Cliff Spence

Cliff Spence is the designer of the themes Dropify and Minimify. Below you can read Cliff’s bio as well as a short interview.

Cliff Spence’s Bio

I’m Cliff Spence, I’m from Kitty Hawk, NC, and I am a product of 1980. Though my relatively short background is in film and television, I’ve been goofing around with web design and web video in one way or another since 1998. It wasn’t until 2003, however, that I became serious about web design and decided to make it my full-time job, primarily working in ecommerce.

It started when a friend and I decided to create an online music store experiment called Steal My Music where the CDs were free plus shipping and handling. The bottom line was music promotion; independent artists would send us their CDs and we’d distribute them, making a few pennies on the handling fee and some advertising on the site. I knew nothing about ecommerce at the time, and didn’t even know much about HTML, but I’ve always found it easiest to learn by doing, so I buckled down for a couple months and built it through trial and error. It turned out to be a pretty effective way for people to get their hands on tangible new music they wouldn’t otherwise ever hear, and is currently transitioning to music downloads-only, due to later this year.

As Steal My Music grew, people began to take notice of its unique design and, to my surprise, my inbox began filling up with requests to be put in touch with my design company. So, naturally, I started my own in 2004 called Promotion Sickness, which was originally created as a viral video marketing company (hence the name), but quickly focused on custom ecommerce design as well. I’m very conscious of the separation of content and design, web standards, using XHTML and CSS. I’m currently expanding my reach, continuing to learn ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails.

I’ve grown to love building themes for ecommerce because the possibilities are so endless, and have been lucky in the past couple years to work with clients such as Gwen Stefani’s clothing line, L.A.M.B., and Mysic Tan, which is currently being featured in MTV’s Real World. I’ve become really focused on simplicity and how it can translate to usability on the web, especially in ecommerce. Make it easy for customers to find their way around and they’re more likely to buy what you’re selling.

Short Interview with Cliff Spence

Question: What is the concept behind your design?

Answer: I usually design a store around the products, and in this case the dummy products in Shopify’s Vision theme-design tool were snowboards. I discovered the competition way too close to its deadline for comfort, so I only had about a day to build a theme. The design just sort of evolved from my perception of snowboarding culture, and since I didn’t have a lot of time, I just borrowed the color scheme from my own company site.

Question: Where can people get in contact with you in order to hire you to design Shopify Themes?

Answer: Just use the contact section of www.promotionsickness.com.

Question: What kinds of freelance work do you do?

Answer: I guess now that I do web design full time it is my freelance work, though I have many side projects, like StealMyMusic.com, FreeDistribute.org, and action sports videos when I have the time.

Question: What’s your day-job?

Answer: My night-and-day-job is currently web design.