Very good questions, thank you for asking. UpStart Productions is a one-man development shop started by me, Jeff Denton, back in Nov. 2000. At one point or another, I’ve done logo design, graphic design for print and web, Flash animation, static and dynamic websites and web applications. My company is currently in hibernation but I’ll shed more light on that later.

The world is not pounding on my door for me to write a web development blog. There are plenty of great design blogs and other resources available such as Sitepoint, V7N.com and WDVL. You see, what you’re reading is the very first blog post from UpStart Productions and I want to take this in a decidedly different direction from other resource sites. I want to focus on the business of web design, not the academic, technical aspects.

I probably won’t show off any new PHP classes, teach you how to build yet another RSS reader or debate the merits of CSS vs. table based layout (a debate long settled in my opinion). However, I will discuss the ups, downs, successes, failures and pitfalls inherent in being a freelance designer of any species be it web, print, multimedia or application. And I’ll try to form some coherent thoughts about a few issues in our industry that nobody seems to be talking about. We’ll dicuss those down the road a bit.

I’m not the quintessential geek but probably close. I’ve been fiddling with computers since I got a Timex Sinclair 1000 at 13 years of age - I was hooked. The web exploded onto the scene (for me, anyway) around 1994, just when I was being forced to abandon my pursuit of an Electrical Engineering BS at Chico State University. So, I discovered programming again: a little C, C++, and this odd markup language called HTML.

I began my career by building a few simple sites for myself and one paying gig for a friend of mine the saw sharpening business. I remember earning $350.00 for that project. At the time I thought it was virtually immoral, earning so much money for doing work I actually enjoyed. At the time I was living in a small, Northern California town. It seemed that a lot of action around what is now affectionately called “the bubble” was happening in Seattle and, to a lesser extent, Portland. So, at 28 I packed up the wife and kids and moved to the Pacific Northwest where I still live - sans wife, well, THAT wife anyway but that’s a story for another time.

No one would hire me as a designer up here in ‘98. Heck, I had no degree, no formal training in design and I really didn’t know my HTML that well either - I wouldn’t have hired me. I sat through countless interviews in bizarre corporate meeting rooms with large conference tables and speaker phones. I endured the embarasment when an interviewer showed me a page of 200+ lines of HTML code and asked me to find the errors. I knew I needed to fall back and punt.

Two year and a few “out of the blue” opportunities later, UpStart Productions was uncerimoniously born.

I’ll spare you the rest of the details until later. Please stay tuned and I hope you’ll let me know when I’m right on, close, full of crap or drifting into a place no one else really wants to go.

Thanks for reading.