fit web design certificate
greetings, everyone. welcome to "design ishard-- the state of learning to design in code." my name is jeremy osborn. i'm the academic directorof aquent gymnasium. you can find us atthegymnasium.com. what do we do? gymnasium offersfree online courses on topics such as webdesign and front end
development, user experience,and much, much more. this webinar is thelatest in our series of discussions with notablefigures in the industry. today, i'm joined bytwo esteemed gentlemen who fit that bill-- jeffreyzeldman and aaron gustafson. first up, we have jeffreyzeldman-- entrepreneur, author, podcaster, andveteran web designer. jeffrey was the founderof a list apart magazine, the co-founder of a book apart,and the design conference,
an event apart. welcome, jeffrey. hi. here is aaron gustafson. aaron is currently web standardsand accessibility advocate at microsoft. he's also the author of thebook adapted web design, as well as numerous articles which canbe found both on and offline. in the past, aaron ranhis web development
consultancy easy designs, basedin chattanooga, tennessee, and managed the webstandards project. last but not least,aaron just coincidentally happened to be theauthor of a brand new course on aquent gymnasiumcalled "modern web design." and that is a completecoincidence, of course. how are you? not too bad. our goal, gentlemen,is to have a chat
around this topicof design is hard and the state of learningin web education. and there's a lot of wayswe could kick this off. maybe i'll startwith you, jeffrey, because i feel like you've beenin the industry for a while. i've been designingweb sites for 20 years and i'm scared of web design. so i'm really glad you'rehaving this panel because it's very daunting right now.
it seems incrediblydaunting to begin-- well, i don't know what itfeels like to beginners. but i think if you've beendoing this for a while, it's like we don't quiterecognize our own country, if that makes any sense. well let's talk aboutthat a little bit. so you coded, obviously,from the beginning of coding, really, for the web. and you dippedinto other ventures
and now you've returnedback to coding. is that an accurate statement? is that-- i've returned to design. ok. i wouldn't hire-- to me,every designer should also be a front end coder,but i wouldn't hire me as a front end coder. i've written booksabout how to do it,
but i wouldn't hire me today. i think one of thethings that's so daunting is this plethora of tools. and i don't knowthat everyone needs to know and master everytool, but we feel like we do. so i think one ofthe things that maybe a course like aaron's ora discussion like this one could focus onis, how do we have evaluate which of these toolsmight actually benefit me?
and the people who use thewebsite, even more importantly. and how do i go about evaluatingwhich of these frameworks i need to know or which of thesenew web technologies, going the other direction,i need to know? aaron, i'm sure you canappreciate this, in that there is so much happening now thatit's very hard for one person to keep track of everything. the latest stuff in css3, thelatest flexbox developments, the latest browserdevelopments--
grid layout. yeah. where do you draw the line? how do you just--how did you do it? how do you draw the line? i think-- and i've actuallyhad a-- i've been thinking about this for a long time. i've got a draft post that'sprobably been sitting there for two years now that i'vebeen trying to put together
how i'm managing this stuff. but a lot of it comesdown to, like any problem, i view upgrading my skills as aproblem that needs a solution. and any complexproblem like this needs to be broken downinto simpler problems that are easier to solve. so on every project that ido, i pick anywhere from one to three new things to tryout and see how i like. so a couple of yearsago, that may have been,
ok, let me dip my toesinto the world of sas, let me dip my toesinto the world of doing task runners like gruntand gulp and stuff like that. and then slowly,but surely, build up a knowledge base of this stuff. so at this point,i've done a couple of projects that have usedservice worker and that's not even a final spec, really, yet. but i've done a coupleservice workers at this point
and i find thatreally interesting. and i've kind of evolved the waythat i approach task runners. i moved from gruntto gulp and started evolving my process there. and it's all-- i'm a bigfan of-- i took latin when i was growing up andthere's the great ovid quote, dripping hollows out the rock. and that's what i feel. you got to start smalland eventually, it
makes a big impact. but you have totake it piecemeal. you can't justopen the fire hose and just assumethat you're going to be able to handle it all. don't overwhelm yourselfbecause it's just going to make it a turn off. it's not going tomake web design fun and i need it to be fun.
you have a smart approach. i think it is overwhelmingfor newcomers. and i think it'soverwhelming for old timers. the very thing you're talkingabout-- i look at this stuff and go, grunt and gulp, andit's like, lions and tigers and bears, oh, my. and i tend-- i'mfortunate that i work with people who knowthat stuff much better than me and i hand it off to them.
but it does make me a littlebit more like a customer and less like a designer,if you know what i'm saying, to not know these things. but i love what you'resaying because it's like a piece at a time. what about therole of the client? in other words, if you'rea student of web design, or if you'relearning web design-- we have folks who arein production already
and they probably know what itmeans to work with a client, but if you're a young designerwho's learning the ropes, how do you simulate that? because, to me, i feellike, sure, there's lots of difficulty understandingcode and understanding the fundamentals of design, butis there a way to tackle that? how do we simulate that? or can we? well, if you're at a school-- itdepends where you're learning.
if you're learningon the job, you don't have to simulate itbecause your client's there. and your boss-- the person whohired you is your client also. and your colleague--a senior developer that you're working with--is also your client. everybody who's more experiencedthan you is your client. and everybody who's lessexperienced than you but you need their input. the content personis your client.
