pro
08-12-2003, 12:08 PM
Long long ago in an office not so far away . . . I spent most of my days (and too many of my nights) designing documents and interactive features for corporate Web presences. Well before the economic bubble burst, I had a parting of the ways with a management I knew to be hideously incompetent (imagine a Dilbert movie written and directed by Wes Craven if you want visuals.) For a the first couple of years, I had my severence package and a modest inheritance to keep me carefree. I gamed, I wrote, I developed some ability as a musician, and life was grand. After a time, the dribs and drabs of revenue I could get from my other creative endeavors started to look smaller and smaller while my savings vanished. The firm where I enjoyed/endured my last regular job has long since imploded in spite of my Cassandra-esque warnings to friends and co-founders that dark forces were undermining all that had been achieved there.
Cut to the present, when I have been destitute long enough to have learned most of what I believe poverty can teach. I'm looking to get back in the design game, as overcrowded as it may be. However, I find myself out of touch on some levels. When I walked away from the craft, CSS/DHTML were new buzzwords for techniques that could only produce browser-specific features. I got my start before Netscape 1.1 (with its mindblowing innovations like background imagery and the tableture.) Right up through the release of the 4.0 browsers, I was a serious professional devouring whatever I could find to keep myself at the vanguard of Web design. Then the rat race sickened me to the point that I said "to hell with it all" and didn't do anything beyond very crude lightweight designs for several years.
The point of this post is not to promote myself, as I know I am not ready to do anything major just yet. Instead, what I want to do is to tap into this community for insights into the most useful or spectacular innovations from the past five years. For example, I totally missed the boat on PHP. Back in the day I often thought about how to deal with the problems it solves, utilizing approaches ranging from foisting a lot of extra work on sysadmin staff to undertaking ambitious server-side Java projects. Now I am devoting a fair portion of each day to developing a strong command of PHP techniques, as it seems to be popular for many good reasons.
What I want to know is, what else should a rusty old-timer investigate in order to update a neglected skill set? If you had spent the last five years in suspended animation, what subjects would you be studying in order to catch up with changes in Web design? Reading other threads I was surprised to discover how dramatically Netscape had been marginalized. I remember bragging to colleauges that I was designing commercial sites when Bill Gates was making statements like, "the Internet is a passing fad that will go the way of the BBS." By the time I dropped out, IE was a viable competitor clearly rising in popularity, but to go so far so quickly is either horrifying or impressive, depending on your opinion of Microsoft. Are there other profound ways in which the landscape has changed?
I haven't been living in a cave since turning in my key at the old office. In a typical week I spend a fair amount of time online, and my current system was high spec when I bought it . . . in the previous century. I do have some thoughts and intuitions on how the profession has changed. However, I know that I have been out of the action, compared to many of you who seem to be out there in the front lines, doing the day-to-day work that drives the evolution of the Web forward. Hopefully this topic will spark lively discussion and give everyone something to contemplate. Barring that, at least I hope to get a recommendation or two that will shorten the journey between where I am at this morning and where I need to be in order to do some innovative work of my own. Since this is my first time here, I included a good deal more background than I normally would. Even so, beware that I do tend to write at length in forums, even by the standards of a refreshingly intelligent community like this one.
Regards,
pro
Cut to the present, when I have been destitute long enough to have learned most of what I believe poverty can teach. I'm looking to get back in the design game, as overcrowded as it may be. However, I find myself out of touch on some levels. When I walked away from the craft, CSS/DHTML were new buzzwords for techniques that could only produce browser-specific features. I got my start before Netscape 1.1 (with its mindblowing innovations like background imagery and the tableture.) Right up through the release of the 4.0 browsers, I was a serious professional devouring whatever I could find to keep myself at the vanguard of Web design. Then the rat race sickened me to the point that I said "to hell with it all" and didn't do anything beyond very crude lightweight designs for several years.
The point of this post is not to promote myself, as I know I am not ready to do anything major just yet. Instead, what I want to do is to tap into this community for insights into the most useful or spectacular innovations from the past five years. For example, I totally missed the boat on PHP. Back in the day I often thought about how to deal with the problems it solves, utilizing approaches ranging from foisting a lot of extra work on sysadmin staff to undertaking ambitious server-side Java projects. Now I am devoting a fair portion of each day to developing a strong command of PHP techniques, as it seems to be popular for many good reasons.
What I want to know is, what else should a rusty old-timer investigate in order to update a neglected skill set? If you had spent the last five years in suspended animation, what subjects would you be studying in order to catch up with changes in Web design? Reading other threads I was surprised to discover how dramatically Netscape had been marginalized. I remember bragging to colleauges that I was designing commercial sites when Bill Gates was making statements like, "the Internet is a passing fad that will go the way of the BBS." By the time I dropped out, IE was a viable competitor clearly rising in popularity, but to go so far so quickly is either horrifying or impressive, depending on your opinion of Microsoft. Are there other profound ways in which the landscape has changed?
I haven't been living in a cave since turning in my key at the old office. In a typical week I spend a fair amount of time online, and my current system was high spec when I bought it . . . in the previous century. I do have some thoughts and intuitions on how the profession has changed. However, I know that I have been out of the action, compared to many of you who seem to be out there in the front lines, doing the day-to-day work that drives the evolution of the Web forward. Hopefully this topic will spark lively discussion and give everyone something to contemplate. Barring that, at least I hope to get a recommendation or two that will shorten the journey between where I am at this morning and where I need to be in order to do some innovative work of my own. Since this is my first time here, I included a good deal more background than I normally would. Even so, beware that I do tend to write at length in forums, even by the standards of a refreshingly intelligent community like this one.
Regards,
pro