In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.

We’re very proud to feature Ivan Fedorowich, (crowdSPRING username: intrepidguppy) today. Ivan lives and works in Canada.

1. Please tell us about yourself.

My name is Ivan (aka intrepidguppy).  I’m a 32 year old male, married 6 years to my wife, Beka.  We have two busy boys, Xander (5) and Luka (1). I’m an ex-army brat, born in Nova Scotia, Canada. One year later, we moved to Germany for 6 years…then to a base north of Toronto, Canada for about 11 years. I’ve lived in Ottawa, Canada since 1994. Ottawa is home to the longest skating rink in the world and one of the birthplaces of modern competitive hockey.  Ottawa also happens to be in the top 10 “Coldest Capital Cities” in the world.  When I moved here I was hot out of high school with no plans to go to college or university.  I’ve always loved art and design but never thought about it seriously as a career.  I did a lot of volunteer work in my area with the local Deaf community and so took work as a night cleaner for local businesses. It paid well and gave me a flexible schedule.

2. How did you start out doing graphic design?

Seriously…would you want to be a cleaner for the rest of your life? My personal epiphany came around February, 2005.  I thought…I’m going crazy. I need a hobby. I love art…why not see if I can make some money doing it too?  I started doing some Google searches for logo contest-type sites. Looking at the posts here and there led me to key words like…vector (huh?) and raster (double huh?).  I found out that these were just fancy words in the design world for infinitely resizable lines and not infinitely resizable pixels. Next step…what product should I use? Does it match my current budget? ie cheap? Is it used by a lot of designers? So I went out and bought Corel Draw 12. For some stupid reason I didn’t start doing vector work until about three months after I bought the product  – couldn’t get over the fear of the unknown – go figure.

So…in case you still haven’t figured it out, I have zero design school education – which I regret to some degree. My learning curve was quite sharp…sink or swim.  I am still learning as projects or boredom push my limits.

3. You designed crowdSPRING’s logo back in 2006. Please talk a bit about that project and the challenges you faced designing for a brand new startup.

It was kind of funny remembering that project.  I remember receiving a lot of feedback. As I found out later, not only was the crowdSPRING team searching for a brand, they were also analyzing the design process.  At the time, it didn’t seem much different to me than the work I was doing for other potential clients. The crowdSPRING team already had a background in branding – they just wanted a cool logo design.

I think what was most satisfying was that my original design survived the second round after some in the community thought the springy icon might not be the best brand for the job.

4. Who/what are some of the biggest influences on your design work?

I can’t say I have any specific influences on my work – although I have to say my mom in a way inspired my style (cheesy I know).  She loves to doodle and some of her stuff is really cool.  Her designs are generally minimalistic but at times can be quite complex.  Doodles tend to evolve as you go and can be a great source for creativity.  Like my mom, I prefer doing minimalist designs. Seeing artwork (especially logos) that can have equal effect in color and black and white is really appealing to me. It’s something I noticed right away when looking through logo books and popular designers’ portfolios.

When I first started designing it was quite obvious that I didn’t know much, even though at times I thought I did.  I made it a priority to analyze why certain designers were successful and worked at absorbing aspects of style while remaining true to the designer I wanted to be.  So I guess I’d have to say my fellow designers (successful ones) here and on other communities have had some degree of influence on my work and contributed to my style – if I have one at all.

(more…)