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Q&A with Marc Hinse

Web designer from Germany | Conceptional web architect & consultant

I am Marc, a so called web designer (siebennull.com) from Karlsruhe, Germany. Since "web design" is much more than pushing pixels in Photoshop I would rather call me a conceptional web architect & consultant type of guy. I originally studied economics and worked in a business consultancy which was boring. But I think the experience to question and improve stucked concepts and processes are an advantage when starting a web project for small and medium sized businesses. I see my strengths in concepts and their frontend development but with easy to learn and flexible CMS like ProcessWire and some basic knowledge of PHP I am able to tailor individual solutions for my clients for front- and backend.

Software

Basically Sublime Text 2 (I honestly use only the basic editor, nearly no plugins except EMMET for easy generating markup for prototypes). Sometimes I have to open Photoshop for image editing, but I don’t use it or other software for creating design. This is just done with markup and CSS.

For CSS preprocessing I use Stylus, I just like the syntax and flexibility. As a build tool I use Gulp with which I am able to easily setup an automatic process for collecting, concatenating and minifying CSS and Javascript and push it to local or live servers (mounted as disk with Transmit) with an automated refresh in the browser with LiveReload.

Other Software I use on a daily basis on my 15“ MacBook Pro Retina: Tweetbot for Twitter, Transmit for FTP and mounting, Spotify for listening to punk rock (my playlist: Punkrock), 1Password for cross device password management and Harvest for time tracking.

Ideal work environment

Pretty much the one I have. I work in our own coworking space in Karlsruhe and like to have people around me that also are creative. What doesn’t belong to an ideal work environment are ringing phones, but without them there would e no business. So I also like to work on public holidays where the state-dictaded silence is perfect for being creative.

Work inspiration

Surprisingly: The web. I read a lot of blogs and web design related blogs. I visit conferences like the unbeaten Beyond Tellerrand for seeing very inspirational people in person. Such conferences are motivating even if I don’t have such clients like Twitter, Mailchimp or the Boston Globe. I think the challenge is to adapt those concepts and approaches to tailor individual solutions for even boring businesses.

People you admire most

There are a lot of people I admire for their work and especially for their talks like Brad Frost, Stephen Hay or Jeremy Keith to name a few. But what I really admire the most is people sharing their work and insights. So you could say: I admire everyone I found on Google while looking for a solution to a given problem.