December’s Website of the Month winner was creative agency MIXEDUPPIXELS. We talked to the multi-talented founder, Mathew White, to find out more about why he loves Flash and how he creates British Sign Language friendly content.

Hi Mathew, tell us a bit about yourself and MIXEDUPPIXELS.

Originally, I started messing about with video cameras and VHS editing and didn’t get my first computer until I was 25 years old. Being from a very creative family (My Father was a fairground woodcarver), I always had a passion for creative pursuits and finally getting a computer was a major changing point in my life.

I was never interested in computer games, instead, immediately learning about photo editing and web design. Given my passion for video production, I always saw the computer as a television rather than all the boring static websites that were around at the time.

This really fuelled my interest in Flash and the much more engaging way I could create websites with video content and sound, effectively turning someone’s computer into an interactive toy rather than presenting boring text documents on a screen.

That was in the year 2000 and now, 13 years later, digital media is my life and has come full circle with the blossoming of video on the web.

The business has had several names, first ‘gloopy.co.uk’ trying to be off the wall, secondly, the rather more business-like ‘yourwebworks’, but once I really started to incorporate video production, photography and other image-based services back into the fold, I wanted a name that really encompassed everything.Everything we do involved pixels in some form or another, be it web, graphics, print, video or photography… the science behind the art was simply to mix up pixels…

You offer a wide range of different services at MIXEDUPPIXELS, including everything from illustration to DVD authoring. What are the pros and cons of offering such a variety?

Each service offered comes straight from my own passion for the process and an insatiable appetite for learning the skills involved.Being able to offer a client a complete in-house solution works very well and often saves vast amounts of time trying to co-ordinate so many different people.My philosophy here is much like Apple and their hardware – by retaining control, you maintain quality and productivity.

The cons? Well, during the busy times, I don’t get much sleep!

Your website is Flash-based, which is pretty unusual these days. Why did you choose Flash and what advantages does it have?

As I said before, Flash was a passion from day one due to its ability to do so much more in terms of multimedia presentation.I particularly love that you can embed videos with alpha channels (transparent backgrounds) , meaning you can free your designs from clunky boxes that confine a presenter to one point on a screen. With Flash, I can have them walk around, appear over any part of the design…With agencies like Adobe and Google working on Flash file conversion software to make this work accessible on portable devices, I don’t think the world should give up on Flash just yet. It will change and evolve and maintain its place on the web I think.Video is only going to become a bigger and more important part of the web and, with mobile data speeds and allowances currently being a throttle to that, a great many people will still access rich media sites from desktops – that’s my experience as I look at the stats for my client’s sites from Heart Internet.

One of the most crucial elements for design portfolios is how information is displayed. How did you decide which projects to include and how to present them?

I always opted to present the projects that I felt showed off the most creative flair or which mixed the most of my skills base. There have been a great many sites created over the past 12 years, but it would be impossible to include them on one site. People can see extensive examples of web, graphics and print work on our Facebook page however: www.facebook.com/mixeduppixels

In terms of the actual layout of the examples on our main MIXEDUPPIXELS website, this was almost predetermined by the way the site moves and ‘expands and contracts’ to ensure the ‘hover to open’ links didn’t pass underneath the user’s mouse and open accidentally. That site was a real technical challenge, but it worked perfectly in the end.

You specialise in BSL (British Sign Language) content. What does this involve and how important is it for the web?

I fell into BSL video websites by accident after I learned to sign for my ex-partner. I quickly realised that many websites catering specifically for Deaf people were still using English as their main language, but BSL users don’t want English and will often struggle with it. Given my skills with Flash and video, I played around with the first Deafab website and we simply shot it with domestic equipment in front of a white backdrop and carefully integrated it into the site.The site was a massive hit with the Deaf community and immediately led to a lot of Deaf companies and charities contacting me to have their own sites built this way.This re-ignited my passion for video in a big way and started a lot of investment of time and money into broadcast quality equipment and learning new skills with green screen production. Today, I’m on the verge of starting a separate business for video production – SceneQ Creative (www.sceneq.tv) with a dedicate 732sqft studio in Bristol.

