CARSONIFIED HAS GROWN from a small web design agency to presenting the massive Future of Web series of conferences in less than five years. The agency is still small in terms of personnel with just 11 members of staff running the whole show. Here we find out how and why they do it.

WD: To kick-off, can you tell us a little about Carsonified and how and when it all got started?

RYAN CARSON: I moved from Colorado to the UK in 2001, after completing my Computer Science degree. I wanted to see the world and experience things from a new perspective, so England seemed like a great place to give it a try. I ended up at a small web design company in Cambridge called Spider Creations (“spider” … “web” … get it?) where I was writing ColdFusion. However, I quickly discovered Joshua Davis’ PrayStation.com and was sucked into the world of Flash and ActionScript. When Josh started giving away all his Flash source files for free, it caused a real renaissance of creativity and excitement. Coming from the cold world of Computer Science, this free sharing of code was mind-blowing and extremely exciting. After Spider Creations folded (remember the fun times after the dotcom bubble?) I moved down to London and eventually ended up as lead developer at a design studio in London. After a couple years there, I got the entrepreneurial itch and decided to quit my job and start my own company. Carsonified was founded in 2004 and the term AJAX hadn’t been invented yet.

WD: What was the original vision for Carsonified and how has the brand matured since its inception?

RC: Carsonified was originally founded as a web app shop and our first product was called FlightDeck, which was a precursor to DropSend.com (our web app for sending large files). I built the entire app on the LAMP stack and then sold monthly subscriptions to the service for £199+VAT. I was working alone in our top bedroom and it was a real crash course in marketing, bookkeeping and self-motivation. Ultimately, I realised that I wasn’t a natural salesman because it was hard to not take rejection personally. Also, as any of you know who have bootstrapped your company from your bedroom, it’s hard to stay motivated and focused when you work alone at home every day by yourself. About a year after I started the company, my wife and I had a hard look at the numbers and it was obvious, I just wasn’t succeeding at selling subscriptions to our web app. It was a humbling and difficult time, but I’m so thankful to have experienced it. We decided that we should re-launch the web app at DropSend. com with massive improvements and instead of selling very expensive monthly fees, we would make it totally free to use. The hope was that folks would use the free plan and upgrade to a paying plan. Thankfully it was really successful and we actually started to make some proper revenue.

WD: The Carsonified collection of websites, Carsonified, Mattinator, FOWD, ThinkVitamin, all boast a unique and identifiable style. How did the original concept come about and how often is the design tweaked/updated?

RC: Mike Kus, our amazingly talented designer, is responsible for all our current design work. If you’re into the Twitter thing, you can follow him at twitter. com/mikekus. Mike started off in the print world so he brings a really fresh and unique aesthetic to our work and he’s very passionate about bringing ‘design’ back into ‘web design’. He did a great talk at FOWD London on that which you can check out at http://events.carsonified. com/fowd/2009/london/mp3s/mike-kus-4/videos. Recently he designed the site for our ‘Stack Overflow Dev Days’ event (stackoverflow.carsonified.com). He published a post on ThinkVitamin and showed the design as it progressed from initial sketches all the way to the final design. The coolest thing about the post is that it shows that amazing designers like Mike also have peaks and troughs in their projects, and brilliant design doesn’t just immediately flow out of their mind and onto the screen. You can have a look at one of his posts at http://thinkvitamin.com/features/the-evolution-of-awebsite- design.

WD: Carsonified is a relatively small agency that embraces a number of aspects of web design. How many of the team are specifically designers and developers and what are their specialist skills?

RC: As I mentioned above, Mike Kus is the only designer at Carsonified. He’s single-handedly responsible for all the design and HTML/CSS work. Keir Whitaker (twitter.com/keirwhitaker) takes care of any front-end development work and also dabbles in Django, PHP and JavaScript occasionally. Keir built tipster.carsonified.com in four days as a fun side project. It’s a tool for people to share and vote on web design and development tips. It doesn’t make us any revenue so it’s just a bit of fun. We don’t currently have a full-time developer on the payroll, so we bring in freelance developers for any hardcore engineering work that needs to be done.

WD: Events are a major component of the Carsonified brand. Was this part of the original masterplan when Carsonified started or is it something that happened as the company evolved?

RC: We started off as a web design and development shop and just kind of fell into producing events. My friend Ryan Shelton and I used to run a group called ‘By Designers for Designers’ or BD4D from 2001–2005. The whole idea was to get web designers away from their computers for an evening so they could talk shop and connect with each other. We’d find a bar with a projector, invite some amazing designers to speak and get someone to throw a bit of cash behind the bar. In the end, BD4D became quite popular and spread across the world to 17 cities in seven different countries with over 50 total events. We called it ‘Creative Fight Club’ because local designers ran the events and we often didn’t know when or where they were happening – it was amazing. The events didn’t make us any money but they were a ton of fun and really connected us to the big names in the industry. I have a real built-in desire to connect and encourage people, which is where BD4D came from. The experience I gained from BD4D gave us the idea to put together workshops and events for the web design and development industry – and we’re having a blast at Carsonified connecting and encouraging folks who attend our shows. It’s a real honour and we absolutely love doing it.

