I guess I’ve always kind of known that client work wouldn’t be all it was made out to be. I always knew that as a designer, I’d be told that my designs weren’t what the client expected and that I’d have to change things, and that it wouldn’t be perfect the first time around. I’ve known that from both my education – where our work would go through iteration after iteration before coming out at the final product – and from personal illustration/design work. But I suppose the difference is that in those cases, I was working towards a better end product.

It seems right now I’m just moving backwards.

Before I go any further, a couple of notes:

• I’m just on placement. I work in a small development agency and we don’t get huge clients coming to us. A lot of our client base is made up of charities.
• I don’t do the design work. We hire someone else to do the designs, we just code them and add functionality. Most of the time, I’m the one coding the design and making it look nice (effectively online prototyping).

Right, so bearing that in mind: one of our clients at the moment wants certain things in their navigation. That deviates from the pretty good design that we had given them originally. In itself, that’s fine. But the way they wanted to change it was not so fine. It meant that they’d have five areas of navigation on a single page – and on some pages, six (depending on the user context menu). In order to make space for it, they chose to remove the search box. Great.

I made it very clear that I wasn’t comfortable with doing that,  and my colleague made it very clear to them that I wasn’t comfortable with doing that, but the client made it very clear to us that that was how she wanted it done. So that’s how it’s been done. Because that’s how she uses the web, so that’s how other people will, too.

Over the last few months there’s been a lot of discussion about responsive web design and whether or not that’s the “right” way to do things. I saw quite a good tweet the other day that summed up my feelings on the matter. Unfortunately it seems I was stupid and didn’t favourite it, but it ran something along the lines of “what sort of industry is this if people who are new to it immediately get told that they’re doing things ‘wrong’?”

And that’s fair. There shouldn’t be a right and wrong way of doing things on the web. You shouldn’t need to have arguments about vendor prefixes or responsive web design or whether PCs or Macs are better. (PCs, obviously.) As much as I hate to admit it, I think that article in the Guardian a couple of days ago was a pretty good one. Not that I agree with him by any means (I think graphic designers make the web a beautiful place to be), but the reason I use to the web is to find out about things – to find information. There are few sites out there that are designed for the sake of being designed.

So information, if it’s what you’re looking for, should be prevalent on a website. Make it look pretty, by all means – after all, the example cited in the above article was just awful – and make it functional. Code it well, and you won’t have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. But then add your quirks to the top. Then add your vendor prefixes and your responsive stuff and your JavaScript fallbacks for browsers that don’t support them. Get your information across first, get the basic design right, then play around with it.

That’s why I’m not enjoying working for this particular client. They seem to be forgetting that users are going to come to their site looking for information, and their five areas of navigation and lack of a search bar is going to make it extraordinarily difficult for them. And that’s not even going into their convoluted submenu system.

So where should you use those pretty things you’ve picked up? Well, where you can show them off. If it’s not client work, or if it’s not essential to the work at hand… then go ahead and play. Portfolios, app pages (of your own creation, not for a client), CMS pages and so on… in my opinion, that’s where you ought to be playing. Of course, I’ll still whimper if you tell me it’s webkit-only (because I use Firefox), but there’s your playground, there’s where you can move the web forward. It won’t affect your clients’ websites. If you’re one of those lucky people (those so-called “elitists” … you know, those people who have worked hard to get where they are), then go ahead and charge clients for the privelege of having those things on their sites, too. Bigger clients should get those choices.

But a simple charity website doesn’t need those things.

So if the client doesn’t need them, should you spend the time faffing over them? No, I don’t think so. Lower-end clients aren’t going to ask for a mobile-first design that has glowing borders on the search box that has an AJAX dropdown because lower-end clients quite often don’t know what any of that stuff means. They just want to log onto a website and use it and leave again. Remember, these people don’t even know which version of Internet Explorer they’re using.

