Issue: Bottom Line October 2000
Section: Web designers
By Chris Gibbons
This story is an extract of an article that was published in the Fall 2000 issue of The Bottom Line. Copyright Crown Communications, a division of The Royal Gazette Ltd.
"Most people have no idea what they want except that they want to be on the web. Sometimes I end up being a business manager too."
Name: Colin Murdoch
Age: 31
Title: Creative director, emedia
Home page: www.emedia.bm
Web CV: www.makinwaves.bm, www.kodakexpress.bm, www.bermuda-insurance.org, www.bermudacosmeticsurgery.com
Recommended: www.airforce.com "A good indication of where the web is going. People have to come up with more things to make users come to their sites."
Tools of the trade: PowerMac, Adobe GoLive, Live Motion, Photoshop, Illustrator, graphics tablet.
Colin Murdoch's workspace is what you'd expect a creative professional's home office to be like: a jumble of books, scribbled notes, disks, cables and works in progress through which the pet cat occasionally ambles, overlaid with a soundtrack of cool trance and techno.
Yet amid this apparent chaos, Murdoch is building a very organised company. The cramped front room that he and girlfriend and eMedia business partner Jennifer Ward share in her grandparents' cottage on Cobbs Hill Road, Paget will soon be exchanged for the building being renovated next door on the junction with Middle Road. Once the Old Cedar Shop, it will this month become home not only to eMedia but also friend Mike Hind's StickStuff company and Bermuda.com.
emedia, which Murdoch started with Dave Hill in January (the two have since had a difference of opinion with Hill setting up on his own as Storm Design), appears to be justifying Murdoch's faith in both his own ability and the increasing influence of the web. He still works as an illustrator and designs the quarterly Bermudian Business magazine but the web is where the action is.
"Until six months ago, I'd say my work was split 50-50 between web and print," says Murdoch, who has worked in the past for agencies Harris & Mitchell, Creative Dimensions and publishing house Bermuda Marketing and has a fine arts degree in graphic design from the Rochester Institute of Technology. "It's now probably 60-40 web and that's going to continue, partly because I'm chasing that business rather than doing retail newspaper advertising but also because local businesses are finding more and more uses for the web. They are beginning to see the benefits of being out there 24-7."
Murdoch got into web design about four years ago. "I realised I needed to do my own site to learn how to do it. I started Makin' Waves right after that. It was perfect timing. Adobe Page Mill came out about that time - it was one of the first real visual layout programmes for the web. I learned that and took it from there."
Murdoch quickly realised this was where the industry was heading and, when the agency he was working with seemed to be slow on the uptake, struck out on his own. "The web is like nothing else. If you're in charge of a project you're in charge of the project. There are a lot of elements to think about and you can get your hands into all sorts of things. It's a designer's dream."
Since building the Makin' Waves site for the Front Street retailer, he has designed sites for clients as diverse as Dr. Jonathan Murray's cosmetic surgery business, the Bermuda Insurance Institute and Kodak Express. His trademark is clean and deceptively simple designs with creative use of space.
"I try to keep things clean. It's important on the web because you've got download issues and you're restricted by the size of the screen. There's always the temptation to put a big, flaming logo in there. If the site calls for an animation, I love to put it in there. I got into design through illustration."
Asked to name his favourite design, he admits to "an emotional attachment to Makin' Waves. It's not perhaps my best site but it was my first and I designed the logo and everything."
Does he put style or functionality first when designing a site? "The thing about the web is you've got to look at both," he says. "You can't get away from what it is and how it does it. It's tough because you can get caught up in the technology side of it but whatever you do needs to reflect a client's current design style. But as a designer, I like to think of it more as a style thing. We don't really get into the back end work which we outsource. Most of the web designers on the Island don't really have that IT background and vice versa."
For example, he says, "IT Bermuda Ltd. did the back end stuff on the Insurance Institute site. The average person wouldn't notice what it does because it's more about client functionality. It enables them to update a lot of stuff themselves. It's the strongest back end site I've worked on until now."
Many of emedia's sites are hosted overseas by US Web20-10. "Basically you get three times as much space for half the price," explains Murdoch. "We can get 100MB space for $19.95 a month. In Bermuda it's about $40 for 30MB. Local ISPs have to realise you could be anywhere. Their prices aren't justified in my opinion."
Local awareness of the web and its potential is increasing every month and Murdoch says clients are becoming more sophisticated and demanding but adds: "We have other jobs where people have no idea what they want - they just know they want to be on the web. That's probably more typical right now. But when people get on the web, it changes the way their business is run. If you're selling t-shirts online, how are you going to get it to them? You need to be able to process credit cards. Sometimes I end up being something of a business manager which I'm not trained to do but I can help them on the feasibility of a site."
He adds: "With the cosmetic surgery site Dr. Murray didn't really have any idea what he wanted from a design point of view so the challenge for me was to make sure the site looked respectable and trustworthy. You're not buying a pair of shoes here!"
He believes that Bermuda-based sites will continue to evolve as the web becomes more pervasive. "I think next year you're going to see a big push on the functionality of sites. At the moment people have made a start by putting stuff up and now they're trying to figure out what they can do with it. You're going to see more and more e-commerce capable sites and you have to be aware of that as a designer. The sort of "come and look" site is going to run pretty thin. People need a reason to go there. You can spend a small fortune building a site but if no one goes there, it's a bit of a waste."