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What’s Your Level of Knowledge
With the standards war coming to an end many designers find themselves forced to draw the proverbial line in the sand, and ultimately determining what level of standards and accessibility knowledge they want to possess…
With the standards war coming to an end many designers find themselves forced to draw the proverbial line in the sand, and ultimately determining what level of standards and accessibility knowledge they want to possess. Memes are popping up everywhere declaring absolutist views on everything from CSS levels to AJAX skills. We ask ourselves which of these categories we fall into, and whether we’re behind or ahead of the fold. This breed of thinking gets the community nowhere if we all bicker over who has the largest- CSS vocabulary. We begin to lose sight of the most important part of our jobs; our client’s needs.
Do we have an obligation to our clients to know everything one possibly can about our various technologies? There’s a wealth of knowledge and how many of us can really harness all of it? New frameworks and acronyms emerge every day. Exactly how accessible does a site need to be? If we say our responsibility is to do the best possible job we can with the skills we have, where does that leave the designer who’s never known a tableless layout? Where does that leave the programmer cranking out RIAs without blinking but has never seen a color wheel? And what of the print designer making the leap to interactive?
No one has the answers, but I’ve got some ideas. What if we all learned as much as we possibly could about our profession and did the best possible job we could with that knowledge for every client? What if we all strived at the very least to make sites that could be used by most people on most browsers? (And by most I don’t mean Mozilla and IE alone, but Netscape 2.3? C’mon.) In achieving this, there shouldn’t be any additional work required in making a site accessible for a screen reader or any number of alternate browsing methods.
The truth is, every client’s needs are different. By demanding the entire industry adhere to minimum guidelines, a designer can be sure that even the most minimal needs are met. Not every site has to have access keys. On a private site, you can be fairly certain who the majority of your users are, unlike a non-profit site where the visitors are more likely to reflect the browsing population as a whole. That’s not to say extra accessibility isn’t useful on a private site. Have you ever tried to visit a site that’s been Digged, only to find after the 15th refresh the stylesheet is never going to load and all you’ve got is text?
We’re in a relatively new profession, there’s no reason any web designer should be so set in their ways they “don’t have time to learn CSS” or “don’t have time to add alt attributes.” A lot of our industry’s problems boil down to laziness. Let’s face it, learning new things can be overwhelming, but this is where the community steps in. If we want tables and poor usability (to name a few) to go away, then we have to do something about it besides complaining.
Anyone can write a blog professing themselves to be the most innovative business professional ever, or the foremost doctype-strict authority around. Anyone can write a tutorial on how to make a shiny badge or round cornered little boxes. What if instead of telling other people who to run their businesses or keep up with the latest design trends, we offered them something a little more substantial? What if we all shared real, concrete knowledge and showed it in use? We could trade gradient box tutorials for Microformats how tos, and CSS memes for wireframe primers.
We all could learn something from each other, even if we don’t author CSS books or lecture at the latest design conference. You don’t have to be a guru. I think the biggest responsibility we have is to keep learning, as a community, how we can give our clients a better site and a better experience.
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Hi Beth,
Thumbs up to you. This is an intresting article, and i agree with you 100%.
There’s a saying: “Jack of all trades, master of none”.
A single person simply can’t become an expert at everything from print design to authoring web sites. You can have some knowledge of all of these and perhaps even manage to practice it with some degree of success but you’ll never be one of the best. Even when creating a website, you can’t do everything from the information architecture, to the design, the coding, and so on, by yourself, and do it perfectly.
So, I say, don’t try to learn everything because you wil fail. Stick to the one thing you do best and constantly improve on it.
Lucian, I absolutely agree. No one can possibly know everything there is to know about everything, the best we can hope for is to do a good job for our clients.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the renaissance method of learning a little of everything, but people should definitely specialize and they might surprise themselves, and be able to teach the rest of us something we didn’t know!
As an author of one of the memes (CSS) I happen to disagree with you. Striving for higher levels is not just about learning more acronyms. It’s about being better at what you do, designing good sites.
The point of all the “levels of”-articles is to motivate people to learn more. I’ve had lots of feedback on mine from people that got the lust back to learning more about CSS. Learning more is never a bad thing.
No, you don’t need to know everything, but if you find yourself at the bottom levels of any of the charts that might be a reason to read up.
Thanks for your comment.
Emil, thanks for your input. I wholeheartedly agree we can always learn more! I didn’t mean to say keeping up with the latest standards is all about acronyms. Sometimes I think we get wrapped up in who knows more and lose sight of what’s really important. Unfortunately the people that are at the bottom of those levels are (probably) not the people who are reading your meme.
The designers I’ve known not implementing current web standards and practices are very detached from the rest of the design community. They’re designers who learned using something like Hot Dog Pro and Geocities’ editor, and want to continue in a WYSIWYG environment and not bother with much coding themselves, so what do they care what’s under the hood since chances are they rarely see it?
So you’ve brought me to another thought, how can we then get these people into the community? I’ve no doubt with a community backing them they’d have a lot more motivation to move forward, and gain a solid understanding of what’s current, but it’s a matter of getting them immersed in the community that becomes problematic.
However, this wasn’t really a rant on designers in the dark ages, because I think that problem may eventually solve itself. As I said, I feel that many designers get too wrapped up in trying to impress (and complain about table based layouts) and forget about creating a great experience for their client because they’re too busy making rounded corners hacks. We could all take a collective step back and say “What is it that I’m good at, and how can I use that to better serve my clients and the community?” and push forward in that direction.
Wonderful! Bringing our attention to the lower levels of design ability. Paying attention to the ones who need to be informed. The people who are in the higher levels already know!
Educating the unknowing, count me in!