Finally, a note to myself: draft your posts before you start writing them, Sophie, because this was all over the place and didn’t make much sense. Also, get more sleep if you’re going to try blogging. That really doesn’t help.

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My computer is old.

When I say it’s old, I mean it’s relatively old. One of my harddrives is nearly a decade old, and the other gave out during my first year of uni. I only upgraded from DDR2 to DDR3 RAM sticks just before Christmas last year (or was it just after we came back? Dates get a bit fuzzy sometimes). None of the components are spectacular, although I do have Richard’s old motherboard, graphics card and CPU, which he bought for gaming only three years ago. They’re not great, but they’re not fabulous. But they serve my purpose.

Unfortunately, one of the things I’ve always had to rely on with this piece of – well, I say junk lovingly – was the network adapter. Yep: I’m oldschool and I use a cable to connect to the internet. Why? Twofold:

1. I don’t trust wifi. It can be flaky. It doesn’t always work. Besides, a cable is faster. It, like, goes straight through and doesn’t get intercepted by the air, or something. (I’m not a huge techy person, can you tell?)
2. I don’t trust our wifi.

I think it’s that second point that’s the most valid here. Like a lot of people in Bristol, we’re on Virgin, and we’re supposed to get 50Mb connections. Again, I don’t know the details, I’m not hugely techy. But I do know we don’t get those speeds, that we aren’t expected to get those speeds (because we can only get “up to” 50Mb), and that neither my laptop, mobile and desktop, when connected over wifi, can get anywhere near the speeds we’re meant to get.

I know that the wifi just drops out spontaneously. I know that the speeds are dreadful and if I so much as breathe in the direction of my wireless adapter then I can forget about connecting to the internet for a week.

It didn’t seem so bad when my network adapter gave out on Thursday, because Richard brought a wireless adapter around in its stead. That worked for a short while, on Friday evening, but then it stopped recognising the network altogether. Possibly the card’s fault? At least, that’s what I assume, since I can still connect to the internet over wifi on my laptop, even if it is a tenuous link.

So I’ve had to resort to using my laptop for a while. I’m lucky enough that my beautiful, darling Dell laptop has a …. an ethernet port? Is that what it’s called? Yeah, it’s got one of those, so I can just plug my cable right in. It makes for a rather messy desk, not to mention the fact that I don’t have the space to put my tablet and do some drawing, and I have to have my computer on simultaneously to listen to music (as I need the soundcard on the mobo in the computer to use those speakers).

On the plus side (again), Richard then went on to order a new network adapter for my computer. That’s currently sitting on my desk here, at work, in a box that I can’t open because I don’t have any scissors (d’oh!). So I’m assuming it’s what I want it to be. He says I ought to try and plug it in myself, but I don’t have any screwdrivers of my own, I’ve never done it on my own before, and I’d rather do it with him there to say “DON’T DO THAT YOU’RE GOING TO EXPLODE THE UNIVERSE” or something.

And before yesterday, he would probably have scoffed that I wouldn’t do something liket hat. But I did kinda throw our dinner all over the floor yesterday afternoon, so hey, anything can happen.

In the meantime, I’ll just stick to my laptop, and use the cable with that until Friday. There are worse things that I could get lumped with. I could be using that stupid Vodafone 3G stick in the hospital again. Or I might not have a laptop at all. (A laptop that has the samei nternet speed when I’m sitting right next to the router as when I’m sitting in my bedroom upstairs.)

I might not have the internet. Then where the heck would I be?!

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It’s pretty easy to make a portfolio when you’re working as an individual, or you’re just adding lab work, or you do a lot of freelancing stuff on the side. It’s also a lot easier to make that portfolio when you’re skilled in the art of the pretties – because you can just bung ‘em up on the internet for people to “ooh” and “aah” at.

But what happens when you join a company that works as a unit to  create a website? What happens if you’re a developer, or a software developer, and you can’t say “look at this” because people won’t “get” it?