everybody's your client. so there's that. if you're doing it at aschool, then your teacher is your client and yourfellow students are clients and you take turns. just like you would if youwere preparing a speech. i'll read you minethan you read me yours. yeah, i think that's fair. i think that one of the thingsthat you did that i thought
was really interesting--again, years ago-- was you documented yourprocess in real time. so you talk about, oh, thisis what i'm learning today. and i feel like is thissomething that's going lost? are we losing the person who--the developer, designer who's sharing what they'redoing with the world? how important is that? there are still-- you'relooking at people who do that. there's lots of people outthere who do that, right?
there's people who make ashim so that a form of css will work in an older browserthat doesn't support it yet. and they say, this isan experiment we tried. eric meyer-- mypartner on an event apart-- is writing a littlearticle right now on some advanced css he just used. not that advanced when you readit because it's eric meyer, so he makes it seemlike it's child's play. he makes it seem-- youcould be a non-developer
and read it and get it. but i think there'slots of people out there-- young people,new people, tons of people sharing what they're learning. i think that's one of theexciting things about web design, as opposed to anyother field i've ever been in. there's not so muchsecretive-- people aren't afraid of looking likeidiots in our field, even though they're professionaland they charge a lot of money.
they're not afraid of saying,i tried for six months to-- we had a-- remember the holy grail? we had years wherepeople were just trying to put aheader, a footer, and a couple of flexiblecolumns on the layout. and it eluded us, in terms ofwhat css was capable of doing and what css and browserswas capable of doing. and people werejust like, folks, i think i might have figured outsomething that kind of works--
you just can't use italics. you can't put an image inthe middle of the column or it'll break. but other than that, if youjust don't have any content, it's going to be great. jeffrey, i'm curious to goback to that idea of what was difficult-- or what has beendifficult for you as you return to this world? you had mentionedthere was a pain
point the last time we spoke. i'm just a little curiousto hear you talk about that. first, i'll tell a story. the first website i ever madein 1995, i had two partners. one of them was a verysuccessful website. and one of the partners quicklybecame a creative director at a different company. a year later, i wentto meet him because i was really excited aboutthis new invention microsoft
was showing off. it was called cssand their ie3 browser could do things with it. and i was really-- youcould do full screen type. you could-- there was somuch you could do that you couldn't do with font tags. i was very excited andi went to show it to him and he had no idea what i wastalking about because he'd been out of it for a year.
now, think about how slowlythings changed in the '90s. he'd been out ofit for a year and i was introducing a completelydifferent way to do layouts. the way we should have had, butdidn't have, at the beginning, and he didn't getwhy that was amazing. great guy. really, a brilliant guy. and much more-- i was theluddite on that project and he dragged meinto the future.
and then, a year later, hedidn't know why that was cool. now i can answer your question. i've always been afraidof that happening, and i think it happenedto me, to some extent. because there was aperiod at my old agency-- i was doing strategicwork for my conference. i was doing strategic work formy book publishing company. i was meeting clientsand talking to designers and i wasn't doingthe work myself.
and interestingly, you can getright back into graphic design. you may feel a little dated,last week's newspaper, but you can getright back into that. and you can figure out ways tothink about responsive and all that stuff. but coding-- the css that iwrote in 2007-- that was good. the html i wrote in 2007is so different from-- and i can look. i can look at html--html5-- good html5 mock up.
i see why it's good andi know how to do things and i know how touse a style guide. but still, for me now,writing something from scratch is a terrifying prospect. and i still wantto do simple things that i fell in love with,like image and copy. i don't really want tocreate all these experiences with stuff floating and allthis-- i sound really old fashioned.
but i didn't-- and i think a lotof people who code that stuff don't actually knowhow to code it either. i think they're grabbingit off the shelf tool that, by default, says,there's three columns and then there's two columns. and then, this floatsand this moves. and they're like, great,i've got that effect. and i've got this effectand that's perfect. and they're pluggingstuff in and it's almost
like they're using an animatedversion of dreamweaver. and i just-- i wouldn'twant to wish them to code that stuff by hand. i'm not sure i likethat stuff period. so there's lots of ways thatit's daunting for me right now. i think parallax is agood example of that. go ahead. or maybe even jquery, right? i know a lot of developers whobuild stuff and, again, jquery
is kind of-- but let's goback to your framework thing. it's fairly trivialor straightforward to add references to somejavascript framework that'll do x, y, and z. but if you dig a littledeeper, the question might be, do you really understandwhat's happening underneath? there was always some mysterywhen we started, right? the first time iviewed source, i didn't know for surewhat everything did.
i had to figure it out. and early javascript? it was this thing whereeverything was an anchor link. those are the painful days. molly holzschlaghas a great analogy for this that i remember hertelling me-- gosh, years ago-- probably over a decade ago now. which is, if you'redriving your convertible through the desert reallyfast and all of a sudden,
it stops and you're out inthe middle of the desert and there's nobody around. and you don't knowhow to fix your car, you're screwed becauseall you know how to do is drive the car. whereas, if youknow how cars work, you might be able to figureout how to fix the car in order to be able to get yourselfout of the predicament that you're in.
and so that was always why, whenshe and i would talk about web education and stufflike that, and what was going on at thattime-- 2004, 2005, everybody was teachingdreamweaver in schools. and i feel like--obviously, dreamweaver is not the de facto toolthat people teach now. but i feel like, in a lot ofways, we still teach tools. we don't teachunderlying concepts. we don't teach you to understandwhat's going on under the hood.
