Voodoochilli Design

This year Voodoochilli turns ten years old which is a long time for such a new industry. Ten years ago I vividly remember working on a September morning on a personal project. I stopped putting together the table infested HTML document with Adobe GoLive to run and see what the commotion was next door. My then student girlfriend Becky was watching the devastating news of planes hitting the Twin Towers. It was a scary time.

Ten years later and almost everything has changed. George Bush Junior has been replaced by the first black president of America. Becky is now my wife and thankfully I no longer design websites with tables or use GoLive.

Technically a lot of other things have changed for the web design industry in this time. Internet Explorer 6 is officially dead and I doubt many people will mourn the loss. (Sadly though, although IE 6 has gone, IE 7 and 8 are terrible browsers that cause web developers problems worldwide.) You can do things today with websites that simply were not possible back then and our whole understanding of web technology has changed considerably.

The web is more than just technology, and it changed people on a vast social scale. So much so that Web 2.0 feels like an outdated phrase. With the web becoming such a big part of society, everybody is now connected. People that have always been Luddites now have their own Facebook and twitter pages as well as internet enabled Wii consoles, Blackberries and iPhones. It is a strange time indeed! As well as the many benefits this brings, it does also create what I consider to be a major failing of the industry. There simply are no real standards, and this is exacerbated by the fact that many people think that web design is only about technology. That to build a website all you need is a copy of Dreamweaver or to be the kind of person who builds computers. This, I feel, has reduced the overall quality of websites, with many people hiring computer enthusiasts rather than designers to build their sites. There are still people building websites with Microsoft Word and no understanding of HTML and CSS let alone a strong background in art and design, an understanding of layout, composition, colour theory and typography. Web design is art and science, and one without the other reaps very poor results.

I am hopeful that my minor gripes with the web design movement are transient. So much has changed in so little time, something that no doubt will continue.

I just thought I would mention this in case people haven’t heard about it yet, Apples itunes application has a nice little feature called itunes U. Its similar to podcasts with the exception that its all about lectures. You can listen to recorded lectures from some of the best universities. It does seems to be mostly American Universities at the moment, but I expect there will be more soon.

A nice little thing is that you don’t need to download the whole track, its streamed so you can listen and skip to see if you like it before downloading the whole thing. Stanfords itunes U site is a great place to get started.