Many people know linkdup but they don’t know you are same people, I guess. linkdup is known about a best resource to find good design and new updated sites. It might be running non-profit. How do you start it and what is your goal?

linkdup was started by Rob in 1999 as a regular email of all the good sites that he found while surfing the web. He mailed this list to friends and colleagues. The central list quickly became too unwieldy and large to be useful. Rob then starting playing with some off-the-shelf cgi systems so these links could be stored in a database and linkdup was born. Now heavily customised from the original system it was based on, the site is continually evolving and we are hoping to secure some sponsorship in the near future to take it further still. Ultimately the idea behind the site is that it’s supposed to be a reference of the best work out there, commercial and non-commercial. The links stay in their for good, so when the links have been gone from other sites’ link blogs and news feeds, you will still be able to find them at linkdup.

You have definitely enjoyed running linkdup but you don’t always enjoy it, I guess. There are some impolite mails or request mail, complain mails, etc. While running linkdup, are there some funny happenings? How do you feel?

We have had people accuse us of picking the same few sites made by the same few people, which is a pointless thing to complain about as it’s so easy to answer. If we’re picking the sites of some people and regularly making them linkdup favourites maybe it’s because they’re just damn good designers, and they’re work out-shines 90% of everything else we see. We’re amazed people don’t work that out for themselves. We only hope it makes future designers be more driven towards being tomorrows great designers. There’s nothing better than thinking you can do a better job than someone else to make your own work shine. But we’re not into favourtism either, we go by the work, not who it’s by, which has caused a few people to say “Don’t you know who I am?”. Are answer is simply “we don’t really care who you are”…

On the other hand though, because of the problems of favouritism (and there is a lot of elitist back-slapping without a doubt) we are very careful to be as fair as we can. We know running linkdup is subjective and so we try to put as broad a range of sites as possible into it. We just look for sites with good ideas, interesting content and attention to detail, and certain contexts a level of professionalism is important too.

One thing we do get quite a few complaints about is the number of Flash sites we feature. We don’t do it on purpose, it’s just the way it works out. If all we get sent to look at is Flash sites, that’s all we can list. We’d love to see more HTML only sites but fewer and fewer people seem able or willing to make really good ones. Also people forget that for every site we do list, we’ve looked at 30 others we haven’t let in, and that’s probably just because they looked like the 30 we looked at just before that. There’s a startling lack or originality too much of the time.

Funny stories about linkdup? I guess being sent sites to include in linkdup that have used graphics or code taken directly out of our own work always raises a smile. It happens quite a lot. Oh, and there was the porn site that ripped the linkdup look and layout 🙂

There are hundred tons of reviews on linkdup. What do you think of design trends recently? Are there remarkable stuffs on the web? I mean design style, trends, differences between Europe and US, Asia, the other countries.

There are still remarkable sites being built and a lot of people emulating those sites. It is usually ideas, humour and an understanding of the media in which they work. The best thing to say would be to go and look at the sites we’ve picked as favourites at linkdup. They cover a huge range of different styles and ideas. Some sites we highlighted just because one small part was so special we felt we should draw people’s attention to it, other sites are so well thought out and designed picking them was easy. As for styles within different countries, yes to a certain extent, though with so many people travelling around the world going where the work is, all the previously regional styles are diluted. Besides the whole point about the web is that anything is visible from anywhere so influences cross-over.

You must be love blue color. do you have any reasons to use this color? How do you define the blue color?

The blue thing has been accidental, really. We developed 3 sites back-to-back and they were all blue. It just worked out that way, nothing intentional, but now people think we’re really into blue. That’s why we make the joke on our homepage, “Another blue site by Preloaded…” We had an orange site before that, and we seemed to do a lot of sites in orange at the time… it’s probably all a subconscious thing…