because a lot of the stuff thatjquery and the other libraries were created to fix,to fill the gaps and make browsersplay well together all that sort of stuff--that stuff's been taken care of for years now. obviously, a lot ofpeople like jquery because i can pick anelement by saying, here's the css selector for it. i understand css selectors.
i can go ahead andfind this element., query's select for all, which isthe standards way of doing that in plain vanilla javascript--that's been around since ie8 we've had thisfor-freaking-ever. and there are a lotof things like that. we've had cross browserajax since 2009. a lot of these different api's-- i would've thought even earlier. without having to usethe active x version
and having the defaultsetups for the browsers to have the consistent api. i think it was 2009. maybe 2007, even. you mean like standardsbased, writing the same code. we've had ajax forever,but standards- based. since outlook webaccess back in-- i don't even remember when thatwas-- 2002 or 2003, somewhere in there.
but yeah, a lot of these api'sthat we rely on a library for-- they're in there. even something assimple as-- people like jquery for addingand removing class names, or to see if an element has aclass name and stuff like that. and there's theclass list api, which has been around since 2013,interoperably, i think. something like that. so these things-- we don'tneed libraries as much anymore.
unless you're doing something-- if you don't codeit yourself, you're basically saying someoneelse's decision is good enough. and i won an extra30k of download in order to be ableto do anything. well, and i think it's-- yeah. it's an interesting dilemma. in some ways, you can lookat some of these things as crutches.
you're using them tohelp you get something done quicker and faster. but of course, the problem withany crutch is you take it away and what's going to happen? which leads us to,again, this question of, all right, we know that thisfield is very complicated. it's tough. it's overwhelming. maybe this leads us rightto standards, right?
aren't those going to help us? don't all browsers renderstuff the same these days? what does that do? what's that look like? was that a part of that painthat you were talking about, jeffrey, at all? did you-- i know that-- no, that's not partof the pain at all. no.
the latest things aren'tuniversally supported yet. you have to turn on aflag in some browsers and other browsers don'tsupport them at all. but that's ok because you canlearn in the browsers that support them. i saw rachel andrew gives agreat talk about-- oh, my gosh. css grids. yes. thank you.
and she says, people say,oh, i can't use it yet. and it's like,exactly, that's great. so now you can master it. use the browsers that supportit, turn on the flags. test it and then use itfor prototyping instead of bootstrap. you just start something new. and then, when it'sfinally supported across the boardin another year,
you hit the ground running. you're the person whoknows how to do all that. actually, i get very excitedabout grid layout and flexbox. i feel like if you missa bunch of-- all right. let's say that you hadstopped doing front end code five years ago. basically, what you missedwere a whole bunch of hacks. oh, this thing doesn't workin this browser because of this well-known bug,so what you do there--
you just have to putan empty comment here. oh, you just got to closeup all the whitespace. why? well, it's going to renderall the white space. that's basicallywhat we were learning was all these thingsto do that were voodoo. right? just put a chickenbone in it and you have to kill a small animal inthe light of the full moon
and then it will work. and that's standards. and that wasn'treally standards. that was the compromised--we're close-- we're close enough to use thisstuff with these hacks. so let's do it. and i think, now--also, i think, really, floats are a hack. we've been doing layoutsfor years with a css
that was not designedto do layouts. the idea that peoplehad was, we're going to keep ourdocuments stylized. it was like a microsoft word. and not microsoft word aslike a publishing tool, like prototypinga magazine layout. but microsoft word asyour kid's term paper. or i'd like to usehelvetica, but i'd like my sub heads to be blue.
that's what it was. it came from that universe. brilliant people createdit, but they were not graphic designers. so now we finallyhave css that's actually designed for layouts. i kind of envy thepeople who start learning how to do thisstuff three years from now because they're going to startwith tools that are designed
for the jobs they do. a scripting language,a markup language, and a styling language that arereally designed for the jobs they do. and they won't haveto go through-- they won't have all the confusionthat someone like me has. because i'm-- the longer--the older you get, the more things youhave to remember. i'm going like, fontface-- no, that's not it.
i have to, actually, likespool the tape backwards and forwards. and we have to unlearnsome stuff, too. tons. tough. yeah, it's a reallytricky balancing act. there are somethings that it feels like are necessary, though. for example, when i came down tochattanooga-- whenever it was--
we were developing a course. and i remember you, aaron,mentioned something about, what would we do without github? and so i am like, ok, is thatsomething in someone's arsenal? should that be in everysingle designer's arsenal? do you need to understand howto use github, for example? can you call yourselfa front end developer if you don't know how to use it? i think you can.
it depends on what your goalsare and the sort of work that you're doing. and i think having someunderstanding of version control is probably auseful skill to have, whether that's github or whetherthat's-- there are a bunch of other ones-- being sock andspring loops and stuff like that-- that offersimilar services, whether it's [? a version ?] orwhether it's git or what have you.
understanding that and i alsothink there are, certainly, fundamentals tousing a tool like git and to knowing the command line. but if you're fearfulof the command line, then there's tools thatare out there for you. or if you're a hand coder likei am, and you like using visual studio code or whathave you-- or sublime-- there are plugins that allowyou to connect with git and manage git stufffrom within there.
