Hi! No problem, thank you for taking the time to interview me. My name is Grant Friedman. I am a graphic designer, author, and blogger from Louisville, KY, USA. I am the editor of Colorburned.com, a graphic design blog that specializes in designing free design resources such as Photoshop/Illustrator brushes, vector pattern swatches, textures, and vectors but we also write tutorials and design-related articles as well. In addition, lately we have also been doing quite a few giveaways on the site. We've given away everything from free vectors to high quality plug-ins for Photoshop and Illustrator.

My favorite foods are chicken fingers, pizza, and cheeseburgers; in that order, but I also love Peanut butter M&Ms and ice cream.

Thanks a lot! I really appreciate that. I've been designing for about 10 years. When I was in college I volunteered to distribute a newsletter via email for an organization that I was involved with. At the time, email was still sort of new to everyone so no one really knew how to do it. As I began sending out more and more emails I started to learn how to make them look better. First I learned a bit of html, and then I started to pick up graphic design. I've been hooked ever since.

A website's CSS can often make or break a site's design. In my time as a designer I've seen quite a few beautiful PSD files been completely ruined by people who have no idea how to code. That's why I always recommend outsourcing the markup to some one you know and trust to ensure that the design you create looks the same in a browser as it does in Photoshop.

I'm a big fan of anything that improves the user experience. If you can use jQuery or MooTools to improve your site's functionality then go for it, but don't use them simply for the fact that they're "fancy."

I started Colorburned in May of 2008 after I left my job working for the Governor of Kentucky. I originally launched my site as GrantFriedman.com and had planned to design the site in Flash. As fate would have it, the Flash idea fell through and I ended up throwing together a Moveable Type blog on my own. It didn't take long for me to realize how crumby of a job I did coding the site by myself so I decided to contact Lisa Sabin-Wilson of E.Webscapes.com to help with the implementation. It was about the same time that I came up with the Colorburned idea. While I liked the idea of having GrantFriedman.com I just felt that Colorburned was much more marketable. I actually spent quite a while trying to think up the name. I actually just went through all the menus in Photoshop looking for cool names. As it happened Colorburned.com was available so I jumped at it.

My main reason for starting Colorburned however was to promote my work. After leaving my job in government I decided to pursue a career in design. This was about a year and a half ago. Ironically, I still haven't found a full-time job but my site is doing really well which is great.

I've been freelancing and blogging full-time since I left my position with the State. I will admit it's been tough, especially after leaving a job that wasn't your ordinary design position. As tough as it's been however, I am proud of what I have been able to accomplish in the last year. I started completely from scratch and within a year I've written a design book, grown my site into a popular destination for designers, and have managed to grow as a designer and artist in the process. Will I be able to earn a living from blogging and freelancing? I think that remains to be seen but as Chris Spooner said when he started freelancing full-time; and I'm paraphrasing, "at least I have my blog as a safety net".

My book is called Retro Style Graphics. It is a resource style guide for retro design. It has sections on vector graphics, fonts, colors, patterns, textures, and brushes; all of which are included on a CD attached to the book. The book is published by Angela Patchell Books, a publishing company out of the UK. The book is my first so I'm very excited to see it. I completed work on it several weeks ago and it is scheduled to be in stores some time this Fall. It is available for preorder on Amazon.com.

Meeting with Fabio was really cool! He was a great guy. I'd love to meet some more people from the design community. I will be meeting quite a few guys at the Front End Design Conference in July but I would love to meet Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine or some of the other design bloggers who live in other parts of the world.

My site is kind of unique in that I don't write very many articles. That is in the process of changing but right now a majority of my site's content is dedicated to design resources like Photoshop brushes, Illustrator brushes, patterns, etc. One of my favorite articles however wasn't actually published on my site; it was published on ArtBistro.com about the value of your work and time. In the article I explain that you should never under-value your worth and you should always charge a price a that is representative of the time you spent on the project.

I wouldn't say that. While I add a lot of free design resources to the site, I also write tutorials, articles, interviews and even giveaways on my site as well. So I don't think it would be accurate to say that my site is not a blog.

One of the most valuable lessons that I learned about blogging in the last couple of years is the importance of social networking. There are a lot of design sites out there so it's important to develop a personal connection with your audience, otherwise they will just go elsewhere for their design news.

I certainly have goals for my site but I try not to set timelines. If I keep producing quality content, the traffic will eventually come.

I would love to learn 3d graphics some day.

To be honest, I have to say that of all the projects that I've worked on the most gratifying is the work I've done on Colorburned. I get so much gratification from creating things. Whether it's a website, organization, or graphic; for whatever reason it just makes me feel good. I like Colorburned because it gives me the opportunity to help designers in ways that weren't available to me when I started out.

I really do enjoy making high quality freebies. I get a lot of satisfaction from it for whatever reason. One of my favorite Photoshop techniques is changing the blending mode in the Layers palette. It's not necessarily the most advanced feature of Photoshop but it really is one of the most useful. You can really add a lot to a design just by overlaying a texture on your design or by setting some shapes to Hard Light.

I actually haven't upgraded to CS4 yet. I'm running CS3 on my desktop and CS2 on my laptop. I plan to switch from PC to Mac within the next few months so I'm waiting to do that before I upgrade. One feature I've been hoping for is a way to copy and paste an entire Illustration from Illustrator to Photoshop while maintaining the layers. Right now if you copy an entire Illustration from Illustrator it will paste the Illustration as one big vector smart object. I would like to have a bunch of independent vector smart objects so I can add effects, change blending modes, etc.

At this point I really couldn't do without Twitter. I've only been using Twitter for about a year but ever since it's become a critical tool for networking, inspiration, and discovering new design techniques.

It was my pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity. My favorite sites are Smashing Magazine, VECTORTUTS, and GoMediaZine but I'm also a big fan of Abduzeedo.

I'm fairly easy to track down. Just visit my website Colorburned.com or follow me on Twitter.