Balancing Web Design and A Love for Art: Meet Nicole Hanusek

A long-time partner of EM Marketing, Nicole Hanusek has been designing and coding websites for 26 years. Starting as a freelancer, her business grew so much that she founded Smack Happy Design and built out a team of web designers and developers to meet the demand. Lately, she has been reconnecting with her love for art. On display now through July 31st is an innovative virtual art show, accessible solely through the websites of a select group of Smack Happy’s clients and referral partners.

Tell us a little about Smack Happy.

We focus on building websites in WordPress. What sets us apart is that we are a team of artists. We’re good at getting to know our clients, their culture, their target audience, and bringing that all together to create a site that really speaks to their prospects.

How do you market your business?

About 75 to 80 percent has come from word of mouth. Because of that, I leaned into networking about 10 years ago. Now, I mostly do business development – networking events, sales meetings, a lot of one-to-ones, and taking care of our referral partners.

Do you miss doing web design and development?

I’ve been working on making sure that every aspect of the business has redundancy, so that everything can be covered by someone else. Every time I delegate something, I have a hard time going back to doing it myself. I really enjoy thinking about how to make the business better and how to grow. I don’t necessarily miss designing or coding websites – the people I hired, they all do it way better than I do. So it’s a win-win for all of us.

How did your partnership with EM Marketing form?

One of my early clients was working with EM Marketing. They asked us to work together in tandem to build out their marketing and website. I’ve been working with EM Marketing for almost the entire time that I’ve had my own business, 16 years.

What has made it work so well is that we have similar values. We care a lot about the people, doing really good work, and taking care of each other and our clients. There’s a lot of overlap there that made a lot of sense. That’s why we’re still together.

What have been your favorite projects? Why?

One project with EM Marketing was Illuminate Education. That company was fantastic to work with. It felt like we were part of their business because we were always helping them design something or coding a new feature, and we went through two new website builds.

Another great project was for the Stinson Beach Water District, an area north of San Francisco. The website had gotten bloated – over time, things would be added here and there, and it didn’t necessarily flow well anymore. We built the entire website from scratch at WCAG Level AAA compliance, the highest you can get for web accessibility, to serve the older folks in the community. We loved our client, Kent. Anytime we gave him “homework,” he got back to us quickly and was a dream to work with. More Kents, please!

What inspired you to come up with the virtual art show?

A year ago, I decided that I wanted to do more with my artwork. A series of events led me to treat my artwork more like a business. I was working with a coach on my pitch for Smack Happy. He kept noticing that I wasn’t really talking about the design aspect of it. Design is our strongest suit.

During a vacation earlier this year, I was tasked by my coach to figure out how to combine the web design business with my artwork. When I came back, I decided to curate an art show to be posted on our client and referral partner websites – like when you go into a café or the dentist’s office and see art. You’d go to a business online and stumble across a piece of art on the About page. My goal was to try to do something different and fun to get exposure for the businesses and the artists.

Who were the artists featured in the show?

Some are friends and some I met through networking that I knew did art on the side. I had also put out a call to artists and we found others who live in California. We got a really cool mix of different artwork. Before I had all of the artists, we created our own graphics to promote the show. Once all of the artwork was finalized, I created another graphic that was a sliver of the nine artists, and that graphic turned out so cool. That was a fun, surprising thing that came out of it.

What’s your background in art?

Early on, in middle school, we had an art project where we had to take a small picture, draw a grid on it, and blow it up into a larger size. Mine was The Little Mermaid and it turned out really well. I got so much attention that I thought, maybe I want to be an artist.

From then on, I focused on art and drawing and that led me to art school – the Cleveland Institute of Art, where I majored in illustration. In my last two years of college, I had a part-time web design job at a web consulting company. I was making money, so I just kept doing it.

Since I got back into art over the last year, I did a portrait of my mom’s dog. I had this idea in my head for the style, and it was one of the best pieces that I’ve ever done. A question that people often ask is, how long did it take you to do it? I told my mom, six hours maybe. She didn’t like that answer – she said, from now on, your answer is six hours plus 30 years. There’s so much more experience that goes into it.

What are your plans for the future?

What I’m secretly hoping is to have more of a balance between Smack Happy and art. I love Smack Happy, I love what I’ve created, I love my team a lot, and they all also really love Smack Happy. We’ll figure out what to do as AI takes over the world. We’ll shift and pivot as needed, and we’ll keep creating things. I want to be able to spend a decent amount of time on my artwork, too.