I originally found aeiko through desktopography.net. Desktopography is an annual release of exclusive desktop artwork designed by some of today’s best designers. Pete Harrison, the man behind aeiko, acts as curator to the initiative.

It was natural then that I looked at the design work done by aeiko himself. Sure enough it was as spectacular as the work done by the designers he surrounded himself with.

Pete’s work extends to clients such as Trojan, MTV, Guinness, Coca Cola, Konami, Nike and even to his own clothing label Funkrush, again featuring a collective of great designers.

I was lucky enough to have Pete answer a few questions that I hope users will find as interesting and informative as I did.

1. First off, how does it feel to launch a new website?

Hey, it feels great… simply because I haven’t updated aeiko in a few years (well apart from a temporary showcase), and this site is much more informative. Hopefully people will get a good idea of my skills and background.

2. How does freelancing work compare with an agency environment? Are there dominant pros or cons of either?

Well as you know I worked in an agency for a while. It was a big agency and I’m sure it would have been different from a smaller one, however I much prefer freelancing. For a start I don’t have to get up in the mornings, I’m definitely not a morning person… Its more freedom, I sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry and have lots more free time… today is sunny and I’m going for a drive, then for some drinks at a bar next to the beach… fair enough I havent got that much work on at the moment, but I couldnt just do that if I worked at a fulltime job! Besides that I prefer working at night :)

3. Is there a particular piece of work that stands out for you? A design that really made you feel proud of your talent?

There are pieces of work that along my career have stood out yeah, and I’ve been proud of a few pieces of work, but mostly proud of the projects I have started, desktopography and funkrush mainly!

4. What do you spend the most time doing?

Playing xbox… haha well this used to be the case, probably now I spent the most time answering emails, checking facebook and networking… catching up with whats going on in the creative industries and procrastinating, but when I have a project on then I’m dedicated to that, I think I need to sort out my time better, which is something I’m working on!

5. Do you read any magazines or blogs? Which ones and why?

Umm… not really any magazines, apart from the one’s which I’m m in… I think I should read more though, I’m a bit out of date with current affairs! I regularly check blogs though, just all the usual design blogs and portals and some others… OL, format, R&R, BSV, swissmiss, surfstation, september industry, visuelle, bitique, aisleone, dirty mouse, iso50… even stuff like digg, and my own blog duoform! which I will try and keep more updated!

6. Do you have a favorite design tool? (whether that be in software of not)

Photoshop of course, but I’m moving towards the pencil today :)

7. What do you generally do on a Friday or Saturday night?

In one word, party! haha…I’m a sociable person, so the weekend is just spent doing fun stuff… mainly going around the country to different nights out, getting drunk and meeting new people, my hometown is torquay so if I’m not out in a different city you can find me in the bars and clubs in the english riviera!

8. If you could pitch a new feature to Adobe for one of their software applications such as Photoshop or Illustrator what would it be?

Content aware fill… oh wait… nah.

9. How important is music to you and your work?

Very I’mportant, always have music on while designing! Cant live without it! Big up hospital records right now…

10. Can you describe two or three designers that have really had an I’mpact on your work or has really inspired you in some way?

I thought about this for a while, and its a tough question, I couldnt pick three, If I can give a shoutout to all my depthcore family that would be great, constantly inspiring :)

11. Any projects or clients you’re really excited about right now?

I’m working on a collaboration with Andreas Wannerstedt at the moment, we talked about it for about a year and finally started in January, its taking us a while but looking and sounding great so far! It’s a flash motion piece… intro for funkrush! :)

12. If you could leave readers with one great piece of advice, what would it be?

You need a website, most of my clients contact me through it… make it nice and have some nice portfolio and the work will come to you!

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It was probably around this time last year that I got real excited about the blogosphere. Up until that point I had never known blogs that I really built a loyalty to. It was when I came across some really great blogs of other graphic designers, web developers, advertising firms, tutorial networks, and a plethora of others that I made the decision to start blogging myself.

One of the blogs that was particularly insightful and inspiring during this time was idsgn.org – easily understood as ‘a design blog.’ It features a creative and unique set of writings on modern design, branding, marketing and in my eyes, our culture. For this reason idsgn has been a great resource in more ways than one. The blog has covered industry highlights such as last year’s Tim Hortons venture into New York, the Nickelodeon rebranding, the new Ikea catalogue typography and various Olympic identity competitions.

