Web Directions @media 2010
I’ll be speaking at Web Directions @media in London this year on the subject of “Core CSS3″, this will be a practical session getting to grips with what is available in CSS3 and how we can get started using some of this shiny goodness right now. I’m excited to be speaking at @media, the rest of the line-up looks great and I think it will be a useful and fun couple of days. If you missed out on Early Bird pricing you can use the promo code ANDREW at checkout to get a ticket at the price of £499 – which is a saving of £50 off the current price.
I’m also going to be heading off to Dundee in a couple of weeks time to present to the students on the Web Design and Development course at The University of Abertay. I’m really looking forward to speaking to these students and I’ll be taking lots of your advice with me.
Your advice for students who want to work on the web
Next month I’ll be giving a presentation to some university students who are part way through a degree in web design and development. These students are hoping to join the industry in various different roles at the end of their course.
I would love to include some tips from other people working in the industry. It would be great to hear the thoughts of employers, of experienced web professionals and of recent graduates. Please leave a comment and let me know what piece of advice you would give to someone who will be graduating in a years time, what would you suggest they are thinking about now to help them be as employable as possible upon graduation?
Blog redesign
I have been posting more frequently lately, and felt that the longer entries were not very readable. This led me to spend some time last weekend attempting a bit of a redesign of this site. I’m not a designer, but I’m hoping this is an improvement over the previous templates. As this is my own site I made the decision to use some CSS3 for elements of the design leaving non-supporting browsers to just render these elements without the detail of rounded corners and opacity and so on. I wouldn’t take this approach in many places, but for this site I’m happy with that decision and the site is perfectly usable without rounded corners!
I also took the chance to have a play with Typekit to render a font for the heading. I haven’t used Typekit before and clients have been asking me about it so I thought this was a chance to see how well it works and how tricky it is to implement. I was really impressed with the ease in which I could implement Typekit, it really is as simple as choosing a font, adding a couple of lines of JavaScript and then assigning which bits of text will be rendered. After battling with sIFR on a number of projects this was a breeze.
To try and make my text more readable I read through and implemented some tips from The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, the background image is from istockphoto member smilewithjul and I found COLOURlovers helpful in coming up with a neutral colour scheme. I thought I might use some different background images in future so I wanted to have a colour scheme that would work with different backgrounds. I used the Starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks as a starting point to save me having to clean up Wordpress templates myself.
This was a very quick attempt to tidy up the site over the weekend, and if I get chance I’d like to add some things to it. Your comments are very welcome, especially with regard to the readability of the blog posts as that was something I wanted to sort out.
Should web designers be able to build their own designs?
Yesterday on Twitter Elliott Jay Stocks opened up a huge debate by stating:
Elliott has also gone on to clarify his thoughts in a blog post and I thought I’d add my thoughts to the debate given that I spend most of my time working with designers.
At edgeofmyseat.com we specialise in developing web applications using PHP, and the majority of our clients are web designers and agencies who subcontract to us the development side of their projects. For many projects we develop everything – the mark-up, CSS, JavaScript and back-end code. Given that our job is to build things for designers you might think that we would be very pleased to work with web designers who can’t write mark-up and CSS, more work for us! However in my experience, asking someone to design for the web who has no idea how the web works, will result in frustration for both the designer and the developer, and a substandard end result.
Looking back over the years I have been working with designers I can say that all of my favourite projects, those I as most pleased with, have been those where the designer really understood the medium they were designing for. As a developer it is so refreshing when a designer can fire up Firebug and play around a little themselves to fine tune the end result, has already considered what we will do with IE6 when a particular design will rely heavily on transparent PNGs, or has considered the experience for users without JavaScript on a page that has a slider for some content.
To be clear, I wouldn’t expect someone who is primarily a web designer, to be able to build a cross-browser CSS layout at the speed that I can, develop a complex JavaScript UI, be able to design a database or develop in PHP. In a small agency it may not be commercially sensible to tie up your lead designer doing front-end development, even if they are capable. However being able to put together a layout – even if it does only work well in Firefox – means that the designer has some understanding of the constraints we work under. They will also have ideas as to how something should be implemented in the medium of the web rather than just expecting a replica of their Photoshop comp no matter what text size or screen resolution the user has.
When you move into the field of interaction design a lack of knowledge on the part of the designer becomes even more problematic. How are you supposed to design user experience when you don’t know what tools you have to work with? I understand Mark Boulton’s argument and don’t believe that simply knowing how to write HTML makes a good web designer, and there are many other factors to take into consideration. However, time and time again I have seen designers from a print background struggle with designing for the web. Once they have taken the time to actually play around with HTML and CSS and gain a basic understanding, they start to become far more creative with the medium instead of constantly fighting against it.
In a large agency, or team developing a single product, where a designer who doesn’t know anything about the web can sit next to a developer the whole time and ask questions then I imagine it would be more possible to design for the web, without understanding the web. However it seems to me a very inefficient way of working, and isn’t a situation that many people are in.
Basic mark-up and CSS, even a bit of JavaScript using a library like jQuery, are not difficult to learn. The tricky things – ensuring a complex UI using a lot of JavaScript remains accessible, making sure things don’t blow up in IE6, actually being able to do this stuff really quickly, is what you need developers for.
On the flip side, I would also say that developers – especially front-end developers – should have a basic grasp of design principles. Having an understanding of why certain things are important to the designers you work with will ease the working relationship and ensure that you can work together to create an end result that is visually beautiful as well as being technically solid. I believe that the web needs specialists, but those specialists need to have an awareness of what the other specialists do, be sympathetic towards them and willing to work together to find good solutions to the challenges of working in this medium.