and you never have tolook at the command line. and so it's all about exposingyourself and then figuring out what works for you, interms of running this stuff. i mean, just like with theworld of task runners-- grunt, gulp, allthat sort of stuff-- there are tools out there thatwill put a gui on that for you, too. and if you're not acommand line person, then there's toolingthat's out there that
can enable you to takeadvantage of those things without treading overthat line of comfort into discomfort for you. so i think there arecertainly-- you're going to be able to find morework if you know how to do git, but you don't have tolearn git in a weekend. you can learn howto push and pull. you could just clone in a repoand just see how that goes. and then, just could startplaying around with it
a little bit. and again, it's notlike you learn git in, like i said, in a weekend. it's the very same process--pick one thing at a time. you're not goingto jump immediately in and start doing octopusmerges and stuff like that. you may not-- start with issues. just start with issues.
issues, for anyonewho doesn't know, is just bug tracking orthings that need to get done. instead of the usual thing,where management comes around and says, this is messed up,this is messed up, fix that. and nobody rememberswhat they said and nobody has marching orders. instead, verysystematically go through-- identify a feature thatneeds to be added or fixed, mark it as a bug or as anice to have-- something
that's urgently needed or not. assign it to a personor to yourself. and so it's basically a way of--it's a way of doing critique and improvements, bit by bit. it's a to-do. it's a task manager. in the literal sense--not a task runner. it's really good andanybody can learn that. we have a lot ofnon-technical people using
git in various projectsi'm on and they get it. everyone gets it. that's a nice way to getcomfortable with the look and feel of it, atleast on github. and you can do the same thingeven with just text files. just write a letter or an emailto your friend as a text file and check that into yourown github repository. and just figure out the processof making changes and getting those in there andthat sort of stuff.
well, i will tellyou another thing. so you know, that probablyshould be in people's tool box. the 800-pound gorilla in theroom, of course, is mobile. these days, again, ipose the same question. if you call yourselfa web designer or web developer in the year 2016,are you designing mobile first? i think you should be. i don't know. jeff-- all three of us have beenaround for so long on the web
that it's kind of amusingto me to sit back and look at how this industry, like everyother industry, is so cyclical. all of the challenges thatwe have now with responsive design, withperformance optimization for mobile and stuff likethat-- we were doing that back when we were dealingwith a 14.4 modem and we were trying to compressthe heck out of our images. and we got, especiallywithin our industry, got spoiled by fast internetconnections and high power
computers and allthat sort of stuff. and really startedresting on our laurels, which is why the averagewebpage is a meg and a half now or something like. we rested on our assumptions. there were a coupleon the bubble. back in 1996 or '97,glenn davis-- who was a co-founder of theweb standards project and who ran projectcool side of the day--
he proposed three kinds ofweb layouts-- liquid, jello, and ice. and ice was basicallyaffixed with layout, which is what became the default.jello was, basically, an adaptive layout. it was a layoutthat worked here, but it would also work there. you assumed-- there were two orthree monitor shapes and sizes, and you accommodated those.
and then, liquidwas-- let's call it a really ugly, primitive,but absolute forebearer of responsive design. and when john allsopwrote a dao of web design, he was talking about,let's accommodate the web. let's let design be webbie. he was talkingabout liquid design. the problem was liquid designwas kind of ugly because there weren't enough controls in placeto do layout-y things and art
director-y thingsand brand things. or even just linelength optimizations. yes, right. it made readingreally challenging. right. i can remember doing themand then having someone on a big monitor going,i can't read this. and i was like, you're right. the old w3c sitewas awful for that.
it just kept spreading andspreading and spreading. so you'd have guilt ifyou did a fixed width layout because you'relike, that's wrong. but you have guiltif you did a liquid. responsive was finally,we have the tools that will allow us to takewhat was good about this and what was good about that. so you're right. everything's cyclical.
and i think thereason you brought it up is in direct responseto jeremy's question-- oh, about mobile first. because years ago, wewere saying content first. years ago, we weresaying, i'm not going to design if i don'tknow what the content is. i don't know whatthe interaction is, i don't knowwho the user is, i don't know what the content is.
i'm not a decorator. you don't hire me tosay, i'd like it beige with a light blue undertone. someone will do that. there are people who do that. you know, 99 designs fora dollar or whatever. and there is some-- if youhave no graphic design skill and you have a companyyou need to launch and you just wanta pretty shell,
then it's a good-- it'sfine and it gives employment to somebody. but design is problem solving. and you're not goingto get it that way. so we do keep--i do think mobile is the 800-pound gorilla, but ialso don't know what mobile is, at this point. everything's mobile. my desktop machine that'sconnected to a wire
is not mobile. i'm not going to take my27-inch monitor down the street to a meeting with the client. but is my laptop mobile? and where do you-- onthe other end of that, watches, drum pants, wearables. i had students-- i teach inthe interaction design program at school of visualarts in new york. and a couple yearsago, i had a student
that made a project that wouldbasically warm up as your loved one came near you. so the example was, she'ssitting in the coffee shop in brooklyn, havingleft work in manhattan, and lah-dee-dah,lah-dee-dah, lah-dee-dah. and all of a sudden,her wrist warms up and she looks out the window andthere's her boyfriend coming up the street. it was a proximitysensor, it was
geolocation, and the internet. and that stuff happensover the web, too. and so i think it'sthis vast continuum that we have tobe-- it's definitely not just visual design. i think it's just design. when we say mobile ordesktop or anything now, i think it's almostlike-- i don't even know what to call it,so i call it design.
