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.