We recently caught up with Bron Thomson, founder of Springload.

1) Tell us about Springload. How long have you been around, how did you start, what sort of work do you do?

It’s hard to say when Springload truly started to be honest. I started working on websites waaaay back when the Internet was just a wee young thing in New Zealand, around 1994. Over the years I’ve gathered more and more cool people around me, including my business partner Carl. Springload is the result, with a current team of 20 people dedicated to designing and building websites that have a strong focus on user centred design.

2) If you had to boil down the essence of Spingload’s philosophy or methodology to a few sentences, what would you say?

Love the web! It’s our Springload vision and the philosophy that we work by. We love the web and everything about it – the technology, the design, the interaction. And we want others to love it too. We also love the people that we work with – our team, and our clients, and the extended Springload family.

It is our team that make coming to work each day a joy, and it is our clients that inspire us on each project we work on. So to us, Love the web really sums up pretty much everything about what we do.

3) We noticed there were a number of Springload entries for the ONYAs. What’s been your impression of the ONYAs to date? Are they good for the industry?

Well, it’s a brand new gig, but we’re really very excited about the ONYAs. There aren’t that many awards that recognise and honour websites from a fully rounded perspective; not just the visual design, but also interaction, content, architecture and functionality as well. Web awards should be about the whole package! And we think the ONYA’s are going to be just that.

4) What speakers at Webstock are you personally most looking forward to seeing and why?

Woah, that’s a hard one, am I allowed to say them all? 😉 We’re thrilled to be sponsoring Daniel Burka, and I’m particularly interested in hearing about his Creative Director role at Digg. Others that I’m looking forward to are Scott Thomas and his focus on design and content to capture an audience; Esther Derby to get some management tips; Amy Hoy for some inspiration on avoiding same-same design; and Sebastian Chan for keeping content fresh by analysing users on the fly. Lots to learn!

5) What do you most love about working in the web?

I’ve got one of those strange brains that likes both the logical and the creative as much as each other (I did a maths degree and a music degree). This seems to me to be what the web is all about – the merging of form and function. You can’t have one without the other, and I love the challenge of meshing the two and creating an experience that is so good you almost don’t even know it’s there.