(This is the third part of my “2008 in plain view” series. Read the first and second parts here.)

Along with WooThemes, the second half of my business activities consists of doing some custom design & development work at {radiiate}. To an extent, {radiiate} represents a bigger success to me personally, compared to that of WooThemes, since it is a much more traditional business (with overheads and employees etc.) and thus more difficult to pull off - even though WooThemes is definitely the bigger business by far.

That said, I love the diversity of my daily tasks, as I’m faced with new challenges every day without having the repetitive nature of most day jobs. Both of my businesses stimulate me on different levels and 2008 would love have been as great if I didn’t have both of these fantastic opportunities in my life. Here’s a brief rundown of my journey within {radiiate} in 2008: (more…)

I’ve been looking for a rockstar designer to add to the {radiiate} team for a while now, in which has been a very, very frustrating experience considering that good talent is hard to find. So when I finally went to one of Cape Town’s top design schools’ exhibitions last week, I was super stoked to find 3 possible designers that had truly rocking portfolios.

So I met each of the 3 candidates this week in what the corporates would call a “job interview”. I however just wanted to meet the person behind the portfolio, as there’s other qualities that are much more important to me (than purely design skills). So with that in mind, these are the factors that I now need to consider before hiring any of them:

• How many should I hire? Work-wise I can probably hire two new team members, but that decision would also put a lot of pressure on me personally, as I’d need to sacrifice a lot of my time to their development, whilst also making sure there’s sufficient work to justify two additional employees. On the background of the current economic situation (even though {radiiate} has skipped all the downsides of it until now); perhaps I should be conservative and hire only one new designer?
• Male / Female? What age / experience level is ideal? Etc… All of these play a role… From the start I’ve been very keen to get a lady involved in our creative processes, as we are three guys at this stage and we can do with some femalie intuition every now and again. And age is also an interesting consideration, as you can either go younger and mould them into your kind of designer or go with more experience (thus older) and start reaping the benefits right away. So it’s very much a short vs long term thing on the age…
• Should they be older than I am? I’ve got no idea… My ego would be able to handle it, but how would they react to it?
• The skills? Am I after a web designer or just a designer in general? Are their technical skills more important than their creativity, ideas and thinking?
• Personality. Honestly I’d much rather work with someone less talented if that means that they’re down-to-earth, friendly, hard working and easy to work with. {radiiate} is not about me or anyone else that works here - it’s about us collectively and a bad apple can bring that whole vibe down.

So who to choose?

(more…)