Thanks Marco! I'm Chris Spooner, a freelance designer from the city of Sheffield, UK who writes articles and tutorials for SpoonGraphics, Line25 and the occasional guest post on similar design blogs.

I love to eat cookies.

Soon after launching the initial posts started gaining some exposure, this simply continued after each new article or tutorial. Occasionally a popular topic would gain a decent amount of traffic from being featured on a number of other blogs and websites, which helped boost up the figures for the following months.

I was stoked at being Baron Chris Spooner on the Royal Design Blogs post, a promotion to Duke status is fantastic :-) .

I kind of take the growth of my sites as they go, I like to check the subscriber stats on a daily bases but I don't have any particular plans to achieve a certain amount by a particular date. I recently worked on a refresh of the design, which makes use of some CSS3 features currently only visible in Safari, when Firefox 3.1 comes out it will act as a mini-redesign with the site appearance being that little more enhanced due to the new support!

On a personal level the main reason I love writing tutorials is the opportunity to develop and practice skills in various scenarios. There's always new tips and tricks to be learnt on every project which helps develop my skillset. I would love to take a little more time to learn some of the more advanced Wordpress theming, such as custom options panels etc.

Achieving a huge spike of traffic after crafting a post is very satisfying, it makes the work involved worth while. Otherwise taking all the site stats into consideration its fantastic to see how the site has grown over the years, it's something I never expected so any boost in subscribers or visitors is great to see.

I'm passionate about web design just as much, if not more than general graphic design with it being a big part of my daily working life. I had written a couple of web design related articles on Blog.SpoonGraphics which proved pretty popular, so I fancied expanding it a little further. With Blog.SpoonGraphics being quite popular for its Illustrator tutorials, I didn't want to suddenly oversaturate it with web design posts, so establishing a second blog sounded like a good idea! This also gave me the opportunity to relive the early stages of growing a blog and establishing a group of subscribers.

I originally had the name of WebLounge, but the domain had already been taken. I tried emailing the registered owner who wasn't using the domain, but they refused to sell. I then went through what must have been 50 name ideas, all of which were taken (and often unused), even the most obscure of words! I finally settled on using something with a number, so I decided on Line45, searched for the domain - it was taken! At least with this name idea I had another 98 number options to go for, so I opted for the number 25, giving Line25.

I thought I was on to a winner - I'd eventually found a name that was available! I registered the domain then headed over to Twitter to setup the Line25 account.... @line25 - Unavailable :-( By this time I was tearing out my hair so I settled for the slightly longer http://twitter.com/line25blog. What a nightmare!

The idea behind this name is quite simple, I picked out a word that had relations to the web design topic, in this case it links back to line numbers we work with when coding, and the number being one that flowed easily off the tongue. I then decided to hide a free icon pack on line 25 of the holding page coding as a bit of a novelty for anyone checking out the source.

A technique I love to use when designing web layouts is adding very subtle gradients to page elements. So subtle that it's hardly noticeable, but when compared to the same element when just filled with a flat colour the difference is amazing.

The illusion is gives is the cast of light over a surface, which helps add depth to the design.

The whole Web2.0 "style" of reflections and glossy highlights looks a little old now I think. Although some of the core techniques, such as the gradient mentioned above still work well if used subtly.

Blog.SpoonGraphics has always been attached to my personal site, so it seemed a little weird offering guest posts and interviews, so these are two topics I'm pushing more on Line25. From developing Blog.SpoonGraphics I've also learnt what types of posts do well and gain more exposure through social media, so I can use this knowledge to hopefully craft link worthy articles and tutorials!

I'd love to meet up with all the people I connect with on Twitter and through my blogs, it would be fantastic to have a mass get together! Hopefully sometime in the future I'll catch up with a few people at conferences, or if we do a couple of trips abroad.

That's right, I decided to go freelance last September, and so far I'm loving it. Beforehand I worked at a local design firm as the primary web designer. With my blog developing nicely it began to bring in a decent income as a base which allowed me to go for the switch to fulltime freelancing, it acted as a kind of safety net being a consistent monthly earner.

Now I'm enjoying the mix of blogging and freelancing, both of which go hand in hand. The blog often brings in exciting and creative projects from the design community while freelancing gives me new ideas and ingredients I can bake together into new articles and tutorials.

Being my first year of freelancing I'm looking forward to living the lifestyle and working in the garden in the summer, but no doubt it will only last a day or so with the darn glossy screen on the Macbook!

I love the initial part of creating the design concept the most, this is where I can put my ideas, sketches and creativity into practice to produce a life-like visual of the website. I also enjoy coding up the concept into xhtml and css, the continuation of developing the website from concept to final design and seeing the progress in real-time is very satisfying.

When coding up the site we often come across layout problems with CSS, especially when attempting something out of the ordinary. Although I quite enjoy solving these issues, I would sometimes really love to skip the process of fixing bugs in Internet Explorer, especially when the particular element is created with valid code and displays correctly in every other major browser.

I rely mostly on the Adobe suite, mostly spending my time in Photoshop and Illustrator. I also use Dreamweaver for coding, although I'm looking to try out a few alternatives such as Coda, CSS Edit or Expresso. I've tested out Coda briefly, but I've found I tend to give up on new apps too soon before getting used to the different shortcuts and workflows, I'm determined to give them more time!

Otherwise, Firefox is my browser of choice with the add-ons of Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar. I use TweetDeck for my Twitter antics and base my blogs on the WordPress platform.

I have a bunch of sites I visit on a regular basis in my feed reader and I'm constantly adding new blog discoveries to the list. A few off the top of my head are DesignM.ag, Design Bump and CSS Globe.

If people fancy stopping by at my websites, I'd love to welcome them at Blog.Spoongraphics and Line25.