I was at a Barnes & Noble recently and encountered a woman sitting on the floor amidst a pile of books related to web design. Looking rather helpless she asked if I did web design, feeling rather helpful I felt like pointing her in the right direction. I had a sense she had a print design background and it wasn’t so long ago I was in her position. I had to mentally retrace steps to see how I became a web designer. I could have easily told her to read an HTML or CSS book and that could get her started or forbid tell her to learn Dreamweaver; to coin an axiom from Jeffrey Zeldman “teaching someone Excel is not teaching them business neither is learning Dreamweaver learning web design.”
I was basically thrown into web design by default. I was a print designer at a book publisher who had just lost their web designer and I was eventually asked to update their web site. I had to simply change a price and a product description on the site. HTML was very crude and bloated with table-based layouts in those days and buried in the alien markup was the product description and further down the price. I was able to make the changes with a few keystrokes and figured out how to FTP the file and *voilà * I updated the site. Little did I know I was also making a career change.
Traditional print design or graphic design and web design have a lot in common in terms of design principles. However, they also share a common thread in the need for content. In fact I prefer the term communication designer since it’s technically still graphic design. I wouldn’t have made any changes to the text of my company’s site it didn’t have relevant content nor would have picked up web design for the sake of learning it-design needs to be placed in context. Once I was able to make text changes with the help of a rudimentary WYSIWYG I quickly learned that colors, font face, weight, size could all be altered. I then learned how to insert graphics into table cells and after a few months I changed jobs as a web producer for a local paper.
There was also an overwhelming buzz about the web in the 90s that this medium was going to replace print and compete with television for marketing. Perhaps for reasons of self-preservation I knew I had to learn web design and I had to learn it fast. I immersed myself in learning HTML, Flash and Dreamweaver although it was overkill as I was learning all these tools but not having enough content to sustain the appetite for all those technologies. My new job wasn’t much different than my previous job, I was still making text changes and updating content. I’ve become only as capable as the content I was working with. Only when expectations for websites were raised was I able to learn more.
It wasn’t that I was lazy or I couldn’t understand the technology it’s simply that the content didn’t require the usage of an array of technologies. I find quiet amusement from reading job requirements for web-based positions: .NET, XHTML, CSS, AJAX, PHP, XML, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, etc., are skill-sets often asked of one person. Employing such a person is akin to stockpiling food and weapons for a nuclear winter. Employers’ rarely understand their clients’ web habits and are usually guilty of sandbagging capable individuals from acquiring the position for a technologist or an overqualified (overpaid) guru.
What’s generally happening is a failure to understand your content and an inability to conceive of the necessary presentation for it. Emphasis on usability, typography, content hierarchy are hardly ever asked but are principles that should be paramount. Design is not just how something looks but rather how it works. I often cringe when I hear advertising agencies who defer their website designs to “web agencies”, it’s as if they are contributing to their own demise. Ironically it wasn’t that long ago that firms utilized print service bureaus for that same reason. The common fear for agencies is that they aren’t able to support the technical requirements of the web. Although security is a real concern, the question is if the technical needs are relevant to their content needs are never posed.
You will often find Flash designers that aren’t very capable in writing clean markup or a programmer well versed in javascript unable to grasp CSS. It’s not uncommon to find university curriculums for Computer Science that doesn’t require an HTML, CSS or a .NET course, neither are you likely to find the same in any Design curriculums. Changing the criteria of their curriculums just isn’t, for whatever reason, in the universities’ best interests.
So how do you find good web designers?
I would seek individuals with core understandings of design, SEO, web information architecture, and usability, a person with a grasp of web trends and techniques; technical prerequisites however contemporary or ever-changing and should be relevant to the task required, e.g.: employer needs employee to update product images and banner ads for company website, and occasionally writing metadata and product description. This person doesn’t need to know AJAX or .NET but neither should the developer be required to know CSS and Fireworks if the site’s architecture is structured orthogonally. Its more important that you have the agility to be able to change technologies when something more capable arises.
Another facet to my growing skill set that had nothing to do with learning a piece of software is how to best organize content and write for the web. I often rewrite copy since copy intended for print may not always be well represented for the web; search engine optimization for titles and headers play and important role when structuring content. The ability to categorize information for taxonomy purposes is an ability that learning Dreamweaver or XHTML simply won’t teach you.
Once I understood that I was capable of building Standard compliant sites for the web I catered my need for learning technologies in concert with the content provided. I was flexible enough in my core understanding to shift to another technology if necessary. Content dictated the necessary technologies whether the site needed Flash, Flex, AJAX, and should be built in Expression Engine, Joomla or WordPress. Once you discover content is king the better able you are to find the type of designer you need for the job required.
>”When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop….
>But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem-and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.” -Steve Jobs, 1984
By Ron Domingue
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