The ability to logically justify our designs is a skill many of us lack, and this is the heart of the challenge that Paul Boag brings you. Get ready to face it, and improve the quality of your work.
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Want to start making something on your own? Michael Aleo shares his own experience to encourage “makers” and “creatives” out there to build their own projects.
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As Web craftsmen, we are living in exciting times today. The frenetic pace of evolution in our industry has created remarkable opportunities for our work.
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We, members of the design community, are on an ongoing quest for knowledge and learning opportunities—anything we can find to enhance our skills and share the precious pearls of wisdom we’ve held close to our hearts. Given that most of us are where we are because of the shared advice we’ve managed to accumulate along the way, tips like these can be powerful tools for facilitating professional growth, which we all strive to achieve. And it helps the community to grow and improve. Thus, they should be not greedily hoarded, but rather openly shared.
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We recently turned to our beloved followers on Twitter—as we like to do from time to time—to help us demonstrate one of the greatest things about the online design community: its willingness and eagerness to pay knowledge forward. We asked our friends in the community to share their favorite design tip with us, and they responded en masse. There were so many fantastic responses that we felt it would have been a wasted opportunity if we didn’t compile them for our readers and discuss them with the community at large.
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Years ago, the online design community was a thriving conversationalist — of sorts — through the comment sections across the community. It was through leaving meaningful comments that the thought-provoking ideas presented and discussed in a post were examined by others whose perspective and experiences may have provided them with a slightly different take. The continued dissection and discussion of the topic expanded the dialog far beyond the initial post, challenging and redirecting ideas and allowing dialog to evolve; it showed a certain level of critical thinking from within the community.
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Walk into any design classroom, at any college in America, and you’ll see a comfortable mix of male and female students. Turn your attention to the front of the classroom, or down the hall to the faculty and staff offices, and that wonderful gender balance starts to skew. Travel outside the campus, and there’s really no balance at all.
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This article is a rebuttal of “Does The Future Of The Internet Have Room For Web Designers?,” published in our “Opinion Column” section a couple of days ago. In that section, we give people in the Web design community a platform to present their opinions on issues of importance to them. Please note that the content in this series is not in any way influenced by the Smashing Magazine team. Please feel free to discuss the author’s opinion in the comments section below and with your friends and colleagues. We look forward to your feedback.
Last Thursday afternoon, I spent about 30 minutes doing a question-and-answer session over Skype with a Web design class in Colorado. I was given some example questions to think about before our session, which were all pretty standard. “Who are some of your clients?” “What do you like about your job?” “Who is your favorite designer?” I felt prepared.
Halfway through the interview, a question surprised me. “So, are there any jobs in Web design?” When a teenager from a town with a population of 300 asks about job security, and the others sit up and pay attention, he’s not asking out of concern for my well being. He’s asking out of concern for his own future.
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Last month the first International Conference on Green Computing took place. The conference agenda included a broad range of topics but, in essence, was eagerly addressing issues surrounding the carbon footprint of computing and how computers can contribute to the well being of our world. So what better time to raise a few questions about green web design. What is our role in contributing to a greener computing world?
We are, after all, steering the Internet towards being a safe storage of every kind of data. Every now and again it is good to step back and look at where we fit into this bigger picture of a green computing world. We as web designers and developers are the lead architects of the Web. We are the ones carrying the main blocks and putting them in place. Layering and cementing the blocks of information together. Brick by brick. The new Rome!
But who is actually making sure the outer walls of our construction run true? Do we have our eyes on the bigger picture? Are our processes as eco-friendly as they could be / should be? And this is not just about optimization for speed of delivery. Are we true to ourselves in considering the energy efficiency of our web constructions, or are we more concerned for aesthetics? Are these relevant questions for a web designer?
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Mistakes are made every day in the design and development world. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it happens. In fact, mistakes are one of the most powerful learning tools at our disposal. Our mistakes impart important lessons that we carry with us as we continue to hone our skill set. Own your mistakes. Never shy away from them; they are the milestones in our development.
So often we view mistakes negatively and let them get us down. We believe they indicate failure and that our otherwise perfect record will be forever marred. No one is perfect; we all make mistakes. They indicate failure only if we fail to learn from them. The online design and development community is a wonderful resource in this respect. Not only are members open about their mistakes, they share their experiences as learning opportunities for others — this is helpful for those of us who have not yet suffered through the same bumps in the road.
With this in mind, we turned again to our Twitter followers and Facebook fans to find out about the worst design or programming mistakes they have ever made. Now we share them with you, our readers, so that we can all learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes.
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