Women and the backchannel responses
I wouldn’t normally write a blog post in response to my own post, however I’ve had such a lot of comments that I really wanted to properly respond.
Firstly, I did not expect this to touch the nerve it so obviously has with so many people. I wanted to offer my support to the women who had been treated like this, ensure this behaviour does not go uncommented on and also start the discussion in terms of how we can stop this kind of thing happening. I didn’t want it to take the shine off what was an excellent day and achievement for Boagworld, and I apologise if that has happened.
I’m going to pick up on a number of the themes that came through in the comments yesterday. I’ve linked directly to some comments just to save people new to the discussion reading through all of them but generally the same points were made by a number of people, either here, on other blogs or on Twitter.
“We should just ignore this behaviour”
Several commenters suggested that we should just ignore these people and they would go away. I would agree that in many cases ignoring trolls and nasty comments is the way to go. During the show in fact the comments were ignored for the most part, we certainly were not giving air time to these people by detracting from the conversations to respond to it. A backchannel for a conference or chat on a live stream however is different to a normal message board setting. These comments were very visible to people participating and watching, not bringing this subject up in some way would really have meant accepting that this behaviour was ok and that boys being boys is perfectly appropriate in a professional setting.
I do not need to be told to “avoid schoolboy chatrooms“. I was dealing with trolls on usenet when many of the people commenting on Friday were still in primary school, so I have a thick enough skin to not be personally hurt by this stuff. What I am concerned about is the message it gives to other women, particularly young women, who want to work in the industry.
“These aren’t people from our community”
The Boagworld community is a really friendly place. I’m not a participant but have read many threads there and the attitude there always seems incredibly friendly, supportive and helpful towards newcomers – even if they are asking the same questions everyone else has asked a million times before. However the 200th podcast attracted an audience from the wider web community. Some of the nasty comments may well have been from kids who had just discovered a lively stream on Ustream, however some of those commenters quite obviously knew of the people they were making comments about, outside of the podcast, which makes me believe that at least some of those posting are people who work in some way in this industry. In addition, the Boagworld chat was not a unique event. The same attitude has been taken towards women on conference backchannels, by people attending a conference, presumably not 15 year old boys.
“Preventing anonymity is not the answer”
Some commenters were concerned that preventing people from being anonymous just creates another problem. In this setting I disagree. Being able to be anonymous is one of the web’s strengths. There are many reasons and places where hiding behind a nickname is appropriate and allows people to ask questions and get support on sensitive subjects, or speak up when they would be in danger if their identity was known. However, if you are contributing in a professional setting at a web design conference or in a chat, then you should be very happy to be identified and stand behind your words. My suggestion of Facebook Connect was really just a throwaway suggestion – I’m sure we can create better solutions – or offer a range of ways to confirm someone’s identity. I’d love to see more discussion on this.
“Women need to take responsibility as well and not act flirty or suggestively”
I have some difficulties with this point of view, and I don’t think that Jen in her comment meant any of the women on the show. If a woman is overtly flirting and then complaining about attention, well then she probably needs to stop doing the former before she can complain about the latter. However that was not the situation on Friday. The fact that some women, and men, behave in a provocative way does not give anyone a free pass to treat all women like that. If we start down this line then, once again, we are telling people they have to conform to be accepted, that as long as they look dowdy and unattractive we will believe they have a brain. Well, hooray for computer engineer Barbie, is all I can say to that!
“This should have been addressed during the show”
Kimberly makes a very valid point that perhaps it would have been better for this to have been addressed during the show. It’s difficult, obviously the show had a schedule to get all of the participants in and able to do their segment. There were people coming on via Skype from different timezones who had set apart part of their day to come on the show. A discussion about these issues could well have totally derailed the schedule and also taken the whole show to somewhere far less fun and positive.
That said, I think that anyone planning on having any kind of backchannel does need to consider, in the light of this and other situations, how they will deal with issues like this if they arise. Both from a technical point of view – being able to identify people, ban effectively and so on, and from the point of view of how it is dealt with by presenters and those running the channel in terms of what they say in reaction.
“This is just jealousy”
I have seen suggestions that the comments – particularly those expressing the opinion that someone is only involved because they are attractive – come from jealousy; from the attitude of, “why is SHE there and not me? It must be because she is pretty.”
Sarah has addressed this issue head on in her own post, which is worth a read. The issue of jealousy and bitterness directed towards people who are well known in this industry is a whole other subject, and one I might address here another time. What I would say though, is that in general, the “names” in web design and development are some of the nicest and most open people you could ever hope to meet. Most people you hear of regularly, you hear of because of the huge amount of time and energy they put into their work and in giving away freely their talents and knowledge. Most of us only get to write books and speak at conferences because we spent years giving stuff away for free on our blogs, and it got us noticed.
If you are doing cool stuff tell people about it, write about it, find small events that ask for speakers and talk about it. Find high profile people who are involved in that area on Twitter and drop them an @reply. If what you are doing is good, you’ll be amazed how quickly word spreads. Get yourself involved in discussion forums, help people out, show them you are an expert, and you can get the sort of attention you want. That is the beauty of this community, give something and you will get stuff back. Sit in a corner and whine and you’ll be ignored.
What happened on Friday was not a one off, it was simply a very overt example of this kind of behaviour. Writing it off as a non-issue, and blaming a few bored kids makes light of the fact that this type of thing happens all the time. No-one is suggesting you cannot criticise a person’s work – far from it. However, you criticise their work, you present an argument against their viewpoint, you do not make personal remarks that have absolutely nothing to do with whether they do good work or have a valid point of view.
