About Megabite Design

History

Megabite was formed when the web was first being made popular through AOL. In 1997 I started thinking of names. 'megabite.com' was available. I was living in Jackson, WY to pursue the fine art of being a snowboard bum, but work still found me.

Before 1996 I'd done print design, which involved ordering type from a typesetter, we called it spec'ing type... then you had to trim it, run it through a waxer, and position it on the paste-up board. This was called production art, and is the basis for so many tool names in design software.

After graduating from Cal Poly, SLO in Graphic Communications, I worked in publishing, most notably Surfer Magazine, and then as an editorial assistant for a non-profit. Moved into advertising and then in-house design. Have designed and produced book covers, magazine layouts, posters, billboards, brochures, magazine ads, and web sites for a variety of businesses.

Design Philosophy

I've been described as a deep thinker and in spite of some right-brained tendencies, highly analytical. I don't jump in with the easy solution; your web problem becomes my web problem and I strive to educate my clients on their options. You won't get a quick fix that will be out of date in a year; you'll get a lasting solution you can build on for the future.

I believe the most important part of any web solution is the customer experience. If text is too long, it will go unread. If it stretches too far across the page, the reader will lose their place and give up. If the information they're looking for isn't easy to find, they'll go elsewhere. If the page takes too long to download, they'll click on the next link in their search result.

The particular nature of a business does not matter to a good designer. Our job is to interpret your needs and your customer and design to attract more business to yours.

I have also done UI (user interface) design on a number of web applications, and conducted usability testing on some of them. Design needs to be driven by customer experience, and anticipating how they will respond is part of why you hire a designer. It is also why you don't make designers do spec work for free through unethical design contests.