jeffrey, just one thing. can you give me your sourcefor the web-enabled drum pants because i need a pair of those. drum pants. ask josh clark. josh clark has a-- orjust google drum pants. it's a product. oh, is it? [interposing voices]
this is cyclicalbecause laurie anderson had drum pants in 198-- yeah, idon't want to say how long ago. but i remember goingto were concert and she was drummingon her suit. she basically hadsensors connected to computers that had littledigital samples-- probably 8-bit samples thatsounded really grungy, which sounded really cool andtechy back then, and futuristic back then-- like tron graphics.
it seemed futuristic back then. but yeah. now they're real. and you can drum while you're-- when you're online. sitting on theunemployment line, you can drum on your drum pants. oh, nice. yeah, i think, likejeffrey's talking about,
what is mobile-- what isthe continuum that we're designing for now? and what starts toget me really excited is looking at where thingsare going with truly voice-based interactions. so no visuals whatsoever. whether you're talking tosiri or cortana or alexa or any of thesedigital assistants, we have to bethinking about what
is the cognitiveoverhead of working with a particular interface? and so all the thingsthat we learned from luke wroblewskiand others, in terms of the mobile first stuff, andfocusing on the core task that needs to be accomplishedin a given interface, and getting rid ofthe noise in favor of the signal-- all ofthat becomes even more important as wemove into a world
where we don't have a screen. where we're justhaving a conversation with some disembodied voicethat's doing stuff for us. and so that's-- that couldbe somewhat terrifying to designers. but it's alsoincredibly empowering, if you think about it. because when you start to tiethat stuff together and tie that into a lot of the realtime translation engines that
are available now,all of a sudden, you open up the largelyenglish-centric web to people in other countriesand in other languages and such, and create moreopportunities for them to access this hugebody of knowledge that we've managedto amass on the web. and enable them to participatein modern society, which largely happens on the internet. i want hal-- hal 9000 from 2001.
i want that to be my voice. that doesn't sound like you. i can't. i'm sorry, i can'tdo that, dave. and i want a web standard that,basically, has voice parameters that you can then synthesize. so you can basicallysay, voice hal. we had aural style sheets. they were a proposal years ago.
google implemented them. i'm not quite sure, buti wouldn't be surprised if they come back insome form or another. because i mean, beingable to change voices-- being able to have a certainsection of your page read out by-- they had controls. it was like, middle-agedfemale-- middle-aged us female or something like that. and young child and allthese sorts of things.
and very few peopleimplemented them. i want to say-- there was probably a fetishnews group for that, too, back in the day. probably. i think there weresome tools-- maybe read speaker and acouple of other ones that would do audiotranscriptions of your site that, i think, did payattention to aural style sheets.
and that's a-u-r-a-l,not o-r-a-l which is a whole other thing. but i think something likethat's going to come back. i got to believe that itwill because we're starting to get more voice enabled. again, everything's cyclical. if you look back to thevery early days of the web, we had-- what was it-- vrml,for virtual reality on the web? and now we have web vr,which is the new thing,
but in a lot ofways, it's going back to that idea of trying to movevirtual reality [? in lines. ?] remember when yahoo! had a language? yahoo! and apple collaborated. it was a 3d language, soyou could do a search. instead of doing a fast,text-based search, which google would then own theuniverse by doing, they came up with areally slow-- especially
over a 14.4 modem-- reallyslow three-dimensional search, where you navigate through--do you remember this? what was it called? it sounds familiar. it wasn't called ice. it was like hot sauce? hot sauce. sounds familiar. it was athree-dimensional-- it was
a language of three-dimensionalsearch, which nobody wanted. it was like, i'm gettingattacked, i need the police. oh, i'll just do this four-hourlong, three-dimensional search for the phone number. everything's an emergencyon the internet. i want to get itas fast as i can. that was the problem. so gentlemen, we're going tobe taking questions shortly. but i do want to askone thing of you both.
you both have been in positionswhere you're looking for jobs, but you've also been inpositions where you are maybe looking to hire someone--specifically a friend and developer, or a coder. and i'm curious to know, forthose folks out there-- or just for anyone, in general--what sort of things, in general or specific,do you look for in someone who might be looking for ajob as a front end developer? what are the attributesthat you're interested in?
i guess, when i was running myagency, a lot of the interviews that we did, we mainly lookedfor interest and enthusiasm for the medium. somebody who actually really--they weren't doing it just for a paycheck. they were doing it becausethere was something that spoke to themabout working on the web and they were excitedto learn new things. obviously, fluency withhtml, css, javascript--
those things were important,but i had no expectations that they were going tohave the entire javascript, the definitive guide,memorized and would be able to write programsfrom scratch or what have you. i think that's kind of-- idon't think that's necessary. there are so many resourcesout there to be like, i want to do this,what do i need to do? and i'd much ratherhave somebody that has a fluencywith that and that
knows the questionsto ask in order to get to the thing theyneed to implement in order to accomplish something. but that's just reallypassionate about the work that they're doingand that's super interested in doing things. because they're going topush themselves further. they're going to learn more. they're going to get betterand better over time.
