I recently finished a major redesign of my site. I had a lot of fun designing and building this new version and got a chance to experiment a ton with new things. A few of the changes that I made include using CSS3 instead of images, the addition of @media queries, and simplifying the entire site to focus more on my blog.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart Seattle. The conference itself was two days long, followed by a one day workshop on HTML5 and CSS3. I got to hear from experts like Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Jeremy Keith, Andy Clarke and a lot more. I even got to meet and talk to Andy Clarke at lunch.
A couple of days ago Elliot Jay Stocks posted a tweet about his feelings on web designers who can’t write code. Since then, the web design community has erupted into a debate on whether or not designers should be able to code. I can see valid points on both sides of the argument and I must admit I’m not totally sure where I stand on this subject.
Universities are great places to learn a lot of things. Traditional four-year programs offer a lot of courses that are of huge benefit to students. One program, though, that seems to be out of place in most traditional universities is web design. The reason I say this is because, unfortunately, I chose to major in web design at a traditional college.