Atlanta designer Todd Dominey has a unique voice in the online design community. As the one-person author of the extremely popular blog What Do I Know (no question mark, please), Todd pours forth his personal perspective on design, Apple, helpful software, typography, and assorted indispensable online resources. As the one-person studio behind Dominey Design, Todd is an oft-published and well-accomplished graphic designer who steps back and forth between new media and not so new easily and to great result. AIGA/LA's Tom Dolan talks to Todd about his practice and the challenges balancing creativity, technology, and personal practice.

Q: You're a designer who's probably better known online through your blog What Do I Know than through your portfolio site. When and why did you start What Do I Know and how did you originally envision it relating to your online portfolio site?

What Do I Know was a forunate accident. My original intent when creating the portfolio site was to have everything under one roof — my portfolio, open source Flash content, news and personal commentary — but the latter soon proved to be too much for a fixed-size Flash presentation. The site was a success in promoting my work and showcasing my capabilities, but for longer passages of text it simply didn't work. So I moved all the textual content to HTML, and creatively the layout went in an entirely different direction. That wasn't my plan at all, but the content clearly needed its own style and title. So What Do I Know was born, as a personal jab of sorts and a reminder to never take it all too seriously.

Q: How has your online presence evolved? Didn't you consider taking down DomineyDesign.com at some point?

I still am. Dominey Design is a number of years old now. It was created in Flash 5, if that tells you anything. The time has clearly come for me to evolve the online presence into something new and more reflective of myself in 2005. The hope is to merge Dominey Design and What Do I Know in some fashion that doesn't turn-off visitors or lessen the visual appeal of the content. But you know what they say about mergers, so I'll have to tread carefully.

Q: Do the friends and relationships you've developed online take the place of more traditional physical get-togethers and design events? Can a designer get all they need from a community of peers online?

I'm notoriously bad with attending local design events. I've always enjoyed them, but with work and other responsibilities they're incredibly difficult to get involved with with. I actually converse and collaborate more with other designers and developers outside of Atlanta than in, which is kind of odd, but it's a natural extension of the web and blogs I guess.

Q: Has What Do I Know become one of the must-visit sites for the design community online? Are you now sentenced to doing it forever? Do you feel a publisher's responsibility to your loyal readers?

I used to. I mean, when I first launched the site I honestly didn't care if anyone read it because it was a creative outlet. I've always enjoyed writing, and have been known to blab my friends' ears-off about "what a great font that is," or how horrible the kerning is on a restaurant menu, so merging both interests into an online form where other typographically-sensitive people could relate was all too appealing.

Once my site became much more popular, I did feel a responsibility to post something every day, but it was an impossible momentum to keep up with professional and personal responsibilities. So I retreated to a position of...if I have something interesting to write about, or link to, or offer an opinion on, I'll write. If not, I'll wait.

I've discussed this numerous times with other designer/writers I know, and you often hear a lot of apologies and feelings of guilt for not updating their sites more. It's an easy trap to fall into. I personally think that if you maintain a blog and more of your attention is going towards posting free content to a web site, instead of spending more time with family, friends, or advancing yourself in your career, then your priorities are out-of-whack. If your blog is your business, that's another story. But if I could give anyone starting a site some advice, it would be to keep your goals in-check. And to never take it all too seriously.

Q: What Do I Know seems to struggle a bit with the issue of comments (as does AIGALA.org). How much of the vibrancy of any online resource comes from the readers? Are comments over-rated?

Comments are the best, and worst, component of any blog. For me they've proven to be invaluable for continued exploration of a particular topic, and can often be a more interesting read than the post that instigated them. On the flip side however — and the reason why What Do I Know no longer offers comments — is that their openness can easily be abused.

My site became so overwhelmed by SPAM — everything from Viagra to Casinos and everything in between — that I was forced to shut comments off site-wide. Through search engines and what-not spammers jammed their junk into hundreds of entries I had written — many going back years — and it was a nightmare to remove them all. I tried manually pruning them whenever they appeared in new posts, but even that proved to be too much. I would often wake up in the morning and find my inbox jammed with comment spam. So I gave up and shut them off completely.

