Down the FoxHole: Featured author SaafiDesign
// July 31st, 2009 // Flash
He’s a top ten author, he has attained gold badge level ($50,000 – $100,000 sales), and he even has time to review files for FlashDen as a reviewer! SaafiDesign’s portfolio is a wonderfully designed affair of video players, images viewers, news readers, menus and much, much more. A diverse treat of multimedia magic! Let’s find out more about SaafiDesign!
1. Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from, what do you do for a living?
Hello, I am Sher Ali (aka SaafiDesign/wes across envato marketplaces) and I’m a 25 year old male. I live in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I am a freelance flash developer, CEO of my new startup company “Lucid Studios”, a husband and a father of a 13 month old son.
I use Flash not only for living but also for pursuing my master’s degree in Computer Sciences.
2. How long have you been using Flash and what made you start selling items on FlashDen?
I have been using Flash since version 5. I don’t remember the exact site from where I came to FlashDen but in those days, a Chinese author (chipiano) was one of the top selling authors here at FlashDen and that made me think that FlashDen is the perfect opportunity (to earn passive income) which I wanted for a long time so after couple of months I started selling Flash files at Flashden and I’m still selling here!
3. Do you create files from scratch for FlashDen, or do you re-use work that you’ve created for a client?
Almost all of the files in my portfolio were built solely for FlashDen but few of them were part of larger projects which I tweaked for selling at FlashDen.
4. Where do you get your inspiration from for your FlashDen work?
I used to visit thefwa.com a lot to get inspired but not now due to lack of time. I try to come up with files which I think will be very helpful for wide variety of buyers.
5. What is your work flow like when starting a new file? Could you walk us through the steps you take when getting ready to create a new file?
After opting to be a Flash programmer, I follow the reverse order of the actual process i.e. first I code and then tweak the design with many iterations, get feedback from friends and then tweak again to make the file better and better. For non-FlashDen projects I mostly code the projects because I get the designs from the clients either designed by themselves or by another designer.
6. What do you do to market and brand your files?
For branding I am not very consistent and change my profile page, file icons etc. whenever I get bord of them!
I had good plans to market my files like having a general dedicated website (lucidcomponents.net) for all of my FlashDen files and a specific website for my events calendar file, but I have not managed to get around to doing that yet. I have been using Adobe Exchange however to market my files.
7. What advice can you give to authors that might help them increase their overall sales?
Learn through experience and follow your own best practices. For example, one of my best practices is to implement the feature of passing xml file path through flashvars in all of my new files because majority of the buyers ask for that feature.
8. Besides yourself, who is your favorite FlashDen author?
My favorite authors are dabamol for having a gold badge with a very minimalistic portfolio, triworks for their top quality work and of course RimV for his stunning 3D files.
9. Which file do you think is your best file so far?
Of course dynamic xml events calendar (AS2 version) which brought me up to the gold badge level very quickly. There are many events calendar files on FlashDen but mine is one of the more attractive and interactive concepts and has a lot of features which others don’t.
10. What one thing would you like to change about FlashDen if you could?
To have a separate testing site for testing new features and sending emails to authors whenever they change their account information to avoid any kind of illegal access to someone’s account at the right time.
11. When you aren’t building Flash files, what do you do for fun?
When I am not building Flash files I try to play with my son, get some extra sleep and spend some time with my family and friends.
12. Would you like to give a sneak peek of the latest file you are currently working on to our readers?
