Superawesome Interview: Petar Perovic & Dragan Babic

Tell us how you got involved in design. What was your inspiration? (I would suggest to change this question to :"How was your company born?" or something similar to this.) We both came from freelancing, working double shifts, taking loads and loads of work on our backs. And since we worked together on some projects independently and living in the same city, we often had a chance to meet, drink and elaborate about our shitty hours, work overload and stressful periods, so we started thinking that merging our talents and starting a company would probably had a really positive impact on our mental health — and it did. Several months after, we moved into our current offices, started Sprawsm. Since then we both feel that the overall quality of our lives have been improved. We're not trying to discourage freelancers, it certainly has it's advantages, but it can often be very difficult to draw a clear line and separate your work from your free time and it affects everything — your health, family, friends and in the end — your ability to produce creative stuff at the same level over and over. Your company has a very bold name. How did it come about? We have always been against the "we're serious guys, doing serious work in our serious suits" way of doing business. We believe that it doesn't have to be like that, and that doing business can be a fulfilling activity. I mean, it is kind of weird to say, but *it's not about money* — as soon as money becomes the goal of your work and existence, it's time to get your priorities straight. We're doing a creative job, and inspiration never has, and never will come from money. Our attention has always been geared towards results and our work, and that's why we choose this name — so people wouldn't take us so seriously, and so they know what they will probably get if they hire us. There is however one drawback to our name — hardly anyone can pronounce it, and that makes the bureaucracy so much harder. The thing that it was actually "Superawesome" at first, and is now legally on paper "Sprawsm LLC" doesn't make it any easier either. Every designer has their own process that leads to creative results. On your site you hinted yours: "From sketch to mock-up and visual identity, to code, to a final shiny product..." Can you tell us a little more about this process? You can imagine our company as a cute little family bakery, where we take great care about every single ingredient, and carefully working on every piece of that golden bread you see on the shelves. And we are being honest. There's just two of us, doing one project at the time, end of story. From time to time, we do need help as well, but the people that we work with also follow our philosophy and that working perfectly. We're both designers and clients usually hire us to do layout designs and front-end coding. When one of us is designing, the other one is coding and vice versa, so our approaches may vary a bit, but basically we're both starting from piece of paper and making some decisions before opening a blank file in Photoshop. And we discuss ideas, so at the end we both contribute, no matter who signed the design. After paper, we try to fit everything in Photoshop and once we're sure we nailed it, we present it to our client. In 90% of the cases, when we're satisfied with the mock-up — clients are also happy, and after they give us approval, the page is ready for coding. We kind of have a thing against what we call "template design" and that's basically what's dominating the "web design scene" at the moment. With our work, we are trying to remind people that we are designing pages, not templates, and that each page should get the attention it deserves because it contains specific information that needs to be displayed in a specific manner. And basically that is it. Coding is more of engineering stuff, so it is something that is coming prior to the delivery and something that we're experienced enough to leave for final hours and still do it on the top level. Going through your awesome portfolio, it seems there's a mix of style; some graphic, some clean and simple. Is this flexibility in style intentional or are you simply adapting to client requests? Definitely both your assumptions are correct. Web design can be tricky and often clients refer to some other sites they like, so you just need to adapt to their requests. That doesn't mean copying of course, but matching some style or features or some other elements they like is sometimes a request. On the other hand there are clients who give all the creative freedom we need, but that can lead to the point being missed, which leads to the conclusion that the moderate guidance produces the best results, at least in our case. So, the answer to your question is - yes, we're intentionally mixing styles, we don't stick to a particular one, but also listening to what our clients have to say. Your website uses some interesting typographic elements. How do you think typography on the web influences a design? Well, web design is a relatively young design discipline and it's quality is rapidly evolving along with the technology being improved. And web typography was probably the most influenced with its font family usage limitations and low bandwidths in early days of Internet discouraging the designers from using custom fonts as images. So, with the browser support for the latest technologies is growing, designers are feeling more at ease in terms of Web's limitations, site designs are looking better and better every year and at this moment the line between print and web