This is why I’d like to share with others the inspiration and insight I received from idsgn.org. I thought in what better way than to ask questions (something I have come to love) and give readers a better sense of what the bloggers themselves are like – what they do, why they blog, and what inspires them.

I was lucky enough to get a hold of Skylar Challand, one of the few bloggers responsible for idsgn content.

I thought of a few questions in which I hoped to reveal the art of blogging and the culture it brings with it.

This is what he had to say:

1. What pays your bills?

Client work. I love writing, but it doesn’t quite pay the rent just yet.

2. Can you describe a typical morning at the office?

I usually start my day off at home, checking e-mails and writing for the site. I head to the office after walking my dog and eating breakfast. I’m lucky enough to share space, which just happens to be down the street in Brooklyn, with some really talented people like Workshop and Jason Santa Maria. Next door is fellow design blogger Swiss Miss and another group of great people at studio 612a, which really makes for an inspiring and fun workplace. The views can’t hurt either.

3. What is your favorite beverage brand?

I don’t know if I have a particular favorite, but I’m a sucker for packaging design.

I’m really into Boylan Soda. They have beautiful vintage glass bottles but they are also have a line of natural sodas. It tastes good, and you can feel good about drinking it. I like that.

I also love it when big companies like Pepsi do something out of the ordinary. Last year, I raced around the city to find myself a Pepsi Natural, and I’d have to say it was mostly because of the bottle.

I’m also a fan of Tap’dNY, for their design and for how they are trying to change the bottled water industry. They actually encourage people NOT to buy their product, their slogan is: “The Anti-Bottled Water Bottled Water”

4. Are you a subscriber to Wired or any other magazines?

I have a bad habit of subscribing to too many magazines than I can possibly read in a month. Yes, Wired shows up at my door every month, along with Interview Magazine, GOOD, Ready Made, and a handful of others. A magazine I have been really into lately is the nicely designed Uppercase Magazine from Canada. Of course, we wrote about it on idsgn here.

5. Is idsgn your first blogging experience?

I’ve worked on a lot of web projects over the years, but idsgn really is the first project where I embraced the word ‘blog’ …although I still don’t really like the word.

6. What is the criteria for the content you post on your blog?

I try to only publish things that really interest me. I assume that if I find it interesting, someone else will too. There are so many other design blogs out there that seem to recycle the same content, we really push ourselves to focus on original material.

Many posts stem from things I see around me. I could be at the grocery store and wonder ‘Why did they change my favorite brand of tea?’ or at looking at my airline ticket and think ‘Why does every snowflake have to be Zapf Dingbats!?’

idsgn began as an outlet to start a discussion around questions like these.

7. Where do you see yourself and idsgn in three years?

I never would have guessed when we launched back in April that we would reach over a million visitors in a few short months. I’ve been extremely happy with what the blog has done so far, and I hope it continues to grow.

Right now we have 3 semi-regular contributors and we hope to grow that number to help round out the discussion.

8. What are your top 2-3 favorite blogs to read?

My RSS reader is overflowing, but GOOD, Brand New, and PSFK are among my daily must-read list.

9. What do you do when your not blogging?

In the odd hour I’m not writing or working (or sleeping), I could be found walking my French Bulldog or out exploring New York City, which is still very new to me having only lived here for less than a year.

10. Do you have any future projects in mind?

In April, idsgn will turn one year old. We have some exciting additions and improvements coming, but it’s top secret at this point… Stay tuned!

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Chances are if one of my friends are looking for online software tutorials I will reccomend one from the Envato Tuts+ network. I’m not the only one either seeing as “Tuts+ serves up over 13 million pageviews a month across its many subsites on subjects like graphic design, web development, audio production and motion graphics.” But it doesn’t end there.

The company is also host to a diverse marketplace where digital producers can sell Wordpress themes, stock audio, After Effects project files, Flash templates and more. If that’s not enough, Envato is also home to a series of educational, informative, and inspirational blogs. They even publish their own work under the name Rockable Press. Their collective efforts have garnered them favorable mentions in Digg, The Washington Post, Macworld, PC World and BBC.

