Kids learning web design
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- studderine0
Tl;dr?
- pr20
"Worse even, it was just devoid of quality control, self awareness, basic design principles, etc."
You can apply this quote with slight modifications to ANYTHING today.
Remember that unlike us who grew up with some kind of role models and standards - the new generation is growing up with none of that. With all the positives that come from that set-up there is a crap load of negatives: one being they have absolutely no clue what's going on and why what they are doing is utterly worthless. And of course ultimately is it really? The new generation of customers grew up in similar circumstances so they themselves don't know distinction of good and bad. This in turn means that some other standards of quality emerge - the kind of standards we might not be aware of - the standards that might not actually be based on "quality" as that word means very little to those guys.
- they have Skrillex... no role models? pleasemonospaced
- saying they don't have roll models doesn't say much about us.moldero
- scarabin0
i hope they get worse. then i can charge more
- e-pill0
..your theme music sir
- mg33
I hope this doesn't come off as some holier-than-thou rant, because that's not what I'm intending here. A name popped into my head recently for a child that belonged to friends of my parents. I'd not thought of them in at least 10 years or more.
Looked them up on the web and discovered they were learning web design at a tech school over the past few years. The sheer horror of the portfolio work and websites I found kind of made me sad in a way. It's 2013, and every bit of images, art, site design, functionality, etc. was reminiscent of what I remember seeing students create more than a decade ago when I was in school. Worse even, it was just devoid of quality control, self awareness, basic design principles, etc.
Yeah, we're all novices at one point, trying to balance talent with ideas and inspiration and skill development. But when I browsed this work, I really started to be upset about the fact that a school - even a modern tech school - would let a student be so seemingly behind the times in what they were creating. I was surprised these sites weren't all built out of tables. Shocked at all the bad image-based text buttons. Terrible gradients. Unaligned text. Beveled buttons. Six different fonts. Buttons that shift oddly when you hover. Total shambles of usability. Some stuff looked like they'd used Illustrator's pen tool while blindfolded - jagged points all over, non-straight lines, etc.
If people saw this portfolio, they would laugh. It would absolutely not get them a job, or work, from anyone with even a modicum of contemporary design intelligence.
So who is most responsible for this? Is it the school's fault for teaching poorly? For mentoring students poorly? For approving such poor work in a web design / multimedia curriculum? For teachers being way behind trends and design methods?
I keep thinking of this analogy: If someone went to culinary school, and graduated, and was making meals using spoiled food, smushed all over a plate, overcooked, over seasoned, etc. that would be a poor reflection of the school that let them get that far with such poor skills, right? But on the other hand, your passion for something should lead you to be current with your skills, have an understanding of contemporary and modern methods so you'd be aware enough to avoid a path down the wrong road.
I don't know... Sorry for the huge post. I just got really bummed out that someone I used to know went to school for something they obviously want to do for a living, and the outcome of that was just so bad. Fucking awful. I'm not going to post any of it, so don't ask me to. Just think of the worst web design you saw around 1999 and you'll have an idea.
