1. Hi , who are you and what do you do?
I feel like I should bust out an AA voice. “Hi. My name is Chris and I’m a web designer.” I have a personal website I try to keep updated with stuff I’m doing. It’s already a bit out of date.

2. Describe a typical day at work?
I work for a design company, so my days are filled with working on whatever projects we have cooking there. I think when you tell people you are a “designer” they picture you playing with shapes and colors and photos all day. The truth is that’s the really fun stuff, which is maybe 10% of the time. The rest of it is spent communicating with clients and in-house, thinking through problems, testing, reporting, dealing with data, troubleshooting… I consider all that designing, just not all of it is as fun as the user interface stuff.

3. What do you enjoy most about your work?
I enjoy coming up with great solutions to problems. And problems come up A LOT at work.

4. What do you like least about your job?
Clients. Ha! But seriously, we are often between a rock and a hard place as designers. We need to appease our clients no matter what, because they pay the bills. But they can be very stressful to deal with. If a client doesn’t like a design, that’s one thing, but it can get much worse than that. Bad attitudes, blame-games, money situations… Too much for me. That’s why I don’t really freelance. I need a buffer between me and all that as big as I can get it.

5. What is your worst enemy of creativity?
The perfect creative zone is when you have some established goals and you have the time and freedom to tackle them. So the worst enemy is anything that hurts those things. Loose or no project goals, too strict of requirements, or being bogged down with crap and not having enough time.

6. What do you do when you start a new project and you have NO ideas?
If I have absolutely nothing, I just start with the absolute core idea and typography. This serves a couple of purposes. Chiefly, it requires you to have some copy to work with. If you don’t have that, you probably shouldn’t be designing anything yet anyway. Also, it ensures you start simple and just gets to doing something. Half the battle is just getting started.

7. What inspires you the most?
Jealousy. Seriously, that does the trick a lot of times. I can look at some design and just be wide-eyed at how awesome it is and wish that I did it. The design itself is inspiring, but just as motivating is my jealousy of how great of a designer the creator is.

8. Do you listen to music while working? And if “yes” what music do you listen to?
Maybe half the time. If I really need to concentrate I can’t listen to anything. If I’m doing something a little more mindless I like to listen to music. I really like bluegrass and old time music, but I like it all. I like music where you can hear the craft of the musician playing it.

9. How do you deal with criticism?
Oh, I don’t mind it. I’m pretty good at taking stuff on the chin. Constructive criticism is always welcome on anything I do. But even the negative and intentionally rude stuff I can deal with. I’m a big guy, I can take it, if that’s how you need to vent.

10. What does your workspace look like?
It’s (unfortunately) nothing special. Someday I’d like a big wrap around desk and a window that looks out onto something nice.

11. Do you remember the very first web-project in which you were involved?
Not really. It was probably college at some point. I was in a bluegrass band for a lot of college and afterwords and I always maintained a site for that, I think that was probably the first independent web thing I did. Definitely not spectacular and not worth seeing now!

12. Is there any advice you would give our readers?
Don’t cross the streams. Always check the barrel. I dunno, I’m sure there are some good movie quotes that would be good here. Here is the most honest advice I can give though. If you want to get good at anything, you have to practice doing it. A lot. All the time, every day. You will probably have to make sacrifices, and it’s going to take a long time. I remind myself of this all the time.

13. What has been the most fun project to work on so far?
Actually one of my recent projects Are My Sites Up has been awesome to work on. It was my own idea, and I felt (and still feel) it is a great idea for a site. Website monitoring that takes about 15 seconds to sign up for and works. As it turned out, the backend of checking tens of thousands of sites is anything but simple.

So I got to take on the challenge of a complex backend and a feature-packed frontend and make it dead simple to use. I think we’ve done it and it’s going to get even better!

14. Imagine yourself in 15 years… what do you see yourself doing?
I’d love to say I’ll still be involved with the web and doing creative stuff. But who knows if there will even be a web in 15 years? That’s a long time. My biggest hope is that I’ve done enough work by then that I make enough residual income that I can take it a little easier. Work less, play more.

15. Please tell us 3 people who we should do this Interview with (Why them?).
I’m a big fan of illustrators, here are some great ones:
Luc Latulippe: http://www.luclatulippe.com/
Chris Spooner: http://www.chrisspooner.com/
Jon Wilcox: http://jtwilcox.com/

Chris…thank you very much for answering our questions :-)
So if you want to visit chris you should do that now: Visit http://css-tricks.com or leave him a comment here! :)