Tony Hardy is  a 23 year old professional graphic and website designer from Newcastle who recently took over the running of the popular forum www.designforums.co.uk. We got in touch to find out more about his plans for the forum and the community.

Could you provide a bit of information about yourself?

I finished University two years ago and set up my own design agency called Canny Creative (www.canny-creative.com). We specialise in branding and website design.

My interest in design stemmed from the boom of internet gaming and designing “signatures” and “clan tags” when I was 14/15. That “nerdy hobby” turned into a career as I went off to study at Leeds Metropolitan University and that’s basically the end of that.

I genuinely hated working under management when I worked part-time so the thought of going back to being told what to do inspired me to just set up and my own and pave my own way. So, that’s exactly what I did. And now, I own and run Canny Creative as well as the Design Forums

 

You recently took on the management on www.designforums.co.uk. Could you tell us how that came about and why you took this on?

The chance came along to take over the Design Forums, and I took it. I’ve always been involved with online communities and forums (back to the old “nerdy gamer” days again) so getting to be involved in a community that share my interest in design was a chance I didn’t want to turn down.

Sure, I could’ve joined any other graphic design or web design forum, but being able to manage and actively try and promote a design community is something that interested me and a task and challenge that I wanted to take on!

 

How would you describe the community at Design Forums?

We’re a friendly bunch of people. We’re a very supportive community open to helping individuals of all levels develop and grow their skills. We have a wide range of members from graphic design,  web developers and coders through to illustrators, photographers and film makers.

Very soon we’re going to be launching community projects to get our members engaging with each other and getting to know each other away from the forum. The idea being to build friendships and contacts that we can extend out into the real world.

 

What are the short term challenges you are facing with this forum and how are you going to address them?

When I took over the forum, it was pretty much dead and buried. There is a large user base but nothing was happening on there. The members had tailed off and a lot of people had forgotten the forum existed.

What I had to do was start raising the public awareness of the forum again. I’ve been on social media touting the forum, engaging with previous members of the forum and it’s started to deliver results. A few new threads and ideas were brought onto the board and so far the activity has definitely started to rise again.

All we have to do for the moment is maintain our core base of users, and then gradually start extending it out. Ideally by contacting Universities and colleges and making inroads into the education system.

Ideally, I’d love Design Forums to become recognised as an industry standard professional forum where beginners, juniors, middleweight and seasoned veteran creative from all disciplines can come, blow off some steam, share ideas and collaborate.

 

What are your plans for the forum in the long term?

Eventually I see the forum becoming a hive of activity and maybe becoming an extension of a much larger network or site with posts, guest speakers and talks.

Down the line I envisage a network growing out of our forum community and things taking off that way. Hopefully we can extend the site out with blog posts and articles, maybe written by our members, enticing other people to join in.

Getting people talking about and responding to creative design, animation, film making etc is the overall goal, it’s just how we get there. We need to try and shift the public focus from “design is just something you have to have and you can get for cheap” to “actually, if we hire a professional designer, we can make [x] amount more profit and that really is worth it”.

At the moment, people see design as something that has to happen out of necessity. If people considered their design, their brand and how they wanted to be reflected from the very beginning, they would be a lot more successful. And that’s what we want to encourage.

What software/ CMS/ tools do you use to manage the forum (and why)?

We’re using IPBoard to manage the forum at the minute, because to be completely honest, that’s what it was when we took it over, and, we have no reason to change it. It works perfectly fine and the design of the thing is great.

In the future, when we grow, I imagine moving to some sort of CMS, but that could be a couple of years down the line, and who even knows what will be around by then?

 

What advice would you give to someone who is looking to start a career as a graphic designer (in terms of education and gaining experience)?

Get involved with a community as soon as possible and start networking right away. You can be the best designer in the world, but if you’re not getting that work in front of the right eyes then it’s not going to get you anywhere.

Also, if you’re going to be self taught, at least get some decent reading material and make sure you get your head around some of the basic design principles. Make sure you understand at least enough to get you by. It’s important to get some good feedback from a group of peers (on our forum) or a mentor of some sort who know what they’re talking about.

Lots of people will say you need to go to University, a lot will advise against it. Go if it makes you happy. If you feel like you could do without it, set up a website, see if you can bring in some work at reasonable prices (no £10 logos) and if you can, then why not make a go of it? Nobody got anywhere by being shy and doing nothing. Be pro-active.

 

What are your tools of the trade when it comes to the hardware and software you use personally?

Personally I use an iMac every single day I’m at work. Running a business doesn’t just stop when you leave the office though. Also couldn’t get by without my iPhone, for doing things on the go. Most important tool by far though is a sketchpad and paper. Honestly, sometimes you can’t beat just scribbling a thought down when it comes to you. There’s no computer substitute for that yet.

In regards to design software, I basically stop at the Adobe suite and Cyberduck FTP. That gets me by. I use Skype a lot and I also use Excel for keeping my books. There are more programmes for running a business than there are for design. Coincidentally, I seem to do a lot more business running and paperwork than actual design work.