambitious, a bit like the wolf of wall street. My friends said I was a punk with stocks (laughings…).
“My friends said I was a punk with market stocks.”
9. An agency between friends in theory it can work no? If everyone works?
Yes it’s already a lot of “if “… (laughings…). What I remember is that things must remain flexible, you do not have to depend on others to make a living. For example, here ( in the co-working space ) we work on projects together, but we keep our independence. If we want to go to work with someone else, we can. Things are more fluid.
After this adventure I became freelancer but in the beginning it was quite hard. Gradually I went from 25 to 35 euros per hour, which is not expensive at all. I stayed at an hourly rate of 35 euros because I realized that for a number of customers I had, it was not possible to get paid more, especially for small jobs.
Anyway there was an inconsistency in the prices. I calculated that if I could get paid all my hours at the end, I would earn more than 5000 euros (around 5500 dollars…) in the month. That’s why I became intransigent about working hours, and things worked out naturally !
In addition I met people who made me discover new ways of working, in teams with agile methods. Me, I was always with a project in V. Now, I have the reflex to cut all the work process in smaller bits …
“You do not have to depend on others to make a living.”
10. How do you see the future of web design?
I am freelance, so that means my situation is flexible. There are many benefits, including that you can choose projects, if you have enough work, you can choose what you do. And that is already huge ! For me, this is one of the main points that makes me want to stay freelance. I do not have to work for a gun manufacturer or for porn industry, I have this ability to say no, I will not work for you! As an employee if you say no, you loose your job.
Did you refuse projects?
Yes, for example I refused to work with Avril recently, an agro industrial group ! The default of freelance is that there is precariousness. So, since I can be in a form of precariousness, the future interest me and I think for the moment, for me, we are in a prosperous period, very prosperous. For now, the context allows it. But I do not think it’s going to last forever!
I think we are in a system which is not connected with reality, where there is a lot, a lot of cash, a lot of money floating around in our economic system that has no place and that does not fit to real value.
Professionally I push the controller fully. I put a lot, a lot, a lot of time in my work, which is not necessarily my ideal of life. For me, I would ideally be at least half in my garden to develop a relative autonomy at home, by growing vegetables.
“There are many benefits, including that you can choose projects, if you have enough work, you can choose what you do. And that is already huge !”
It’s a little pessimistic ?
This is my pessimistic opinion. Maybe we still have 2 more years, I do not know. But this technical ability (to create, maintain web sites) to meet needs can also transform in an exchange form, which does not necessarily imply money. You can very well be in barter, make a site for someone in return for vegetables, that’s why it’s always interesting to have a technical skill.
11. What about your watch ?
I have a techno watch, a graphic watch and an information watch. And I think we have to do all three, even professionally, since it’s interesting to see what is happening in the world and to predict the shots in advance. What I recommend is RSS technology and an XML feed. I use an RSS feed aggregator: Feedly. Many sources are not free and all that. But it is very well done and in its free version, it is really good.
So for the news I follow more alternative medias, like Agoravox, Arrêt sur images, Mediapart, Le Saker Francophone , Taranis News. For my webdesign watch there is Awwwards, Alsacreations.com, Bleech.io which allows you to have little bits of code, and also Codrops.
There is also a french guy called Grafikart who is a super interesting blogger. If you want to learn, I even recommend you take a premium access because it’s cheap. And frankly, his videos on You Tube are of good quality. As for hardware, the digital world and development: Next INpact is a great site.
12. What is the last application you discovered ?
Oh, I’m going to talk to you about something that’s good, it’s DASH ! It’s a library for developers. You install it and you can have the documentation offline. That’s great when you do development without internet, in a train for example. You have a catalog of ActionScript, Bootstrap, PHP, jQuery, PHP Node and all languages. It is always arranged in the same way.
