I remember a girl who wanted to write, during my university days, a research paper on “Science and technical students and their approach to canon literature.” The first thing to be done, as she was being guided by her tutors, was to define “canon literature”. It happens that she dismissed science fiction, hence dismissing J.R.R Tolkien who entered the British canon in 1996 with “The Lord of the Rings”.

I’m saying this because sometimes, reading things out of our own world might give us other approaches to our work. These might help us improve our way of designing web sites. They might push us to other boundaries which are less rigid than just building either with creative juices and forgetting usability or doing just usability and code while forgetting the fun part of things.

You might for example tackle this report on Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study of Health and Finance Web Sites published by a Stanford (Google anyone?) research group. This sheds some light on how experts evaluate a site according to its content, while online consumers evaluate the same sites on the basis of design. So if you want a website that sells both to experts and consumers (lightly said) you would need to have both content and design. Consumer Web Watch has a lot of other reports of that sort.

Who knows, you might even want to try Maslow’s classic psychology research on human needs where he defines the characteristics of the basic human needs and how to satisfy them. This is taught to marketing students: by designing a product that fulfills more needs than that of your competitor, your product might have more success whatever the price. Examples: Iphone, German/Italian Cars (for Europe) which can’t be sold in the US because of the need for bigger cars…

As the Dalai Lama said “Each year, go somewhere you’ve never been before”. This just might work to improve your web desiging.

Mark Boulton’s Practical guide to Designing for the Web is already considered as a stepping stone in Web design and I hope that the winners of the PDF book giveaway will take great pleasure in scouring its pages. The contest was a real success and it is a pleasure to read all your comments. These are really inspiring and unveil the Web as a real up to date way of acquiring new information and skills while keeping books as a classical yet favourite tool. This will keep Steve Robillard’s hopes high as, I’m sure, books will never go out of business.

Now back to the prizes. We had 71 participants and the whole draw was done on random.org where the list of participants was uploaded and the list randomized in one single draw.

So, as you can see, the winners are:

• Corrinne
• Jonathan Chacko

Congratulations to both of you. Please send me your full name via email as each book is personalised. I’ll send you the links for downloading them. Thanks to all who participated and stay in touch for other giveaways coming your way soon.

A month ago, I wrote an article on web design education in Mauritius which got me some sour reactions from so-called “web design professionals” from Mauritius. Sure, the first reaction in Mauritius is to insult then think. But do you do it when you’re a professional? Anyway, this is their way of doing the business: ego and self-satisfaction ensuring that all the inequalities prevailing in Mauritius carries on healthily. [Rant and denounciation off]

Coming back to the issue of web design education, a lot has come out from the ongoing contest to win a copy of Mark Boulton’s “Designing for the web”. Read the comments and you’ll get a great view of how most people in the industry have learned their trade. As a matter of fact, school and university lectures are practically non-existent in web design. Most of the time this goes in this order:

1. Learn from the web with online tutorials
2. Learn by scouting portfolios and “big hats” in the trade
3. Books (depending on how they are written, bland and factual ones are not favourites)
4. Ebooks/PDF books (new technology has us)
5. Practice (trial and error)

Once again, read through the comments (and add yours if you’re interested in the topic or the contest) and get to know how people have started out in the domain.

Along with these are two excellent overviews that I would like to share. These might even be the groundwork for a new way of teaching or building a curriculum around web design:

• Teach the Web has published a Monograph where the underlying question is “What to teach to the next generation of web professionals?”. Leslie Jensen-Inman has interviewed 32 top category web designers to understand that intricacies and issues of learning web design and the results are astounding. They are to the point and well documented. A real view of what web design education should be.
• The School of Visual Arts has an MFA in interaction design as well as a great active blog on the theme of interaction design. Readers have requested reading recommendations in terms of interaction design and this has given a superb list of books to be assigned/already assigned to their courses.
  

  These could be landmark texts, underdogs, or critical reads, or stepping stones to other fields.

One of the last tweets I saw today stated: “Reading is hazardous for your stupidity…”. Thanks for the message pal! Looking back at what has been hazardous for my stupidity through the past week is the PDF book I bought off Five Simple Steps by Mark Boulton.

What I like with Web design guru Mark Boulton is his transversal view of web design and his direct and concise way of explaining the underlying design concepts. It reads with a great pace while giving you “to the point” information on webdesign in a 100+ PDF printable, personalised book! This is another example of a great Web design book to own. You can read other writings from Mark Boulton on his blog.

Having said this, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius is offering 2 (yes TWO) copies of Mark Boulton’s book. Just leave a comment on this post about your experience of “learning” from books (most web designers, designers or programmers do so at a certain point in their lives) to enter the contest which will end on Monday 2nd of March 2009. I can assure you that you’ll even love the book’s layout!

Experienced webdesigners tend to forget that beginning in webdesigning, especially in css, is really hard. This is also the case when one has to make the jump from the deprecated way of designing and HTML coding to the use of divisions and CSS.

Basically, using standards in coding and CSS is the act of separating content from structure while managing the latter to allow it to hold the former in place. In this case, the code is the holder and works for the profit of content and not the way round. Now, if you want to get started in CSS or change your designing approach you HAVE to learn. The big question remains: where and how ?

A quick search in any search engine will show that you have more CSS tutorial websites than you can shake a stick at. I have nothing against tutorials but these, however, won’t get you in full swing without the knowledge of basic concepts. Many webdesigners have started CSS the hard way tinkering some code here and there and wading through the neverending fog of browser testing, code hacking and DOM inspecting. CSS being the standard way of doing things now, what was supposed to happen did happen: hundreds of books! There too you have your numerous bookstore shelf but the “for dummies” thing won’t get your backside out of the fire.

Which one then? For me, the question is simple and easy and the answer is short: Jeffrey Zeldman.

In 1998, Jeffrey co-founded—and from 1999 to 2002 he directed—The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition that helped bring standards to our browsers. Once browser makers got with the program, Jeffrey and his cohorts persuaded designers and developers to change the way they created websites—an effort to which A List Apart also greatly contributed.

My opinion is that Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman is the eye-opener any webdesigner must read at least once in his/her life. My own personal experience is based on this book, read some 5 years ago. The power of this book is the way in which it presents web standards and css without actually being a dumb step by step tutorial book. This is the one book to read in the first place as it is written for technical and non-technical persons. Once this is done, you’ll be ready to read any other CSS oriented book or tutorial site fully understanding them and why you’re doing it.