It should be obvious then that Envato is one of today’s coolest and most significant development companies out there. The abundance of resources they offer to freelancers is unmatched. They represent a true example of what Web 2.0 is capable of – what collaboration, teamwork, and user participation can amount to.

When the company’s Marketing Manager Cyan Ta’eed replied to my interview request I was excited to get some insight into how Envato started, what their core mission is, and more than anything, what made the Envato spirit come to life (of course, as an aspiring UI designer in awe of the Envato brand, I had to ask some design questions too). I’m sure you’ll agree that Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato (and husband to Cyan) provided the very insight I was hoping for.

Image taken from http://www.twitter.com/collis

1. Did you go to a university or college? If so, what did you take?

I sure did, I went to UNSW to study Math for four years (though it took me five because I kept skipping too many classes!) Luckily I got to do some computer science courses too which have been useful over the years for working with developers, the math on the other hand hasn’t come up too often :-)

2. How old were you when your first project ActiveDen went live?

I was … *counts years* … 26!

3. How many people were involved in the launch of ActiveDen? What roles did they play?

There were four of us, myself, Cyan my wife, Jun who is my best friend and Ryan who was our developer on the job. I was the main organizer and designer, Ryan the developer, and Cyan and Jun did strategy and marketing. A little while later my brother Vahid also joined us to help with organization, especially with the hard stuff like accounting! But as in any small startup, we’ve pretty much done whatever needed to be done and often shared or exchanged jobs. The five of us are all still here and still mixing and matching jobs even to this day!

4. What inspired you to start a network of educational websites?

To be honest it was almost by accident! To begin with I was just putting up some tutorials I’d made, but it turned out they were quite popular. From there we started thinking it should be a whole site on the subject – Psdtuts+. When that became super popular, we thought we’d extend the franchise out to have lots of educational sites.

I’ve always loved education as it’s such a rewarding type of work. I also really believe that teaching is one of the best ways of learning. Certainly when I used to write tutorials on Psdtuts+ and later on Nettuts+ I always ended up learning lots of stuff myself!

5. How important is the interface design for the success of one of your websites?

I think it’s very important to have a great UI design as it helps set the tone for the site. It gives visitors an immediate impression of who and what you are. The wrong design can send all the wrong messages. And a badly designed interface can make a site very hard to navigate and use.

Having said that, there are some very famous examples of sites (MySpace and eBay in particular) that have had massive success with some less than perfect interfaces :-)

6. Can you describe a typical afternoon in the office?

A typical afternoon these days is mostly meetings and email for me. I sometimes joke that CEO stands for Chief Email Officer because I seem to spend a huge amount of time doing that these days! Now and then I still get to do some design, but with every passing month and year I seem to do less.

7. How has Twitter and other social media affected your website traffic?

I think Twitter has become a great source of traffic for all our sites and certainly is a great way of getting news out there. More useful to us, historically speaking, has been Digg. Although it’s very difficult to get on there, and these days the site seems to have waned a lot, the traffic from Digg helped get both FreelanceSwitch and Psdtuts off the ground. I think Twitter is probably doing the same thing for newer sites as the number of Digg links I see around these days is relatively few.

8. Who designed the Envato logo? Can you explain the meaning behind the Envato name and logo?

That was designed by me! The word “envato” has no inherent meaning – which is actually why we picked it! A blank word leaves a lot of space for creating a fresh brand in people’s minds. The leaf is there because our marketplaces in particular have always been based around animals (Activeden has a fox, ThemeForest a bear, and so on) so the leaf represented this by adding an element of nature. It also just looked kinda cool :-)

9. Do you know of any other similar networks or websites to the Envato network?

I don’t think there are any other networks quite like us in that we have a very diverse and eclectic range of sites spanning digital goods marketplaces like ThemeForest, app review sites like Mac.AppStorm, a gallery at Creattica, and of course tutorial sites at Tuts+.

10. Any there any short or long term projects in mind for the future?

Lots and lots! Right now one product we’re developing is an editable directory of apps and app developers for AppStorm.net. We’ve also got our new Creative Sessions site which has been in the pipes for a long time and is almost ready!

But probably the thing I’m most excited about this year is organizing some face to face workshops in different parts of the world so we can meet up with the Envato community offline! It’s going to be lots of work to organize as we really don’t know much about real world events, but it should be very cool and very fun!

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