lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

Next week I suppose to go on holiday as I planned at the beginning of the year. It is going to be Grand Canaria island. After very busy half year I really feel I do need to re-charge my batteries. The plan is to relax and enjoy the weather but at the same time I am taking my Canon 40D so I expect to get some pretty good shots in those conditions. That was the second target for this year. I hope I can get at least one excellent shot which I can then enlarge and frame.

If I am right, Grand Canaria is the biggest island in Canary Islands so do not expect us to lay on the beach all the time. We will explore the country around us. I am also taking my PHP book so I will not get bored from all that relax on the beach bellow umbrella.

Taking a book with me (which is quite massive - about 700 pages) brings me into the dilemma I am having for last couple of weeks. Should I be buying more paper books? The reason for this question is new technology. There are devices on the market which can store hundreds of books and the readability comfort is very high. They do not use back-lighting so your eyes are not going to be tired after half an hour of reading. Another reason why I am thinking about this option is space in the room I live. I have collected about 30 books during the last 2 years and there is really no more space in our room.

Do you guys have any experiences with eReaders? My favorite so far is the lattes Sony one even I would prefer one from Apple if there was one but unfortunately there is none. The Amazon one seams to be OK but I am not very keen on design…

If you have been reading this blog for some time you probably know that I belong to the category of people who study all the time and will probably never stop. Today I would like to talk about the way I study and maybe get some ideas from you guys to get more effective. I have to say when I started to study web design it was quite difficult. There was a lots of stuff I needed to get into my head. I used to study different kind of materials in the past and this area was pretty new for me. I have spent lots of time studding finance, economy and law before and I would not even think that you can actually study web design and even more that you can become professional web designer. I always thought that it is job which belongs to IT department.

Once I have started to study web design in general the doors has suddenly opened and I saw the whole picture. It was very exiting and interesting. What I have not realized how wide knowledge is needed to be a proper web designer. My naive opinion was that there is html, css and that is it. Later I found out that there are such a things as layouts, grids, colour managment, icon design, flash, dom-scripting, ajax, accessibility, web standards etc. So I told to myself. If I want to do my job properly I have to learn all of these. It already looks like a lot of stuff to get into single brain but you know what? It is not all. There is so much more to it and it is developing pretty fast and that is why it is so interesting. All these study areas I have mentioned belong to front end but there is back end as well so the list goes on and on. For the back end I have chosen PHP and MYSQL.

If you are new to web design study do not be scared if it looks like too much for you. First of all. Once you love what you do you do not have to force yourself to study because you just love to do it. Secondly, you do not have to learn all these stuff. You can decide what you want to be specialist in. You can be perfect HTML and CSS coder or PHP and MYSQL coder if you do not feel like playing with colours and pretty pictures. My problem is I want to know it all. I dream about perfect, accessible web applications with beautiful semantic code which would have a pretty and intuitive interface spiced with cool behaviors via dom-scripting and ajax.

I study almost every day. It does not always mean reading the book. Sometimes it is reading RSS feeds sometimes going true someones CSS code. When I read book about something new, I usually read the book 2-3 times to get the big picture. Then I start trying stuff, coding and testing. It is always this faze when I realized that it is not that difficult as it looks like when you first read about it. After some time spent trying new stuff I get another book to get a different view on the problematic. Reading second book is always easier and you find yourself nodding your head when going true the first chapters. The second part of every book is more complicated and it needs to play with a new technology for lot longer time to get the whole idea. For example I am still not confident to make some complicated java-script functions but I can create some pretty cool and useful stuff. What happens next? After I feel I am able to produce some of the stuff I was reading about I move on. I chose different subject and study something else. Later I come back and build on the knowledge I got in the first round. So I work in circles. This helps me not to be overwhelmed by one subject and still be able to make a progress. I am interested in lots of different areas so that allows me to move in circles from coding such are HTML, CSS, JS jumping into Photoshop then photography then Flash or drawing. These days it is PHP and MYSQL but when it becomes to much I read about colour managment.

What is your method? How do you get your head around web design?

As usually there is a lot going on in the lewro’s life. Last Saturday I spent on the MAC Expo London 2007. You can see couple of images on my flickr site. So, how was it? It was really cool. The most interesting was presentation of the new MAC OS - Leopard. I have seen most of the new features presented on the apple site but they showed us couple of new once as well. Specially very interesting was how you can create widgets directly from the Safari browser window. For example departures of Tube on the selected station. Creating widgets with zero programing knowledge, that it really cool.

There have been couple of other companies doing presentation among them Microsoft with the latest Office for MAC and Quarks, Crumple and others. I have also spent some times on the presentation of digital photography by Nikon. The reset of the time I spent wondering around with a coffee in my hand, ten minutes here and ten minutes there. It is a pity there were no hardware presentations by Apple. I would be interested to see the iphone, new ipods and ibooks. But anyway it was time well spent.

There is going to be another interesting presentation, this time specially about photography. One of my favorite companies Canon will be presenting in the London in about one week time. I hope I can learn more about digital photography and techniques for editing images. I am looking forward to this one. London is such a great city for this kind of free events where you can watch top professionals.

New books

Except the events I am attending I continue my study of web design and development. I bought couple of new books. Most of them are books for web designers but as you see I am going to study PHP and My SQL. So I am widening my spectrum towards development as well. After reading a book called DOM Scripting I have used the knowledge from this book in the couple of projects but what is more interesting it showed me that programing is not as difficult as I thought it is. I will let you know if I was right in case of PHP programming but that is going to take me some time. I am going to read and study this book as last one from all of these books which you can see on the image bellow.

Work in progress

So that was all about the access to information in different forms but obviously I am working as well. My full time job is giving me a great opportunity to grown, specially working in Photoshop is improving and speeding up. I am very happy about that. I have learned a lots of shortcuts which are extremely useful. I have still long way to go but it is a good start. I have also started a new project. This time it is print. It is going to be finished this week so you can find it later on my flickr, in the design section.

I wish the day had at least fifty hours so I could do more interesting things. I can not find the time to draw for example. But may be during the Christmas holiday I find some time. There are so many things I would like to draw. One of them would be motor bike Vespa or a car Mini. That are such design icons. I absolutely adore their shapes.

Question for you

How do you guys study? What source of information do you use?