Customer Spotlight: Angsty G

I stumbled upon Angsty G’s website when I was getting ready to post it on our Daily Dream sometime last year.  I immediately become obsessed with her work!  Even better… she is a DreamHost customer!  I was so happy when she agreed with so much enthusiasm to do a customer spotlight with us!

Where can we find your website?

On the Internet, for sure! Or www.AngstyG.com, more specifically.

Tell me about Angstyg Design..

It’s a love story about me and my trusty laptop, and the sad necessity of income in a layout-eats-layout world. It’s my second try at freelancing. There’s no conventionally ‘professional’ face to it. I hate referring to myself in third person, or doing that thing where people fiddle with personal pronouns to make it seem like there are multiple people under the banner, pecking away at keyboards and answering phones, when really it’s just one dude checking his email a lot. That’s gross. AngstyG is just me — there it is.

Well you are extremely talented! How did you get started in the design business?

I got into graphics doing Buffy fan art when I was a teenager. Fast-forward five years and I’d gotten good enough to land a graphics designer position at a local screen-printing company. The pay was crap, and I traded my time between recreating logos and doing manual labor in the form of folding shirts and degreasing screens. I haven’t had a job since that wasn’t related to graphics or web development in some way.

Oh man… you just tugged at my heart strings. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my favorite tv show growing up!

How would you define your design style?

Totally fluid. I go through phases all the time. Sometimes I crave delicate ornate designs and other times I crave bold, grungy stuff. It really just depends on my mood or inspiration. I’m just coming out of a massive art nouveau phase, for instance. I’m also in a complicated relationship with vintage and retro styles. I get bored really easily, so I’m always halfway onto the next thing before the previous thing is finished, but I’m not fickle, okay. I’m creatively promiscuous.

What work do you enjoy doing the most?

Book covers, at the moment. I’ve done websites and other virtual mediums for so long that having something to physically hold is sort of trippy. I’d love to fill up a bookshelf one day. I also have an affinity for horror designs, which is sadly a very uncommon job for me to encounter. I’d also love to illustrate and paint… if I weren’t so terrible at it.

What is your dream project?

Charity design and development work is very fulfilling to me since I’m low-income and can rarely spare money to give away. I’m always excited to get into a non-profit project if time and resources allow it (and sometimes when they don’t). LGBTQ rights, animal rescue, women’s rights, cancer research, and domestic violence are a few causes most close to me. I’d love to do something big for one of those.

Where do you go for inspiration?

I have a whole variety of clients, so I usually look up the competitors and see what’s trendy right now. Sometimes I mimic it and sometimes I go against it. It just depends on how adventurous the client is feeling. For my personal stuff, I can go a little slower, so I just build up and save ideas until I can’t wait a second longer to execute them.

How do you start planning your designs before you start drafting them?

Trial and error. I’m a real fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants’er, so I usually don’t. I just open up Photoshop and start playing around. Sometimes nothing sticks, but eventually everything will slot into place and make sense in my head, and I just go for it. Writing is a hobby of mine, and I’m the same way with that. Outlines never fare well with me.

How long have you been with DreamHost?

A little over 2 years now.

Why did you choose DreamHost?

I used 1and1 for years, but I eventually started getting actual traffic (what a novelty!), and my shared server proved to be temperamental. My site would crash if a dozen people even looked at it the wrong way. I serenaded it once, hoping to gain some favor, but it was no dice. It 500’ed all over the place.

Then, in 2010, I did a charity auction project and the chairwoman was using Dreamhost. I was terrified because the charity was super popular and necessitated constant, unobstructed uptime so folks could bid on time-sensitive items. The auction only ran for seven days and got more traffic in a week than most sites get in a lifetime. It never went down. We raised almost $150,000 for pediatric cancer research that week. A month later, I packed my bags and gave 1and1 the finger.

That all makes me and everyone at DreamHost very happy!

Do you use any tools in the DreamHost Panel you use?

I have a client who uses the announce lists weekly. I also have promo codes for the affiliate program and am usually kicking around phpmyadmin for one reason or another. I also use the domain search exclusively. Back in the day I used search any old place, but then one of my ideas got snatched up by a sniper who parked it and wanted to charge me $4,000. I realized where you search matters, like, pretty hardcore.

So happy to hear you are a part of our affiliate program!

Do you have any suggestions for DreamHost? Anything you would like to see, use, and change?

The only real qualm I’ve ever had is with regards to outgoing SMTP, since Dreamhost is very spam savvy and limits the amount of emails that can be sent from a website. However, I understand and appreciate the purpose of this, so I do my best to work around it when possible.

If you were a super hero, who would you be and why?

I asked my significant other and his reply was, “You’d have to be hot and smart, maybe Jean Grey.” Then I said Rogue was totally cooler and he was like, “But Rogue has ~issues~,” and I was all, duh she’s a very complex multifaceted character, though to be fair she’s probably a lot more fulfilling to read than to be.

And then he and my BFF reminded me that Buffy totally qualifies as a superhero, so yeah. That! Slayers do it better.

I would have chosen the exact same superheros. Rogue is my favorite Xmen and Buffy is so badass!

Where else can we find Angstyg online?

I’m on twitter @AngstyG, but I curse like a sailor and talk about terrible porn quite often. Just.. you know, a disclaimer.