and i think that's a reallykey thing to have for somebody that you're working with. and obviously, agood team player is a huge, huge thing, as well. because you wantto have somebody that's there tosupport everybody else and in the group, as well. excellent. jeffrey, what are your thoughts?
those are great. i agree with all those things. i also think if somebody'sa newcomer, or a student, or young-- new to thefield-- they don't have to be young in age, butnew to the field-- i look for excitement andenthusiasm just like that. because when i was teaching--when i saw this stuff-- i thought it was thecoolest stuff in the world. and i would dreamin 16-color gifs.
i would actually dream--i would see a sign and i would say, howwould i render that? i would always be thinking--i was boring as hell. my girlfriend couldn't stand me. but i was obsessedwith learning all that. and so i look for that. i look for someone who'spassionate about these things and has ideas. and then, if they're alittle more experienced,
i look for contributions. have they given something tothe community in some fashion? do they write? they don't have to be thegreatest writer on earth, but do they blog? and if so, what about? are they repeatingwhat other people say? or do they have ideas? do they contributeto a group blog?
have they made somethingfor other people? have they done-- i workwith a guy, roland dubois. we weren't even workingtogether at the time, but i said, i wantto really try-- i have this idea fora design i'm doing and i want to trytilting the type. and i know you cando that in css now but i don't knowif it's readable. he went and made ajsfiddle to just test it.
and he said, well, here'swhat it looks like. and he had littlevariations to show me. and i was like, we're noteven working together. and by the way, it'san experienced guy. that's not a beginner. but that wasn't hisproject at the time. and he dove in because hewas passionate about it. and now we work together. i look at that and go, that'swhat i want to work with.
someone who's more firedup about this than i am. and i'm pretty excited about it. that sounds likeenthusiasm-- for those folks out there-- enthusiasm wayup on the top of the list. and also to showsomething cool that you've done so that we know thatyou're telling the truth. and if you haven'tdone anything cool, we have a contest for that. that's true.
we should totally do thatbefore we jump to questions. there is a cool contestcalled 10k apart. aaron, can you just talk quicklyabout that before i forget it? sure. as i mentioned earlier, thecurrent average web page is a meg and a half orsomething like that. and so we decided tobring back a contest that microsoftand an event apart have done in the past,which is to build a web
experience in 10k or less. we've changed it alittle bit this year. we're actually saying10k per page load for the initial page load ofyour html, css, and javascript, and to buildsomething cool in it. and we've-- gosh, i think we'reup to almost six dozen entries or something like that. it's some ridiculouslyhigh number. and they've been amazing.
and the contest is opento, pretty much, anyone. there are some minorrestrictions in the legal copy. but there have beensome great entries from all over the world. and people have untilthe end of the month. i think the 30thof september is-- and what's that url? a-k-apart.com. you can find all of the details.
and you can usethe contact forum. and i will probably bethe one answering you, to give you recommendationsand suggestions. i've actually been usingit as an opportunity to help peoplebetter come to grips with progressive enhancementsand stuff like that, as well. if something comesin and i'm like, oh, you could tweak thisand make it more accessible. or have you thoughtabout doing this?
so it's been a fun mentoringexercise for me, as well. always teaching. you're always teaching. well done. and also, thatwebsite that you just mentioned itself is actuallyan example of a site that is less than 10k, right? yep. and it does balloonup to 200k, roughly,
on some of thelarge gallery pages, but that's only if youhave javascript available and then we lazyload inthe appropriate images and all that sort of stuff. but i've actually beenwriting the sixth entry, i think now, that coversthe whole build process of how we've managedto squeeze everything into a 10k initial load. so it's been interesting to goback and dissect that stuff.
where are you publishing those? those are all on themicrosoft edge developer blog, which i'll drop thelink in here for everyone. cool. well, let's switchgears a little bit and take some questions. again, we've got tonsand tons of them. there's no way we're goingto get to all of these, obviously, in 10 minutes.
but the good newsis some of them are close duplicatesto each other. here's one from remy,who says what are your thoughts about frameworks? bootstrap,foundation, et cetera. when should webdesigners reach for them? of course you giveit to me first. sorry, i was typing that url in. my feeling onframeworks is that i
think that they can be reallyuseful in certain scenarios. i think that they're extremelyuseful for quickly prototyping an idea and justseeing if it has legs. because then you're not spendinga bunch of time writing css that you're going to throwaway and so on and so forth, or javascript you're goingto potentially throw away. and so they're reallygood in those scenarios. they're also reallygood for learning from to see how people havesolved certain problems.
but i am very reluctant tojust build a site in bootstrap and just push thewhole thing out there. i think there's alot of great thought that's been put into tobootstrap, foundation-- all these differentframeworks that are kind of a mishmash ofhtml, css, and javascript. but i don't necessarilyfeel that the problems that the framework wasdesigned to solve-- they aren't necessarily thesame problems that you're
looking to solve, so they maynot be the right solution. and then, you alsorun into the problem that most people whouse these frameworks don't go back and pare them downto only the pieces that they actually need. and so you end up-- i actuallytalked about this in the piece that i wrote aboutthe 10k apart site, talking about just jquery. how many peoplejust automatically,
when they create a newtemplate, they include jquery? so that's roughly a 30kdownload for people. and they may useit to do one thing. that one thing probablycould have been accomplished in vanilla javascriptin a lot less than 30k and the user would have abetter experience overall. so i think de facto going toa framework for every project that you're starting is doingyour customers-- your end users-- a disservice.
