In a new segment we're going to call Interview With the Artist (original, I know), we're going to dig into the minds of some of our favorite artists on the web. I should note that we're making a distinction here between "artist" and "designer" here. There are a bevy of wonderful designers out there making quality work (and interviews abound), but there seem to be fewer peeks into the minds of talented artists, illustrators, and otherwise making their home on today's web.

While future interviews will look at some of our favorite artists outside our doors, today I wanted to start with an interview of our own Brian Brasher. I've loved Brian's work for years—long before he came to work with us at Firewheel—and this has given me a great opportunity to take a peak at what makes Brian tick.

For those who don't know Brian, his icon work goes back many years with his trademark pixellized style becoming well known through a handful of Pixelpalooza appearances and his personal website, etherbrian. Lately, you can also find a lot of Brian's personal illustration work gracing his submissions page at Threadless. Sadly, Brian's humor is more advanced than most of ours, and he has never had a submission chosen to be printed. We're hoping this will change soon. ; )

Lately, Brian has been cranking out a plethora of icons for IconBuffet, including the popular Oslo collection, which we'll talk about a bit here in the interview. So without further ado, here we go:

Josh: Okay, let's cut straight to the good stuff. Why the fascination with the pixellated fat-bit icons?
Brian: Retro gaming graphics, of course! Arcade consoles, the Atari 2600, and other bitmappy stuff from my youthful days.

Josh: How'd you get started designing icons, and how long have you been at it?
Brian: I saw a segment in one of those heavy Mac Secrets paperbacks by Davis Pogue in which he briefly described how to tinker with system icons with ResEdit. It was like finding El Dorado. I think that was somewhere around 1995 or 1996.

No, maybe 1993. Way back.

Josh: A lot of your personal artwork features pop-culture icons in unusual environments, like Walt Disney on ice, or the Illuminati Oreos (AKA Conspiracy Cookies). Where do you find the inspiration for these illustrations?
Brian: I suppose I'm just a nut for surreality (achieved, mind you, without narcotics). Pop culture icons also fascinate me and I guess the two just sort of get mixed together. A Reese's Cup scenario, if you will. You'd see more Elvis, but I can't draw him very well.

Josh: After joining Firewheel a little over a year ago, what has been the most difficult creative challenge for you?
Brian: The biggest challenge is really much less of one now, which would be dumping my previous illustration app of choice and diving head first into a new one. I'd been using Macromedia FreeHand for about 15 years. Wrapping my head around Illustrator was tricky at first, but now you couldn't pay me to go back.

Josh: Any advice for other Freehanders looking to make the jump to Illustrator (since Adobe will force our hands eventually just-the-same)?
Brian: I'd tell them to do it now and do it whole hog. The faster one loses the mental mindset brought on by FreeHand the better. Anyway, I'm betting he or she will quickly find that they get much better results than they ever could have with FreeHand - or at least get them a lot easier.

Josh: Alright, about the Oslo icons: Was there any specific inspiration for these, or did you more-or-less create the style out of your mind's eye?
Brian: I was interested in a different perspective as well as forcing myself to create everything within a very limited structure. I'm happy with the stylized look of Oslo, and that look meant I had to get an image across without any extraneous thingies tacked here and there.

John Marstall: What's your opinion on the shift to larger icons and resolution independence?
Brian: Larger icons mean more detail, which means a richer GUI experience as well as removing a lot of restrictions an icon maker has placed upon him to make an image legible. Unfortunately, throwing out those restrictions means that a lot of icons that look quite spiffy at full size will be muddy, cruddy horrors at 32x32 and below. A two-edged sword. There will be casualties

Josh: When you started crafting the original Oslo icons, how did your general workflow progress? Did you start with pencil sketches, or did you get right down to it in Illustrator?
Brian: Hmmmmm. I can't remember! I'm thinking that those might have been born right there in good ol' AI, but there could be a paper lying out of sight for the moment which is covered with crude scribblings that were the twinkle in my eye of what was to be Oslo.

Josh: What was it like creating the super small Oslo CMS icons based on the larger, standard Oslo icons?
Brian: If creating Oslo was challenging, the CMS icons were something far and beyond! There was definitely a bit of trial and error with those. Yet the stylistic simplicity of Oslo did keep the set from becoming a bad pixel mistake.

Josh: Any advice for would-be icon designers?
Brian: Practice, practice, practice. I don't think anybody, even the Grand Master Icon Crafters, were any great shakes right out of the gate. OK, maybe there are a few Japanese icon artists who sprang full grown from the forehead of Zeus, but you're probably not one of them!

Josh: What application(s) do you use to create your bitmap (pixel) icons now?
Brian: Still using ResEdit occasionally, but mostly only when I want to force myself to use a very limited palette. Otherwise it's Photoshop. I've tinkered a bit with Pixen, but that's been many months ago and I should revisit it.

Josh: Alright, a couple for fun. What do you listen to while you're working away?
Brian: A small bit of news on the radio (the box that picks up radio waves from local radio stations, for all you youngsters reading this), old time radio drama (digging that theater of the mind), and "radio" that I've cooked up myself - jazz, funk, rock, lounge, soundtrack music, etc., interspersed with retro commercials and my very own station ID's.

I can't work in silence.

Josh: What are your favorite activities away from work?
Brian: A little bit of everything. Reading, b&w cinema, being outdoors, and talking incessantly to people who'll listen to me.

Josh: Nice. And finally, as an artist, who are your biggest inspirations and influences?
Brian: In no particular order: John Severin, Jan Van Eyck, John Buscema, Dali, Howard Finster, and many others whose names will come to me in the middle of the night during a sudden moment of wakefulness.

