Leja Kress makes up one-third of Sweden Unlimited, a New York-based design company, whose ranks are filled out by Leja’s twin sister Alex Kress, and Richard Agerbeek. Aside from a barrage of clients including V Magazine, Fredflare.com, and Jonathan Adler, the trio are also involved in their musical side-project, Sweden Music. Here, we talk shop with Leja about everything from site planning and structure, to video games and abandoned Jersey City bakeries!

Geoff: Hello Leja, thanks so much for talking with us.

Leja: Sure! The three of us (Richard, Alex, and I) use Dreamweaver every day so we're excited to check out Ten Ton Dreamweaver.

Geoff: So let’ talk about site planning. Is there a formulated approach you take to site planning, or is
every site different?

Leja: Every site is a little different . We do anything from small portfolio-type Flash sites, to huge customized e-commerce sites that sell hundreds of products. We try to get as much information from our clients as possible about what they want, and we find the most helpful thing is for them to list all their favorite websites out there, and what they like about them. Then we do a basic outline of the sections that are needed, and ask our clients to send as much material (copy, images) as they can.

Since there are only 3 of us, we've found it helps to have sort of defined roles in each job. Typically Richard will do the initial design layouts, and Alex and I will build the e-commerce functions and shopping sections.

Leja: We usually start off with a meeting with the client just to get a feeling of what they are all about and what they are looking for. We also do have a lot of clients in other cities that we have never even met, so in that case, email or the telephone is just as good. The first step is establishing the design and the look of the site. We almost always start with static Photoshop designs and send the client those. Then once the final design is approved, we begin to build the site with Dreamweaver or Flash, depending on the type of site it is going to be.

Geoff: In terms of site structure, how much planning do you do on paper? Would you figure out all the pages in a site, and how they link to each other first on paper, or is that something you do as you’re building the site?

Leja: Yes, we do create flow charts on paper— we find it far superior to the cocktail napkin. We like to do it in Adobe Illustrator rather that a flow chart app like Visio so we can make it look just the way we want, and it 'll look more impressive to the client. For smaller sites we may skip doing it but for bigger jobs, we've found that having a flow chart really helps, but it's not something we do all the time. We do usually like to know ahead of time what all the sections or categories are going to be, because that makes it easier to give a time/cost estimate and makes it easier to plan out a navigation scheme. But we are constantly changing things around for clients, everyone is entitled to change their minds!

Geoff: Visio makes my head hurt. So do you have any Golden Rules with site design that you could share with us, or is that classified Sweden Unlimited information? Are there a few things we should be watching out for or keeping in mind as we’re in the early stages of web design?

Leja: Yes we have our Sweden Unlimited Golden Rules hanging on a plaque above our desks! We don't really like to conform to the typical rules that everyone hears about web design, like get the users attention in the first few seconds or stuff like that. We just do what will best convey the clients unique style and if having extra superfluous elements is what it takes then that’s what we do. The biggest compliment we get from many people who have seen our work, is that all our sites have a certain look that is a total combination of our aesthetic and of each of our client's own unique personality. And that is our goal: to have work that we are proud of, but most importantly, that our clients have websites that they love.

Geoff: That’s great. So any secrets for getting around all the different browsers, monitor resolutions, and operating systems?

Leja: No, but if anyone has a good method can you please let us know!! It is difficult because we all work on Macs with 22-inch displays, and of course the rest of the population uses a PC with a smaller display and their resolution set really low. So while we're creating a site, we use Safari, IE and Netscape on our Macs to check what's happening. We have a little PC laptop just for checking our sites, which has helped us to design smaller.

Geoff: Yes, I have my rusty old PI 133 here for just the same purpose! So what’s up with Sweden Music? Are you guys currently recording?

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