Summary: Episode 172 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) interviews Jason Beaird (@JasonGraphix) of Zaarly and disusses the likes of SASS Less, jQuery and many other parts of the front end development world. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #172: Work-Life Balance with Jason Beaird (MP3, 25:35, 24.6MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1328644474660-10'); }); Episode Summary Kevin and Jason discuss how to balance the time and priorities for a web designer with a long term relationship and the addition of a child too. Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/172. Interview Transcript Kevin: I am here with Jason Beaird, and we are going to be talking about basically work/life balance. Now, if you don’t know who Jason is, he’s authored a book for SitePoint called “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design”, correct? Jason: Yep. Kevin: He’s also a new father. Jason: Well, to start that off, I’m still trying to figure out the whole work/life balance thing. So, I’m no expert, but I’m learning as I go. Kevin: Right. Well, that’s the best time to ask though, because you’re actually starting to think about these things and maybe research ways to do that, right? Jason: Yep. Kevin: So, it’ll be nice to have this interview with you now, and then in the future maybe have you come back and say, “Hey, these are the things I learned along the way.” Jason: Sounds good. Kevin: So, to kick things off, Jason, tell us a little bit about yourself. Jason: My name is Jason, and as you said, most people know me from the book “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design”. I’ve been doing web design for a long time, back to the GeoCities days when I was in high school, and bulletin board systems, and discovering the web through the early, early days when everything was table- based. I’ve just enjoyed the changes and the evolution of the web. It’s what I do for fun and it’s what I do professionally, currently a User Experience Designer at MailChimp in Atlanta, Georgia. As Kevin was saying, we’re going to talk about work/life balance. My wife and I just had our first baby. She’s four and a half months old. Her name is Adelyn and she’s pretty much changed my entire life. So, it’s always fun to talk about her. Kevin: Yeah, that’s good. Tell me a little bit about the history of your expertise and the development of your career. Did you attend college, that kind of thing? Jason: I knew by the time I graduated high school that the web was what I wanted to do, but I thought I wanted to design websites. But at the same time I had planned to go to school for computer science, because I thought that’s what you do if you want to build websites. I ended up changing my major at orientation, before even getting in to any of the computer science classes, to art/graphic design. Because they told me at orientation at University of Central Florida that if I wanted to design websites then I had to go to graphic design. I’m always curious, if I had gone the computer science route, where it would have taken me. But the art/graphic design route treated me pretty well. There are a lot of things that are hard to learn about art without taking traditional art classes, learning how to draw, learning how to paint, framing pictures, making pottery, learning about art history. That kind of guided my sense of design for [...]
