Erik Akers

Note: This post is more tar­geted at fresh or resent design school and col­lege graduates.

When I grad­u­ated from col­lege I wasn’t required to take one web design class to get my degree in graphic design. Look­ing back that just seems crazy. But seri­ously not one web class was required, it was all print work based. Now I learn enough about design prac­tices and the­ory to cre­ate a design for the web but noth­ing on how to go about put that design on the web.

It’s not that there wasn’t a web course offered, again I just was not required to take it. But after I talked to a few of my friends that did take that web course, I’m glad I didn’t because it would have been a waste of time. How­ever that got me think­ing, are schools that teach web design really teach­ing what cur­rent stu­dent design­ers need to know?

Print Design Slow Death Spiral

Here is a major fact, Print design is slowly dying. Does that mean it will totally go away and dis­ap­pear? No print design will always be around in some form as there will always be a need for busi­ness cards, sales sheets, fliers, bill­boards, etc.

But print adver­tise­ments are the endan­gered species here and not because they don’t work, but because mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers are des­per­ately try­ing to catch up to a increas­ingly inter­ac­tive world with many of them just not mak­ing it.

In the near future web design is going to go from a small part of design to the biggest com­po­nent of all design as every­one will want to increase their online pres­ence as the absence of print media increases.

What are stu­dents really learning?

Back to what stu­dents are learn­ing. Are teacher and pro­fes­sors keep­ing up on the newest tech­nolo­gies like CSS, JQuery and XML? Or are they just con­tin­u­ing to teach what they learned when design was first pick­ing up steam?

I found that most are still teach­ing the use of tables and sim­ply design­ing some­thing in Pho­to­shop, slic­ing it up and using Photoshop’s save for web fea­ture to cre­ate a web site. Then teach­ing stu­dents to do very basic HTML edits to that exported file to make links work. No where in the course work they cover what CSS is or what it can be used for. All this really means is that when those stu­dents are done with school they are be hide the curve when it comes to web design.

What web design is not.

Web design is not sim­ply mak­ing some­thing look pretty on that web. As a young designer you can’t call your­self a web design just because you can cre­ate an image in Pho­to­shop. Now I know there are a num­ber of com­pa­nies that will take a Pho­to­shop file and do all of the cod­ing (HTML and CSS) for design­ers for a fee. But is some­one really a web design if they have no under­stand­ing of what goes into cre­at­ing that HTML file? I say no.

Just in the same that what just because some­one owns Pho­to­shop or any Adobe prod­ucts for that mat­ter doesn’t make them a designer, have some­one else code one a design doesn’t truly make one a “web designer”. Just because some­thing you designed is on the web doesn’t make a web designer.

Web Design Today

Like all tech­nolo­gies web design is change almost every day. New cod­ing stan­dards are always being devel­oped a good web design­ers do their best to stay on the cut­ting edge to push their designs to the next level. Which mean if stu­dents are learn­ing out dated tech­niques in school, there is a large amount of catch­ing up just to get some­what up to date. And we are not even talk­ing about any kind of server side script languages.

I think most web design­ers today should have a good under­stand of what can be done on the web. And by what can be done I mean under­stand­ing  server side script­ing lan­guages, java and jquery tricks to make the user­face bet­ter and eas­ier to use, and cre­at­ing web pages that have quick load times and have good SEO. And those are a couple.

If you are a resent stu­dent or cur­rent stu­dent one word of advice if you want to do any­thing with web design. Start learn­ing CSS now, learn how to con­trol posi­tion­ing with CSS, cre­ate menus, and con­trol the over­all look of a site. Fig­ure out how dif­fer­ent browsers make designs look dif­fer­ent and what you have to do to cor­rect them.

Any other design­ers out there have imput on what stu­dents should be learning?