WD: The ‘Future of’ series of conferences have proved popular across the UK and US. How much time, effort and organisation is involved in putting on such an event?

RC: The amount of work that goes into producing a big 1,000-person event like Future of Web Design (FOWD) London is pretty unbelievable, actually. We have five full-time people on our Events Team and they work very hard. Tash, Lou and Jo are event producers, Will is our sponsorship manager and Keir is the team manager. Our mission is to encourage, equip and connect the attendees at our shows. We work very hard to make the content cutting-edge and valuable, while also facilitating ways for attendees to meet new friends and business contacts. The events need to be informative, inspiring and a lot of fun. It’s a hard balance but I really believe we run some of the best events in the world.

WD: The success of FOWD has seen the brand branch out into a mini tour. Do you have plans to continue and expand the tour over the coming years?

RC: The current tough economic times make it harder for people to afford travelling long distances to conferences. We wanted to help folks out by bringing Future of Web Apps (FOWA) and Future of Web Design (FOWD) to several cities around the UK and dropping the price significantly. We’re coming to Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Belfast and the tickets are only £59+VAT, so hopefully everyone will be able to afford it. There are going to be one-hour tutorials by Elliot Jay Stocks, Drew McLellan, Andy Clarke and Bruce Lawson on topics like HTML 5, designing your portfolio, web typography and more. We’re also going to have four keynote talks and a speed-networking session where everyone will be able to meet new people. We’re currently on the road for the FOWA Tour and it’s been a blast so far, so we’ll definitely do it again. The FOWD Tour is happening in September and we’re really looking forward to that.

WD: Carsonified currently runs a series of workshops. How do you decide who is going to take a workshop? Do you approach members of the web design community or do they come to you?

RC: We run a series of one or two-day workshops at CarsonWorkshops.com with speakers like Dan Cederholm, Ryan Singer, Cal Henderson, Dave Shea, Molly Holzschlag, Daniel Burka, Paul Boag, Andy Clarke, Eric Meyer and more. We choose designers and developers who we feel are the best in the industry and thankfully, they like working with us. The workshops are very in-depth and are limited to 40 people, so there’s a lot of interaction with the speakers and other attendees. We always provide a yummy lunch and lots of quality coffee.

WD: The Carsonified blog recently mentioned promotional ideas. What are the staple promotional tools used by Carsonified to promote itself?

RC: We think a great way to create buzz and have a lot of fun is to do short-burst creative projects. The idea is that everyone in the company turns off their email and phones for four days and we do something that is creative and fun. In the past we’ve done projects like TheMattinator.com, HugMyMac.com and tipster. carsonified.com. TheMattinator.com was a tool that allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts without having to log in and out. We wanted to try out Django, which we have never used, so that was a real adventure. I got asked to write an article for TechCrunch so we got a huge amount of coverage. HugMyMac.com was a project where we hand-made six Mac and iPhone sleeves and then gave them away. We felt that the world had become too mass-produced and impersonal and it would be fun to make something by hand and give it away for free. Tipster.carsonified.com was just a fun quick project that was built by Keir. The goal is to allow people to share web design and development tips and vote on ones they really like. Hopefully it will become a useful resource for everyone.

WD: It seems that Carsonified it destined for great things. What immediate plans can you tell us about? For example, are you set to enter into the world of mobile web design?

RC: Well, thank you – that’s very kind of you. We would really like to build a new web app but we’re struggling to allocate enough time to the project. We’re currently working on re-designing Carsonified.com and then we’re going to ‘re-align’ events.carsonified.com as it needs some tweaking. I am really excited because we are going to combine our ThinkVitamin.com blog and the Carsonified blog into one valuable blog for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs. We had a hard think and realised we were spreading our effort over too many blogs and we really should combine the two. The new blog is going live at carsonified.com/blog and I think all your readers will really enjoy it. Once we finish the above projects, we will then allocate ourselves some time to work on our new web app – can’t wait!

WD: Finally, as a company that is very active in the web design industry, what advice would you give to those wanting to get into the industry?

RC: I would advise designers to take time and create a project that will raise their profile. It’s highly unlikely that a client project will offer the freedom and control you need to do something really amazing, so it should be something you just do for fun. A great example of this is when 37signals (back when they were doing client work) ‘re-designed’ the homepages of several big companies like FedEx and UPS. It caused quite a stir and really raised their profile. In addition to doing a creative profile-raising project, I would highly recommend that designers get out and meet big name designers they respect. It’s so vital to grow your network of friends and contacts – it will open huge doors and opportunities. The best way to do this is be very helpful and friendly to everyone you meet. It’s like karma – do good unto others and it will somehow come back to you.