Designing with open source

Not really sure what they meant by Open Source designing. I'm assuming they were referring to utilizing Open Source software, platforms, apps, etc.

The odd thing is that they criticized you using WordPress when it is Open Source. Did they throw any terms out to you regarding what they meant by Open Source designing?

I wouldn't be so hard on yourself. It sounds like it was a rough interview. The best thing to do now is to try and understand what they meant, then maybe make it a learning process.

Open source isn't any specific technology -- it's a way of licensing and producing software. Open source software is software that you are free to edit, change and improve upon. Usually it's also free (doesn't cost any money). WordPress for example is an open source software project as are many of the technologies web developers use everyday like Ruby on Rails, PHP, the Apache Web server and MySQL. Linux is an open source operating system. jQuery, the JavaScript library is open source, and so is webkit the rendering engine behind the Chrome, Safari and Opera web browsers. There are also free, open source graphic design applications like GIMP (which is a free Photoshop-like program). In other words, open source isn't any one thing.

One of the things that makes open source so great is that anyone is free to help out with an open source project and improve it by submitting their own code enhancements.

I'm not sure what the interviewer meant by "open source designing" -- whether that meant you should use open source design tools like Gimp, or simply that you understand what open source software is and how you might use something like PHP, MySQL and Apache when building web sites.

My advice for situations like this is that if you feel like the interview is going badly, don't pretend like you know what they're talking about. Reply with your own questions like "I'm sorry, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by open source designing?" Often times if you're being interviewed by a human resources person, it turns out they don't know what they're talking about.

WordPress is a great platform -- many small web shops use it exclusively because it's free and easy to implement and provides great tools for clients so they can update content and control their site. It lets a designer get a site up and running quickly and lets you charge much less than if you tried to build a large static site (hundreds of plain HTML pages) or tried to build your own content management system.

Here's another place in the interview you could have asked a question like: "What don't you like about WordPress? What content management system do you prefer?"

I thank you both for your replies. The person I met with was the owner of design studio. In the beginning he did keep mentioning that he comes up a design and then goes to his developers (who do not live in the area - are out of state in Miami; I am in Atlanta) and asks if the design can be done. I did find it odd, and he did say he does not know much about coding, so I am wondering if he was just using terms he has heard from the developers. I don't know. When he brought up open source, i did think to myself that any CMS platform (Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla) were open source. I think when he asked that it kind of threw me off. Now, I am not saying I am the best designer in the world, but I think I do have some talent in this, otherwise, I would not have been studying web design and development for the past 7 years. He told me that he used to teach design at one of the local colleges, so I asked him point blank, in your opinion, do you think I have any talent in doing web design. His reply, was that I have potential but could not answer that about my coding as he was not fluent in the world of code. I did make the remark when he was showing me some of his work, that they were all similar and just had different color schemes and that they all looked appeared to be similar to Wordpress, which he said they were not.

Thank you all very much, I appreciate your input.