design has never been thinner. That line has already been erased on Flash based sites and it is slowly disappearing in html world as well. So, the answer to your question is that web typography is having less and less restrictions and soon, in years to come, we'll be seeing some wonderfully designed html sites with various typefaces used and without an obligation to heavily use Arial, Lucida, Georgia or some other web-safe font. All in all — we're looking forward to it! On your website it says that you're good in crisis situations. How do you go about managing tight deadlines and still come out on top? As we mentioned in one of our previous answers, we are trying to keep our workload on some reasonable level whenever possible, so there's always some spare energy saved for handling crisis situations, and the other thing is repetition or experience, whatever sounds better to you. When you do certain things over and over again every day, you start to almost go by instinct, it gets under your skin, and you quickly recognize the best solutions for the current problem you're solving and it becomes almost like a routine. Behind any top–notch design there is nothing more than hard work. Blood, sweat and tears. As a small company you probably work with other freelancers. If so, what do you look for in freelancers you collaborate with? Naturally, we are looking for the same dedication and responsibility we're offering to our clients. Clients shouldn't have to listen to your excuses if the project isn't finished on schedule and you can never blame a freelancer for that. At the end, you choose him. That's why we're carefully picking our associates and we've never had any problems, since they're all solid, competent and reliable people, taking every task as serious as we do. And we surely know how to respect that. The home of Superawesome is Novi Sad, Serbia. From your experience, how do you think European design differs from North American? In terms of visual and technical, it doesn't. We're all learning from the same sites, using similar inspirational resources, reading the same articles and following the same opinion leaders etc. It's just the North American web market is substantially bigger than the European. Most, if not all the leading sites (social networks, tubes, blogs etc.) come from United States and US investors are more aware and ready to invest in something abstract such as a web site. We think that the situation throughout Europe is changing, but quite slowly (with the exception of UK), things are not moving as rapid as in US. And another key reason to that is language. You have some 350M of people in North America which is a number unreachable for the Europe with it's many languages. Europe will probably never have a successful local social network or some other site as influential as some above the average North American networks. Speaking of that, China probably has a lot more potential, but we'll leave that for some other interview. Anyway, that is not keeping us from being involved there, as many of the European agencies were/are hired to design and develop various great North American sites. At some point, we will probably have to offer some great product interesting enough for any market, but for now, dealing with clients from all over the world will just have to satisfy us. Many of us use Twitter, and we see you use it as well @sprawsm. How would you say Twitter has helped your company? Well, to be honest, we really couldn't say as we're so irresponsible when it comes to updating it constantly. We just occasionally post some stuff that we think is relevant to our followers. It is definitely the best tool to stay connected to your audience, apart from our site/blog. What do you like most about your job, and what are its most challenging aspects? We like our everyday things, small things. Office pranks, day trips, excitement about certain projects, ability to choose the project we'll work on, hating some clients and drawing dicks in their mouths on our whiteboard, drinking beer in your office at 9AM, leaving it at 10AM. Those sort of things. And we're trying to keep it positive all the time, 'cause it's viral. The most challenging thing is probably dealing with heavy and demanding clients, they can really suck off all your energy and you cannot get rid of them before fulfilling the contract. That is why you often need to have some in-house projects in order to spare your nerves. We have Uni-Form [http://sprawsm.com/uni-form/] and soon to be relaunched Plakatt [http://http://plakatt.com/] for that. Your company has a long list of clients, which must mean you're doing something in marketing right. What marketing tips can you can share with us? It's simple. Use all the available weapons to improve your online visibility — be fresh, write blog posts, twitter, try to get involved on the message boards, refresh your portfolio from time to time and most of all *be honest.* If you present your company as some huge agency with 50 employees that in reality is just you working from the same desk you used to write your maths homework 15 years ago, you'll end up with a damaged reputation which you'll hardly ever get back. Be intelligent enough to channel your potential in the best possible way, so it works for you. There is no "best designer in the world", there's always somebody better or somebody worse than you, so just be objective and find your spot in this huge market, build your reputation patiently and clients will surely know to respect that. Interview by Damian Madray, founder of Designers'Couch and creative director at Depthskins Design Studio.