Web design education.
The current issue (276) of A List Apart concentrates on the difficulties people have to study web design and above all, the quality of web design education. The two articles published triggered quite a lot of questionning and thoughts. Let’s face it, Web design education doesn’t practically exist. One of the major drawbacks according to me is that Web design is considered as a poor “sibling” of the larger “programming” family. Seems to me that, in Mauritius for example, Web design “oriented” classes will be given at the IVTB rather than at the University.
On my part, I do have a postgraduate degree in computer science and I have to admit that the “Web” courses I had there brought nothing to me. It was just an analysis of a list of tags used in HTML and a little bit of CSS. Some PHP was also considered as our programming base was OOP but not more. Everything I use today in my everyday job has been acquired in books and on reading online articles from sites like A List Apart and Web Designer blogs.
Another thing is, are the people giving those Web Design courses fully qualified? Let’s take an example, this is in no case a personal attack, just a fact. This person is called “Darkprint” and has been awarded the best student in graphic design and multimedia at the IVTB which has been covered by the press etc. Congrats to him! Problem is: his site is not standards compliant, there’s an overuse of images and spacers, the CSS is horrible. This shows that the courses he has had in Web Design were really poor. Furthermore, there’s a huge business management problem. If you’re going to be a freelancer, you have to manage your image and business. Do they teach that also? It doesn’t seem to be the case. On coming on this portfolio some things seem wrong. The only information I have is that the guy is young and ambitious and is called Darkprint and he uses a gmail account while having his own domain name. This lacks professionalism just because I won’t even know, provided I search the whole site or open the article, who the person is at the first glance.
Web design is more complex than it seems and many designers get into the job being completely oblivious of the REAL basic knowledge. Many people think that mastering [insert image editing software name here] is all that you need. The web culture, the trends, interactions, research and coding standards and knowledge are not taught! The uses neither. The WASP as well as the W3C have set up Web design education programs but these need time to get into the teaching culture, then it will take time to get the teachers qualified and eventually we’ll be able to get great Web designers leaving school with great value in their hands.
Category: Web Design Education
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You are perfectly right. These days I am feeling that I am wasting my time at the university. Concerning the web technologies module, it only taught me what i already knew before even starting the module. Some html, asp and php with ajax and css. Only the basic though.
If I had not learn from the web and ebooks, maybe I would not have been able to even make a simple registratio form and submit with php lol.
They dont really teach anything but the basic. Concerning web design, i think it should be a separate fiel of study in itself. As you said, inserting image and coding some html is not what matter. I know html and i know how to edit some css… i know how to write some php and tweak where needed,. This does not make me a web designer though. In mauritius, there are many people who know some html think they are already a web designer. Or worst..some who know how to edit a photo in photoshop think themselves to be graphic designers lol.
Nice post btw.
Thanks Avish
.
I really think that real Web design courses will be eventually offered but there’s at least 5 to 10 years to wait (yeah I’m a visionary) but what will really make the difference will be the quality of these courses and this will solely depend on the quality of this generation’s Web designers… which is near to amateurish. This is where the work must start.
Can you please check ur own work before checking others. your website has been rejected it the W3C Markup Validation Service
Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 188 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication.
The error was: utf8 “\xE9″ does not map to Unicode
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webdesign-bureau-of-mauritius.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
Hi Darkprint,
nice of you to try validating this blog. However, this is not my own work. If you know a bit about blogs most of them run on templates and this one runs on a template built by other people. If you read a bit around you’ll see that the official Web Design Bureau template is under construction. If you want to have fun validating my own work, you would probably try validating my own portfolio‘s code and CSS. You can use the FF/IE Web Dev toolbars and Firebug to come to this.
On the other hand, validating a website is not the only thing in web design. I am here talking about other things like the use of UX, usability, accessibility standards and what not. There has not been any criticism of your work but only the way in which it is being implemented. Just a few tweaks would make your portfolio work for you.
Mail received from Darkprint:
thank you for the back link on you blog. i have receive 3 client in 2 days. and guess what those people came on your blog and prefered me to design their website.
Are you jealous of mauritian designers or agencies?
hey many i pity people like you…
Enfin 1 grand “P” rest and grand “P” lol
Bien triste ki u living in the shadow of people like me…
Thanks again for the back link…
even goggle and microsoft website have more than 65 errors and warnings on W3C validator… if they dnt care why should i care….
No problem, you don’t have to thank me for this (all backlinks are in no follow mode). I don’t see why I should be jealous. And why use the word “jealous”. I am aiming for the use of standards and quality, this has nothing to do with getting contracts or whatnot. It would also be better not to use foul language if that’s fine with you. And as I said in my earlier reply: having a valid code is not the main issue here. Concerning the personal attacks its up to you to see what publicity this is doing you.
Hello…
Just want to remind that the previous mail send in the name of darkprint is not send by me.
[Mail received from Darkprint:
thank you for the back link on you blog. i have receive 3 client in 2 days. and guess what those people came on your blog and prefered me to design their website.
Are you jealous of mauritian designers or agencies?
hey many i pity people like you…
Enfin 1 grand “P” rest and grand “P” lol
Bien triste ki u living in the shadow of people like me…
Thanks again for the back link…
even goggle and microsoft website have more than 65 errors and warnings on W3C validator… if they dnt care why should i care….]
And i would like to know why you write all this about me and saying “i send you those messages”.
Someone is using my identity and replying.
What is this website about? WEbdesign Bureau of mauritius?
If you think you are a perfect design thats your problem. So remove everything linked to me.
@Amitrai: I tried to discuss calmly with you via mail. IP tracking has gone up to your IP address. POST info on my portfolio’s log indicate the same IPs. There has not been any insult on my part but I did receive threats. I won’t write more on the subject, you who you are and what you have done. Here’s a French saying: “Qui ne dit mot consente”.
@No Name: Thanks for intervening. I have nothing against Eservices.mu. I didn’t know that Darkprint worked for them anyway. And there is no link between this article and that which involved Eservices’ portfolio. Once again, I’m stressing on the fact that web design education is way behind and other important subjects like project management, business management and portfolio SEO as well as business model are not included in the syllabus.
Darkprint is working at eservices.mu anyways!
F*** validation dark print! Your website is cool except for the footer! But the markup makes me puke
! Seriously!
We are in 2009 and you are still designing with tables! Use tables only for tabular data not for the whole site!If you dont know about the advantages, its about time you read all the posts on this blog!
Better get yourself to work buddy! You are way behind the loads of web designers in Mauritius!