The process of shooting either BSL or speaking presenters (among other things) is really very simple. The presenter stands in front of a green cloth and reads or signs a script from an Autocue. This is captured direct to the Mac and then the background replaced with whatever is appropriate – or left transparent as required.

The modern web is revolutionising communications for the Deaf with webcams, Skype, Facetime etc. and their websites have a massive part to play in this process. We’re really proud to be able to cater for such a specialist market.

MIXEDUPPIXELS makes great use of video. Why did you decide to go down this route and what were the highlights of making it?

The MIXEDUPPIXELS website was conceived in 2008 and, being a very picky so’n’so, it took a year to build between other projects to make it exactly what I wanted.I wanted to create a ’wow!’ website. – the sort I’d seen rare examples of on the web over the years and I wanted to show potential clients that I was capable of not only thinking outside of the box, but of actually throwing away the box and pushing some boundaries. I don’t buy into ‘conventions’.If we all did that, there would be no innovation at all and we’d still be browsing ‘designosaurs’.

I didn’t have studio space when I shot that video in 2009 – or the far more recent SceneQ website videos in early 2012, so my living room was turned upside-down for a week, couches on top of couches, lights, camera, autocue and green screen! I even bought the Barcelona chair – a design classic – from Ebay specifically for the job. It was also my first ever time filming myself as a presenter.. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t afford a celebrity..!

You operate as a one-man studio, but you also have a pool of talented web professionals to call on as needed. What are the benefits of operating like this and how did you build up the group?

My ‘network colleagues’ as I call them are fantastic! They’re all people I’ve encountered over the years and worked with and established a really good rapport and trust with. That trust is everything when you are working in a team or to a deadline and knowing that the work will be of high quality and come in on time keeps the wheels well oiled. The benefit is simply that it means I can offer my clients even wider scope to keep a project well-managed and effectively in-house rather than dealing with a bunch of different unknown agencies.

Many self-employed creatives find dealing with clients the biggest challenge. What are your top tips for working with customers?

First and foremost, don’t bombard them with technical rhetoric or try and make yourself out to be something you’re not. If they need a skill you don’t process or don’t have access to, don’t pretend that you do. You’ll end up looking a fool and lose their trust in your ability to do a great job for them.I always find clients simply prefer a very relaxed approach in meetings and to ditch the ‘front’.I just talk to people as people and I don’t assume they know the ins and outs of the creative process.I think my clients have always appreciated the fact that they can contact me at weekends and later into the evening than many larger agencies can allow. In the past, this has meant that issues have been fixed quickly if necessary.

What advice would you give to someone looking to hire a web designer for the first time?

Be well prepared in advance of contacting them.I will always say one simple thing to a potential new client – consider your budget. Many people know what they want to achieve in their mind, but knowing your budget usually means I can conceptualise something really tailor-made for you.Otherwise, I could come up with a concept that is either woefully under or over their budget.

I find 90% of my work comes after someone has seen something else I’ve done and they really like my rich media style, so taking the time to check out many other examples of my work and picking examples they prefer is also a big help and, hopefully, reassures them they are commissioning someone with the right skills for their project.

Why did you choose to host your website with Heart Internet?

I was with a different hosting company for many years, but their prices just kept getting higher and higher and, on top of paying a substantial rate simply to be a reseller, they also charged a small fortune per account I set-up. One day, a friend recommended Heart Internet, who he’d been using for many years and had never suffered any problems with. I looked into the company and was really delighted with the pricing structure for resellers and made the move quite quickly, which has saved my business a small fortune over the past 3 years and have never suffered technical issues as my previous hosting company had.

MIXEDUPPIXELS is very happy to recommend Heart Internet to anyone out there needing reliable hosting and at better than fair prices.

Thanks Mathew!