and i think-- i soundlike a broken record a lot when i'm at conferencestalking about this stuff, but i feel like we make a lotof decisions as web designers and developers, where we choosetools and frameworks and stuff that make our jobs easier. but then, our users end uppaying the cost for that. and i don't think that's right. i think that we shouldabsorb that pain in order to make their lives better.
that's a fantastic point. i totally agree. he nailed it. here's another one. this one is veryprovocative and so i'm going to throw this tojeffrey because i'm fascinated to hear his response. here's the question from david. now that so much web traffichas migrated to the mobile web,
with all the restrictionsthat this brings to the presentation ofcontent, is a background in graphic design really asvaluable as it was in the past when you're juststacking rounded corner boxes ontop of each other? to simplify, is abackground in graphic design really as valuable asit was in the past? and a background in scienceis just as valuable. and some of the bestdesigners i've worked with
had a major in philosophy. whatever it was thatyou studied, that you're passionate about, thatyou bring to web design-- you're a better webdesigner if you're a web designer whodoes stuff for ngos, let's say, because you'repassionate about social causes or you do stuffabout your church because you're passionateabout your faith-- whatever it happens to be.
if you have that other passionthat fuels what you do, the things meld. you don't have to bea graphic designer to be a good web designer. you don't have tohave that background. but it certainly helps,in terms-- like decisions about typography. and, in fact, i would say,the smaller the screen, the fewer things-- the fewerdistractions-- -- the more,
dare i say, mastery of graphicdesign makes a difference between a really effectivelittle app that seemingly wasn't even designed and anotherone that's not that much fun to use, or there's justsomething off about it. a really greatgraphic designer knows what to remove and keepremoving and keep removing. and will make, maybe therewill be two sizes of type because that's allthe hierarchy that's needed, as opposed to someonewho's playing and using
lots of sizes. so i think thediscipline and skill that comes with a graphic designbackground are very valuable. and they're as valuable asthey ever were, maybe more so because, again, the lessscreen you have to play with, the better you betteruse that screen. at the same-- andthe less you're relying on buttons andnav bars and the more you're relying onpeople understanding
that they can touchsomething, the more you have to really understandhow design works. because if i don't knowanything about design, but i know that i put a bigleft and a big right button for next, and iwrite the word next, i can get away with havinga crummy user interface. because if you go to huffingtonpost or any of these websites where they have a, "youwon't believe these celebrity divorces."
you go there and it'sjust a whole bunch of ads and then there's alittle pop up window with deceptive anti-userpatterns everywhere. but basically, there'san ugly little left arrow and an ugly little right arrow. when you figure that out, youcan navigate to the next image. but that doesn't take a greatgraphic designer to do that. but making something thatworks on a tiny phone screen takes a pretty good one.
so i would say, you could bea great designer without that but graphic design iscertainly not devalued in today's-- it'slike saying, well, if we're only printingin black and white, i guess i don't reallyneed to understand design. yeah, you do. maybe more so than ifyou have a whole color. we got away with murderfive, 10 years ago. a guy was like, i'm going tomake a back burlap texture
and a little drop--lots of people could pretend to be designersbecause anybody could make something look pretty goodif you were a little bit restrained, but you hadsome tricks of the trade. i'm going to make a dropshadow and this angle, and i'm going touse-- oh, yeah, this curve that everyone's using. you could make it look likeyou knew what you were doing. and there's a lot of sameness.
oh, and that reminds me. one other thing i wouldsay that aaron didn't get to when he was talking aboutthe drawbacks of frameworks is they have a certainde facto look and feel and that's become the de factolook and feel of the web. and so people are all makingsites that look the same and it's reallyboring right now. and they're not necessarilysaying to themselves, how does this contentwant to be represented?
what will make the mostmemorable and brand appropriate impression? no, they're saying, ok,i've got a big picture up here-- probably animated--then i got two things here and then i gotthree columns here. done. and, oh, yeah, andit's responsive. all right. i'm done-- without thinking.
and i think a graphic designbackground can help you there, you don't need it. there are plenty ofother great backgrounds. but i think it could help. i would completelyagree with that. and i think that's one of thethings that really irks me about the startup world. every site's a bootstrap site. and you can tell, immediately,when you go to it.
oh, this is yetanother bootstrap site. i think that if you don'tcome from a graphic design background-- i didn'tcome from a graphic design background-- there are somegreat books out there that can give you, at least, a senseof-- ellen lupton's thinking with type is a really accessibleintroduction to typography. and you don't have to jumpin to bringhurst or something like that and get into thesuper nitty gritty of it. but you can start tounderstand things like that
or start to understand thingslike proximity and contrast and some of those othertools that are really useful. and as you mentioned, jeffrey,have become even more important as you get into a smallerscreen, where there's the potential to createtoo much distraction or to draw your eye away. or you go to a siteand the margins are huge on your tiny screen,so you end up with, basically, 12 characters acrossor something like that.
