Pancho Pérez www.lonchbox.com
Agencies : De Maruri & grey, Spiga, Probalear, blond beyond.
Actually: Freelance.
Video intro. Click to open video. [Thx. xplai]
- How did you got in this business?
Lonchbox: I’ve studied advertising when at school. It was pure luck, that I started working in Ecuador traditional advertising agencies. - 5 years ago we used to do Flash Intros and tables, but now most everything is Divs and CSS. How do you see the web evolving 5 years from now ?
Lonchbox: The price made everything change. Flash became expensive and hard to update. It gived a lot of design freedom but was not productive, because of that the HTML with CSS style sheets allows us to have a web that is easier to maintain.At the moment everything moves around the search engines and that also rules how to design pages. In 5 years… I wish that Google indexes AJAX, that would bring fast and versatile webs, there is when designers should show all their potential. But iPhone, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, they are leading us to the mobile life, they want to own content, that will be personalized. The future then I think will be more tailored to your needs, with content going straight to your hand, and there the business will rule.
- How do you feel comfortable designing ?
Lonchbox: With music, I select a type of music that goes along with the design I’m about to do, if it’s something fashion I put some hed kandi music for example. It also depends on my mood, like everyone else. - How do you see the market here in mallorca?
Lonchbox: Closed. In a place that is so small there is a lot of people from the web world, I think that the only product that Mallorca can export is at the internet level. For example: globalia, solmelia.com, bingos.com, meneame.net, they were born here. - What is your opinion about prices and the competition?. What’s first the price or the quality ?
Lonchbox: I think we are not a regulated market!
Some people also goes crazy, I know about some that make a website plus all the corporate image for about 2000€. The competence is who creates this and there is a lot of “intrusism” because they still think we are “programmers” and now anyone that knows how internet works can make a webpage, they make it very bad…but they make it.
I see 3 types of clients. One is the professional client that goes to an agency and understands the mission of the web he wants to ask for. There are very few clients with this profile.
In a second place the one that wants a web to say “this is my page”, in some cases they have some idea at a design level, when you explain him the functionalities the web has and he says OK,then you are fucked, because you are going to do a lot of work they will never use, and after a year they will ask for an update if they didn’t forgot they have a website. But this is not all, the third type of client does not have any clue about how internet works and suddenly someone sold him a web (the cousin, the brother-in-law, a friend or a “programmer”), and the result is for sure a complete disaster, so much that it downgrades the overall essential quality in the web itself.
But let’s give an example, here Fasani doesn’t believe I’ve found this offer in Google: Professional design + domain registration + 1 year of hosting for 59€, the result in this offer is not so caotic…so better I stop there. - What about your relation with the developers?
Lonchbox: Mmmm…, we have a different creative process. There is a difference between a graphic designer that makes web and a “web designer”, we have a different nature. But this separation opened another path in design and I don’t know how now the code it’s related to “colorines” (an expression used by many developers) - What do you know about web content management tools ? Did you ever used one ?
Lonchbox: At all the works I’ve did the developers had their own CMS. In a recent past I made the layouts in HTML and then the developers integrated it on the web.
At this new stage I searched for a CMS for my profile (A designer: not too much code please).
The first that I tried was one that was free and I don’t remember it’s name. I couldn’t make it work. Then I understood that I had to tie it with a database and I finally made it work. I couldn’t make anything with it. Second try, I found modxcms.com thanks a friend but I didn’t had the time to test deeper. At a first glance it has a lot of potential. And last but not least I installed succesfully Wordpress , and now I’m testing a theme. I thank Luciano K. for helping me by MSN. - Describe the latest proyect that you had, tell me the one you enjoyed most…
Lonchbox: dameporwifi.com Blondbeyond had a product that was blondwifi and they wanted to offer a free wifi service in Mallorca.
They made a test in two points: Es baluard and blondcafe. Fro m these two test they took statistics that indicated that the users of wifi use it for different tasks, from people using it just to browse the web, other people uses it to chat, and others to download movies. This made the project quite complex at a network level and they didn’t know how to react to the market and the demand of wifi. The location to place the wifi antennas was the most important point to look up so I had the idea to create a campaign to receive feedback about this and dameporwifi was born. I placed my idea like a street “movement” for the people that is in this medium (laptops,blogs,gadgets,etc). We needed to start from the street level but the rest of the team didn’t saw it this way and they though that it should be a company initiative and not a movement. The current design is not mine and the important thing is that the idea goes on. - The web 2.0. What is the Web two ?
Lonchbox: In an Adobe Live event, domestika gived their point of view of the web 2.0 and they focused on the aspect it should had. Estetically they gived the signals of what it’s not: Borders in degrade, reflected logos, rounded corners, glossies and a large etcetera. But they leaved it open like “Find what the web 2 is”.
In my point of view a web 2.0 is Facebook . A meeting place for web content. A place that is the nexus for many other webs. The big difference between Facebook and MySpace is that Facebook does not allow you that high level of personalization, it just mantains the content organized.
www.shopify.com as another example has a business mode where they give you the tools to mount your own shop. They don’t design, they give you a CMS tied with a payment gateway and they host the web having a revenue share deal of each sale you make.
web 2.0 is also the hability of publishing content in different places (RSS), gadgets and in any other type of containers than the original web (widgets) like for example netvibes.com , Google personalized, and mobile RSS readers. And now comes a definition made by my friend Waldo Verdejo :
“We need to use something to organize all that information that is now available” . Filling that hole are the already mentioned netvibes,windows live, myspace, facebook and of course iGoogle. - To close this interview, how do you see your career in the next years ?
Lonchbox: I would like to specialize my career in web design but before that I should learn a bit more of coding. Learning all the process of creating webs has served me to sum to the previous advertising base I already had. I hope also that the fear that many people has to buy in the internet will be lost in the next years and internet exploits all the interactivity and they improve watching closely all the user behaivour like it should. If that is made in a serious way, much further than the creative campaigns (the super flash, the warfare campaigns and the blog influence) internet can be the main advertising medium.