Josh: Anything else you'd like to add before we wrap this up?
Brian: Nope. Just happy to be here!

So you're running a small business, and you're asking yourself about all this Web 2.0 stuff. What can this new generation of web applications offer me and my small business? Honestly, we've always felt like the social side of Web 2.0 gets all the attention, but applications like Basecamp, Mailroom, and our own Blinksale are showing that today's web can help your small business operate more efficiently and effectively.

On this note, our friends at Sproutit are kicking off the Simple Business Workshop, an event for freelancers, independent professionals, and small creative businesses. During the fast-paced one-day workshop you will learn "easy ways to attract new clients, collect your pay, stretch your dollar, and provide professional service." The workshop rate is $249 in advance (or $299 at the door), including lunch and a workbook. Dates have been announced for Chicago and San Diego, with other dates being announced soon.

Some great products and companies are involved in the workshop, including Fluxiom, Dabble DB, Shopify, Mailroom, DropSend from Carson Systems, and our own Blinksale. Should make for a wonderful event. Sign up today.

Yesterday, IconBuffet logged the signup of member number 40,000. Given that the new IconBuffet is still less than 6 months old, we're pretty stoked. When we kicked off the IconBuffet Free Delivery service in December, we knew it was either going to totally bomb or turn out to be something very exciting.

To our surprise, the excitement has exceeded our wildest expectations. The community that has sprung up around IconBuffet is remarkable, and we now more-or-less realize we never planned for this sort of response. That said, work has begun on a handful of community improvements to the 'Buffet. These improvements will make it easier to send and receive free icons, track your own icons, and network with other icon lovers. We're not messing with the core or anything, but we're certainly going to make some stuff better. More to come.

I'm in the process of wrapping up Steven Levitt's wonderful Freakonomics. If you're the type that is fascinated by hidden stories that can be found in statistics (or, if you're fan of Malcolm Gladwell's works) you need to grab a copy. Today.

In Chapter 2: How is the Ku Klux Klan like a Group of Real-Estate Agents? Levitt lists several terms commonly used in real-estate ads. What may (or may not) surprise you is that terms like "fantastic" and "charming" and "spacious" are commonly used to describe homes that really don't have anything worth describing. And as Levitt points out, "an exclamation point in a real-estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm."

Conversely, real-estate ads with descriptive terms like "granite" or "maple" emphasize the true selling points of the home, and can result in a higher sales price.

We live in a world where the signal to noise ratio is tilted heavily towards the noise. There is so much crap we have to dig through to find what we're truly looking for. If you're building a website or creating the next big web application, there is a key principe you can learn from real-estate ads when promoting your site:

Avoid meaningless adjectives like "awesome" or "superb" and instead simply tell your audience what your product is about.

For instance, we could say "Blinksale is an awesome way to send your invoices!" But instead we choose to say "Blinksale is the easiest way to send invoices online." It's a bit understated, but it sticks in your mind.

Anita Campbell recently picked up on this Blinksale attribute at this article about remarkable sales copy at BNET. She notes, "What immediately struck me was the simple, playfully worded—yet remarkable and memorable—website.  You visit the website and the first thing you see is a clear statement of what the product does: 'The easiest way to send invoices online.' That's nice and clear..."

We play up that "easiest way.." tagline a lot. It's in the title element of our web pages, it's on our business cards, it's on our collateral. Another by-product of our clearly worded copy is better search results. It's put Blinksale at #4 if you Google "invoices". (Dang that A List Apart...)

Now there's something else I must note: I truly believe Blinksale IS the easiest way to send invoices online. You can't go making statements like that unless you believe your site or service has the chutzpah to back it up. Using descriptive terms like "granite" and "maple" to describe your home only works if you actually have granite and maple in your home. Otherwise, you'll be called on the carpet by your customers. And that is most definitely not "totally awesome."

The importance of clear, no-bull copy shouldn't simply be reserved for your website tagline either. It needs to become a way of life. Check out Skobee (the best way to make everyday plans). Their simple homepage tells you exactly what their service is about ("Make plans with people").

Finally, I believe there's still a place for superlatives like "fantastic" or "heavenly." This place is in customer testimonials. There is an old proverb that basically says that it's better to receive praise from someone else instead of heaping it upon yourself. Let others be superlative while you stick to the basics. Be confident in your voice, but don't be the cheesy salesman. If you're site is worth talking about, others will talk about it. You just need to provide them with the facts. Simple, straightforward, friendly sales copy does just that.

Last summer we were privileged to work with the great folks at Zenfolio, a professional photography hosting service that has just recently launched. While it shares some similarities with Flickr, Zenfolio shines for the professional (or "pro-sumer") photographer.

With Zenfolio, photographers can upload their photos, categorize them, add metadata, and organize them into galleries for viewing by the general public. Soon, photographers will be able to sell prints and digital files to the public from their Zenfolio accounts as well.

In general, the technology under the hood is pretty beefy. There is a lot of polish, glitz, and sophistication underneath the gallery layouts. Here are some of my favorite galleries:

• Costa Rica 2 by Natalia Valik
• Portfolio by Mike Peyzner
• Big Island of Hawaii by Juliya Rubin
• Australia by Sasha Yevelev

Be sure to resize your browser window while viewing the galleries. The loading and reflowing of photos is pretty darn slick. Also, check out some individual photos as well. The responsiveness of the service is amazing. Hopefully it will retain the gee-wow factor as more people hit Zenfolio's servers.

For our part, we designed the vast majority of the Zenfolio web-application, as well as the public-facing gallery templates and pages. Of course, you'll find plenty of our icon work in their as well. If you're a photography lover in any sense, you need to check out Zenfolio.