Educating the unknowing, count me in!

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.

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.

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!

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.