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?
