About

My name is Smilyan. I live mainly in Sheffield, UK but travel often to Bulgaria – my homeland. The passion I have for technology has developed since I was a kid. The first time I had a computer I wanted to know how it works, so I disassembled it and then spent the next two days trying to assemble it back together.

Later in highschool while studying business I was part of a student company providing advertising and media services. We went on to become the third best company in Europe at the annual gathering in Belgium in 2005. I was responsible for doing presentations and websites on Macromedia Flash and that’s when I decided I want to dedicate my time to design.

That decision brought me to Sheffield where I studied graphic design at the Sheffield Hallam University while simultaneously working as a freelance web designer. I was the only one on my course (120 people) who could “deal” with websites, and that gave me great opportunities to work on projects with my classmates.

After university I started my own company. One of my clients is a local business called TribePad. Through the work I have done with them, I have completed projects for the BBC, KFC, Tesco, PizzaHut, House of Frazer, Coca-cola to name a few. Through those experience I have learned a lot in terms of managing projects, working with teams of many different people, not just designers or developers, but also all other levels in those companies. At the same time I know the impact my work can make when there are tens of thousands of users visiting a page.

Everything I have learned I am now using to focus on helping small local businesses and individual owners, people who have a great service or product but do not necessarily know the benefits of an online presence or how to harvest them.

This site

I am my business and I like the personal approach, because I love to work with people. This is reflected in how smilyanp.com has grown. You can find what I write about, what I design and code. I am completely open, honest and direct and you can easily see who you would be working with by browsing the pages here.

SEE MY PORTFOLIO

Skills

If you’re wondering what I am particularly skilled in, here it is:

Design:

  • User experience design
  • User interface design specifically for web applications
  • Print design – primarily stationary
  • Identity design
  • Icon design

Code:

  • CSS3, HTML5, SASS, LESS
  • Bootstrap 2/3
  • JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, JSON, React.js, Redux, Gulp
  • WordPress, WooCommerce
  • Blade, Smarty
  • Git, SVN, BitBucket, SourceTree
  • CKEditor, TinyMCE

Other

  • Project Management: JIRA, Trello
  • Video Calls: Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype

Interests

I am currently learning and experimenting with technologies for processing and using Big Data for machine learning, and learning Node.js.