Thursday
15 October 2015

Web Design Advantageous

Everything I know about web design, I’ve taught myself.

I first started making websites as a 14-year-old, just fun little WYSIWYG sites for me and my friends to enjoy, sharing our drawings and stories. It wasn’t long before my design sensibilities got the better of me. The next year I started teaching myself html, diving headlong into the coding and happily typing up all my designs from scratch in Notepad. I discovered the joys of CSS and was gifted bloogum.net for my 18th birthday.

For the next several years that knowledge, expanded to include HTML5 and CSS3 when they came along, was quite enough. I made layout after layout for my various little sites on bloogum, committing to a new set every month for my LiveJournal, and was happy to keep it as a hobby. With my first job out of university being at a print house, I never had the need to develop my skills professionally, but I still kept learning new things. I got excited over being able to finally use fonts other than Verdana or Century Gothic, making things transparent without having to make a PNG file, and animating objects without having to learn JavaScript.

The time came to go job hunting. Everything advertised such lines as ‘Minimum of 2 years’ experience in the industry’, ‘Solid knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite including InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop’ and that deceptively innocuous line, ‘Knowledge of web design would be advantageous.’ I triumphantly carried in my then-3.5 years’ experience with exceptional knowledge of Adobe CS6 and solid knowledge of HTML and CSS only to find, after three or four interviews, that I consistently ranked at number two on their list of interviewees. Pegged at the post by someone with more digital media design industry experience.

Web design advantageous? Is that really all it is?

I had two options: Get depressed and feel worthless; or get motivated and build myself up. Learn more. Break into the formerly intimidating world of JavaScript and PHP, break out my first WordPress template, make everything responsive. Not just find time, but dedicate time to learning, to building the most beautiful portfolio I can create.

It’s been a wild, frustrating but hellishly rewarding ride. I’ve been playing with jQuery, most notably in the menu to the top right, and found it to be not nearly as intimidating as it used to be. With that came PHP, and wondering why I had never introduced myself to this magnificent beast earlier. Admittedly I had touched on these with v1.0 of my online portfolio, but every new page I code with it is more learning.

The portfolio itself was my first shot at a fully responsive layout, and that was built on the Bootstrap framework. I’m familiar enough with that now that I could have built the blog in the same way, but this entire site is an exercise in learning as much as anything else, so I’ve learned all about flex boxes here, and CSS media queries—(th)inky thoughts has three grades, for mobile screens under 768px wide, medium browsers up to 1200px wide, and anything larger.

The blog is also built in WordPress, featuring my first WordPress style. As with anything brand new, it’s been a steep learning curve, but one that I’m only going to keep hiking up. I can make comments work, style dates however I want them and sort my widgets into a pretty little sidebar (or footer, depending on your screen size.)

Everything, from the first forays into HTML through PHP to WordPress styles, I’ve taught myself.

Just imagine where I could go in a graphic design studio.

Comment    things I learnt, web design
Tags: css, html, introduction post, JavaSript, learning, php, web design, wordpress