What is your educational background?
I am currently a psychology student at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Can you give us a brief bio?
I am a 23-year-old freelancer living near Boston. I got my feet wet in web design about 10 years ago building sites out of tables using notepad. Now I specialize in blog design, but I still do other web design work in order to pay the bills.

Which software do you like the most?
I have tried quite a few image editing softwares over the years, but now I use Adobe Photoshop for all my image editing needs. I use Textmate for all my coding needs.

Can you describe your normal work day?
I tend to spend the morning reading emails, comments, tweets, feeds, and generally just catching up with what has been going on since I slept. Then I get to work on all the tasks I have set for the day earlier in the week. I also tend to spend a lot of time in between playing with twitter or reading books/articles.

What do you do to relax?
I like to play video games on my Xbox 360, ps3, wii, or ds, which one depends on the games that are out at the time. I also love to read about everything, mainly psychology and business books though. There are books lying everywhere in my room. During the winter, it is all about snowboarding. The occasional pub, club, or bowling is nice too.

Your life’s turning point?
Rediscovering my passion for web design. It has been an on and off hobby of mines over the years, but I got back into it seriously just a little over a year ago.

How did you get into web designing?
My sister bought a book called “Mastering HTML 4.0 ” in order to spruce up her Asian Avenue homepage, but she didn’t really read it so she left it lying around the house. I found it, began reading it, and I got hooked after trying it out and seeing what I could do. It was awesome.

How important is branding?
In general, it is pretty important for everything if you want something to stick to people’s mind, whether that is an idea or service.

What was your least successful project?
I would say my first homepage, which I created with frames was a disaster, haha.

How do you prefer to start off a project?
I like to start off by mind mapping. Great way to think.

Give an example of a time you’ve gotten feedback you didn’t agree with and what you did with it.

If I don’t agree with someone’s feedback, I try to understand why they said it and if I still think they are wrong, I will try to persuade them to my side. But if they are right, I will admit defeat and try to learn from it.

What motivates you?
My main source of motivation is being the best I can be and my competition.

What brings you joy?
A really good design brings me great joy, especially if I made it. I also like coding the designs and adding features to the site, it feels like I am bringing the design to life.

What are you most proud of?
My voracious appetite for knowledge.

What job was your most satisfying and why?
My personal projects tend to bring me the most satisfaction because I am doing it purely out of passion.

What kind of responsibilities would you prefer to avoid?
Too much coding. I like to develop scripts, plugins, and programs in general, but I can’t stand coding too much. I need the design part of things to balance it out.

What is the most important thing to you in a job?
The money. Nah, I am just kidding. The most important thing in a job for me would be how challenging it is. I get bored when it is something I can do easily. I need it to push me 2-3 steps further than where my actual skill is.

What have you learned from your mistakes?
That it is hard to learn from sometimes. I find it takes a lot of conscience and focused effort in order to learn from some mistakes and it just doesn’t happen automatically.

How do you measure your success?
How much I can charge and get away with is an easy way to measure success, but definitely not the best. I suppose the amount of demand out there for my services can be used as an indicator of how successful I am.

If you could change anything about your career what would it be?
Nothing. It is moving in the right direction right now.

Lately I have been looking for the best laptops for designers as I am thinking of upgrading. I found a lot of useful Macbook reviews at my new twitter friends site, laptopical.

More Resources for designers:
interview: 12 personal and professional things about Jacob Cass(JustCreativeDesign)
40 Most Creative and Grunge Blog Designs
Download 50 Beautiful Grunge Fonts

What is your educational background?
I am currently studying Visual Communication (Majoring in graphic design) at Newcastle University, Sydney Australia.

So far I have studied: Advanced English, Design & Technology, Business Studies, Information Technology, Design Elements, Contexts of Design & Technology, The Design Process, Design Issues, Visual Communication Imaging, Media Production, Photomedia, Graphic Design, Studio Photography, Experimental Drawing, Photo Imaging, New Media, Audio and Video Production, Visual Communication Technology Principles 1 & 2, Typography, Design for Advertising, Animation and Multimedia.

Can you give us a brief bio?
This was a bio I had to write in third person earlier this week, so can I cheat and give you that?

Jacob Cass is a 21-year-old freelancer from Sydney, Australia who freelances under his business ‘Just Creative Design’ which doubles as a popular design blog. Jacob’s talent has brought him many awards & his work has been published in books worldwide.

Which software do you like?
Photoshop, Illustrator, Firefox, Twirl, Dreamweaver, InDesign, MSN, iTunes.

Can you describe your normal work day?
No such thing as normal

What do you do to relax?
Go to the pub, beach or design.

Your life’s turning point?
Who knows?

How did you get into web designing?
Before MySpace and Facebook I used to put pictures up on the web for my friends and it went from there.

What motivates you?
Passion for design and making the world look better.

What brings you joy?
Family and friends.

What are you most proud of?
My parents.

What kind of responsibilities would you prefer to avoid?
Tax and the business side of design.

If you could change anything about your career what would it be?
Started earlier!

Awards received:
1st Place – 2008 National Youth Week Best Tattoo Design
2nd Place – 2008 National Youth Week Best Website Design
1st Place – 2007 National Youth Week Best Tattoo Design
Finalist – 2007 National Youth Week Best Poster Design
2nd Place – 2007 – Roads & Traffic Authority Best Drink Coaster Design
2005 – Finished my Higher School Certificate with top 10% in state.
2004 – Design Elements Cert II. – TAFE College

Jacob Cass else where:
DesignFloat
Twitter
StumbleUpon
LinkedIn
MyBlogLog
FaceBook
Technorati
Digg
BlogCatalog
Del.icio.us

I had to say Special Thanks to Jacob Cass Still lot more interviews to come! So stay glued.