Web Design Courses are Failing Us
About a year ago I got to teach best practise web design to some graphic design students at the Diploma level. It was interesting and there were some good takeaways from my angle – one being that diploma students don’t like to be told they have to participate in their own education. Apparently the new paradigm is that if a teacher fails to get a message across it’s because they weren’t entertaining enough, or it failed to meet the individual student’s learning style. But I’ve thought about how I went about that teaching episode and I’m unrepentant. Diploma’s shouldn’t be places that people congregate to avoid having to attend lectures or read books. Web design is a technical occupation.
Web design courses should never EVER teach WYSIWYG web design. Web design courses should never EVER just teach the technical HTML and CSS without teaching the big picture context which enables them to use those technologies with purpose and professionalism. Anyone can insert images into a web page, or do a whole bunch of what we do for a living. Relatively few are able to provide the greater knowledge about the Web, how the Web technologies work and interoperate, how users interact with interfaces and systems, how various browsers and technologies require different effort to obtain levels of accessibility.
Web design is not just about making posters that have clickable text. It’s not just about drag and dropping functionality into given areas of an interface simply to look pretty. Web design is a big picture industry that ranges from the business assessment stage right through design and development into the marketing and business return on investment. It’s a business to business cycle. It involves knowing about subjects as diverse as design theory, psychology, human computer interaction, technical coding and programming, practical design, search engine optimisation, client support, copy writing, information architecture, usability and accessibility, metadata such as Dublin Core, e-commerce, the limitations and strengths of particular web technology components, and more and more and more.
Teaching web design without teaching students about the interacting parts of it is like handing your child a shotgun and asking them to open the milk carton. Don’t ask why industry skills are lacking from graduates, or why so many organisations have settled for mediocre. This form of teaching devalues any certification.
Finally, teachers of web design need to be generalists. When children are growing they go through a phase of asking incessantly why… it’s because we both need to know how to do something and why it should be done. While I get the idea that diploma students don’t like to be lectured, I fail to grasp how they can learn why from a simple step through tutorial which most students won’t complete, or by watching YouTube (as one overweight edu-anarchist insisted on doing).
It is not enough anymore to be able to make pretty pictures and to use DreamWeaver. This industry is getting more complex. We need web designers who can understand the context.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 pm
steven i am thinking about a career in web design . it seems to me that it is not that hard to create your own site with a few basic programs (dreamweaver) etc. is it worth a go?
can you recommend any good courses (melb)
i understand that the more complex the web site there is a need for a professional
i liked what you said about not just learning about the technical aspects of web design but using it in a purposeful and professional manner in the industry – thats just good design sense thanks andrew
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Hi Andrew, it’s not easy to answer specifically some points without knowing your circumstances and reasons for pursuing web design. But I’d suggest you should first learn how to write POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML – or XHTML). And hand code some basic CSS. This layout for example is very simple to achieve with a little nutting out Internet Explorer 6 issues, but nowdays they are well worth it.
But what you really need to do to broaden that technical aspect of your development is to read voraciously about usability, information architecture, best practices in web standards and accessibility – a broad knowledge. It’s the kind of stuff that comes from just understanding over time why it’s not a good thing to do something and how you might overcome specific difficulties. You start to then understand CSS beyond the “getting it to work” stage and find you know why position relative fixes something or how to trigger hasLayout. Things like understanding a little about interface design – read Bill Buxton’s book, for example. It’s not a knowledge that comes from a small sharp effort, but it’s what you’d pick up from conferences and friendships and general social absorbtion.
I’m not totally convinced this industry works well from the courses perspective though. The ones I’ve seen don’t achieve as much as they claim, but given the right teacher you can at least walk away with the tools to learn. I’ve reviewed a number of decent books on this site and they often have good ideas and code.
But mainly doing is learning. And try not to spend every day blogging or reading. One hour a day reading maximum… then work.
The thing to take away from web design is that it’s really a general umbrella name for a number of jobs ranging from business marketing through to graphic design, programming, information architecture, user behaviour and human psychology. Learn lots about humans and limitations.
Hope that helps. Email Russ Weakley at maxdesign.com.au and ask the same question. He runs the web standards group. They have a lot of resources to teach about HTML and CSS best practices.