and understanding howthose very fundamental bits of graphic designknowledge work can help you to do a reallygood job in those areas. i'd also say lookeverywhere for inspiration. look at all communication. listen to music, read books. how is the author letting youknow what the character thinks even though they haven't saidwhat the character thinks? how is the filmdirector letting you
know that this characteris lying or in trouble? the actor's doing it,the director's doing it, the screenwriter did it. how are they doing that? go to a museum. get an art book. look at art. how does it communicate? how does this picturemake you-- why does
this picture make you feel sad? bring that to your design. great. very well said. we've got one more. and this one is kind of acombination of a couple. and this one issomewhat related, but maybe completely different. here's a question.
do you find that there'smuch gender or age bias in web design, especiallyif you're new to the field? i am a 55-year-old womanwho spends all my free time online learning, researchingthe latest and best design practices and examples. gender, age bias exists,but to what degree? can we talk aboutthat for a second? it's definitely out there,some places worse than others. and there are also places thatare really into-- age less so--
but there's lots of places nowthat are into empowering women. run by women, started by women. don't have to be. there are lots of men thatwant to hire women, too, but that's not the point. find the places thatdon't have that bias. don't necessarilytake a job where you're going to be treated as aglorified secretary or whatever because of somebody'ssexist baloney.
i'm saying-- i'mwatching my language here because i don't know whatthe rules are about swearing. but yeah, don't letthat get you down. age is another thing and that'sthrough our whole society. my brother's girlfriendis an accountant. she's very good. but she's approaching 60. and they'd ratherhire two 30-year-olds. you know what i mean?
as people get older--i can remember, when i was first inadvertising, seeing these middle aged people who had just losttheir jobs because there was a merger and they fired--half the clients fired us because of conflicts. i saw these people walking awaywho were going to go nowhere. they were 40 and they'd beendoing this mediocre advertising at this agency tosatisfy the clients and now they were nevergoing to get another job.
it's very scary. but if your passionateabout what you're doing and you're willingto reinvent yourself, don't let anybody keep you down. and go to meetups,go to-- there's lots of girl development. there's lots ofmeetups specifically for women coders and designers. go to those things.
make contacts with those things. you'll get lots of referrals. there's companies like etsy. they, veryaggressively, don't want to be a tech companythat's half men. very aggressivelylook for women. they, very aggressively,make sure that there isn't bias in the workplace. that women don't haveto feel like they're
in some boys' locker roomjust to get their jobs done. there's companies like thatand they're talking about it. so find the companies thatare talking about that stuff. that's where you want to work. some day that'll be true inevery place, but right now it's not. so you don't want towork at some boys' club-- they're out there, but youhave lots of other options. i think you're going to findthat larger companies tend
to have less and less ageistbias, and certainly less gender bias, as well. i know microsoft had atraining that they did that was on unconscious bias. and they actuallytook that-- which was an internal training--and made that public so that anybody couldactually go through that and learn aboutunconscious bias. and it's a phenomenal thing.
but they're very concernedabout having a diverse workforce because diversitycreates better products. when you don't havethe same-- everybody has the same background,the same experience, you end up creatingvery specific products that only work for that group. and so when you have adiversity of opinions-- a diversity of experience-- thatcreates better products overall that are usable by awider variety of people.
so i think focusing on largercorporations is probably-- at least at this pointin the web space-- is probably better thangoing after a startup. i think what you just said,too, is a really good point. because diversity leadsto better products. absolutely. said one of the three whitemen on the panel-- diversity leads to better products. as a result, you can sell itlike you sell accessibility
by the self-interestof the company. if you tell a company, this isthe morally right thing to do, they're looking atthe bottom line. it's not going to work. it might work with some people,but it doesn't work with a lot. but if you tell them, ourproduct will compete better. we will avoid a costly mistake. the costly mistakethat happens when you have to pull everything backbecause you've offended half
the population because no onefrom that group was in the room when the very obviouslyoffensive thing was said. nobody had theright sensitivity. if you're-- in terms ofpushing managerial change, it's easy to do from that point,with that as a sales tool-- that as a selling point. wow. language, words. it's been an hour.
i has been an hour. and so we have lotsof awesome questions, but we need to wrap it up. and before we do,let's just check back in with you folks-- you guys--and anything on the horizon that you want to talk about? things that you're doing--presentations, books, anything? you got your time. i'm going to disneyworld not this weekend
but next weekend with my kid. but i'm going foran event apart. we're doing a three-day,18-speaker blowout in disney world. at a disney hotel onthe disney grounds, so you can learn all day andthen go meet mickey at night. so that, i'm excited about. i'm excited about seeingall these great entries that are coming in for the10k apart contest.
and i'm excited to let thejudges dive in and start to hear their feedback. and it's going to bereally interesting. well, we started to get aweird buzzing at the end there. so luckily, we dodged. i think it's yourmic, but maybe not. we dodged that bullet. so thanks, everyone,for joining. the last thing iwill say, again,
in addition to the10k apart stuff, aaron also is the author ofour latest course, "modern web design," which is now live. for the folks who areseeing this presentation, you're actually thefirst people to see it. so check that out. and you're going tolearn a lot about things that we talked about here. and if you're curiousto learn more stuff that
isn't web development,go to gymnasium for ux and github andwordpress and bootstrap. all those thingsare available there. and i want to thank everyonefor taking some time out of their day to listen to ustalk about all of these things. and gentlemen, thank you fortaking the time, as well. thanks, jeremy, thanks jeffrey,and thank you, everybody, who's listening at home. a lot of fun.
let's do it again. we shall. we are now officiallysigning off. take care.
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