This isn't as much of a problem now with new authentication schemes a variety of blogging tools are offering, but I haven't gotten around to using them. I look forward to turning them back on again.

Q: How important is it for designers who don't work on the web to pay attention to what's going on online and in other interactive arenas?

I think it depends on a designer's clientele and their respective target audience. If it mainly consists of 40+ adults, perusing web sites probably isn't integral to their success. But if their demo is teenagers and young adults, they simply have to be aware in order to be relevant and successfully communicate to that demographic.

You see this in everything from Flash-like vector animations in Toyota television ads to VH1's on-air promotional graphics. They both effectively replicate well-worn "web styles" to grab the attention of their web-savvy target demo.

In general though, and perhaps I'm a little biased, but I fail to see how anyone involved in design couldn't be interested in the online space. There is always something new and exciting to see, and design-centered blogs are often great sources to find it.

Q: Should web design be considered 'graphic' design? How can an organization like the AIGA make strides to be relevant for interactive designers who may have never sent a piece to print and don't care about CMYK versus PMS?

I think organizations like AIGA can be relevant to interactive designers by providing an offline community resource. It's so easy to stay in the online space, where all communication is electronic and seemingly intimate, but nothing takes the place of face-to-face interaction. Plus, so many ad campaigns these days have multiple medium components — from print to television to interactive — so the more awareness and collaboration the better. Groups like AIGA are in a position to facilitate that interaction.

Q: You've become a pretty accomplished scripter, programmer, tweaker ... for Flash in particular. Does the technical fluency your output requires feel at odds with the mindset you need to be a creative designer?

Here's what I've noticed — virtually everyone I know who works in interactive/web design, myself included, is mentally split right down the middle. Some days they wake up with a dominant left brain, other days right. This is drastically different than the days when I worked in print, where most agency people I worked with lived exclusively in the right. I think I knew web design was right for me very early on when I was the one guy in the office who could fix a crashing build of Quark or replace a corrupted extension in the System folder. I appreciated the technical as an integral part of the creative process, and felt the greatest professional satisfaction when both paths crossed.

If you're a creative type who can tap into the zeros and ones of the programming world when need be, there's nothing standing in the way of you fully realizing your ideas online. It's one thing to create a static layout for a print piece, and another to populate it with dynamic data, or animate it in some fashion. The interactivity — when done well — can take a flat print piece and expand it in ways that are impossible in any other medium.

Q: You've just launched a Flash slideshow code solution — SlideShowPro. Are you embracing the idea of releasing commercial software/shareware as a business?

SlideShowPro is an experiment of sorts. I wanted to see how much of a market there was for Flash components, which are essentially mini-Flash applications any Flash developer or designer can use regardless of experience. I guessed at what the proper price point would be, and released it. And to my surprise, it was received very enthusiastically, and the traffic has yet to die down nearly two weeks after its release. This is my first commercial product, so all of this is brand new to me. But it's so exhilarating to see your creation being used and re-used in a variety of ways by people all around the world, that I'll be hard pressed not to try it again.

Q: Where to from here? What's going to be interesting in the design world in next couple of years?

There are a number of interesting trends to watch in the online space in the next few years. Personal bets include Google offering a full desktop solution that doesn't involve Microsoft, Firefox becoming the most popular browser on the web, Flash video overtaking Real, Windows, and QuickTime in market share penetration, and Apple achieving ten percent (or more) of the desktop market.

I think it'll also be interesting to see how much larger the blog phenomenon will become. With a little work and luck, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see some of them overtaking big-media ventures in traffic, eyeballs, and social influence.

Design wise, I'm sure we'll see the death of 800x600 resolution layouts, a deeper connection between television and interactive media, heavier web pages, and an even-larger glut of freely syndicated news and data. I hope a couple of years from now the typical "blog look" evolves into something more personal and sophisticated, but we'll have to wait and see. I can only hope to still be around to see it.

Tom Dolan is creative director at Polychrome, a design studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He's a former board member of AIGA/LA and one of the designers of the AIGA/LA website.