That’s what I’m facing at the moment. I’ve done a fair amount of work on several websites in the last few months while I’ve been working with Circle. I’ve created a custom module, but it’s on our intranet. I’ve rethemed several sites, but I’ve just done the coding and not the design. Can I put that in a portfolio? Someone else did the design, someone else did the  content, I just put it all together.

How do you go about building that sort of portfolio? How can you showcase your talents if you’re just a part of a team? (Not to say “just” a part of a team, mind: I mean a part of a team as opposed to working on your own.)

Maybe I’ll just take screenshots of the pages and the code and see where that gets me. What do you guys do?

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There’s been a lot of kerfuffle going about recently to do with “what should be taught in IT at schools”. Certainly Anna Debenham is a huge advocate for change, and while I agree with her that change is necessary, I don’t think she’s going about it the right way.

Right now, at GCSE level, IT courses include information about how to do mail merge in Word, make websites in PowerPoint (!!), create a leaflet in Publisher, a spreadsheet of prices in Excel and a database in Access. Yes, they’re all Microsoft Office products. No, I don’t think we should be making websites in PowerPoint. Yes, those are some useful skills to learn. Wait: what?

Well, riddle me this. How many people who use computers do coding, high-end stuff like web design and development or software development … and how many use them to browse the internet, write an essay in Word, and write an email to their mother with pictures of kittens saying funny things?

And then you get into “how many kids end up doing computer stuff versus how many do business” – and while I don’t know the numbers, I can take a pretty good guess that most of them do business rather than development and therefore most of them are going to need business skills, like creating leaflets and databases in Publisher and Access, rather than technical skills.

If the new curriculum is useful, then this is great news: j.mp/zLxidV

— Peter Gasston (@stopsatgreen) January 11, 2012

Today the education secretary announced that the current ICT programme is to be scrapped, though, and a new, “open-source” one is to take its place. Is that good, or bad? Well, yes, I agree it needs changing, but does it need changing so much?

Consider: if we teach every kid the ability to code a basic website, will they all leave school thinking “yeah, I don’t need to hire someone to make my site because I can make it myself!”? That’s a very basic way of looking at it but for a long time that’s what I battled against. My peers could put a site together in Front Page and voilà, they had a website. They didn’t need someone else to do it for them! And there’s plenty of examples out there of people who have taken up web design as a hobby that they can teach themselves. Is that the right way to do it? A quick course at school, some open-source options online, and there you have it, “anyone can be a web designer who wants to be a web designer”? Isn’t that a devaluation of our profession?

It’s  a little tricker for computer development, but the point still stands. All those people who go out and study for four years at university for a degree in software development, who learn all the theory behind it and why you should do it this way, and who learn why code is written like that and so on – for them to be undercut by someone who can write software in half an hour using a do-it-yourself program that you got to use in your computer science GCSE… well, it’s a devaluation. It’s not fair on them.

If these things are available to learn at GCSE and A-level, we’re going to see a lack of people going to university for these subjects. There’ll be thoughts of “why should I spend £12,000 (now up to £36,000) on a course when the person in the year below me is going to learn it for free?” Even I think that and I’ve been at uni for two and a half years (kinda). I shouldn’t be doubting myself like this.

There’s always the argument that “well, if people want the right thing to be done, they’ll pay extra for someone to do it professionally” but come on – in this day and age, which are you going to do: pay £1,500 for a website that’ll look great and have all the features you want, or pay £500 for the son of your old college friend to do it because he learned to do it at school? Sure, you’ll have a half-assed job and you’ll probably have to pay extra to get it fixed later, but when you’re hard up and just starting up a business and so on which are you going to pick? It’s hard enough as it is. Don’t let’s make it harder.

I do, however, believe that some fundamental ideas should be taught in schools. This is the C programming language, you use it to write programs that run your set-top box. It is different from C#, and different again from C++. Java is not JavaScript. Try it out, write a “hello world” program in each. Maybe do a short exercise in each. But we don’t really need to take it further.

When I first came to uni one of the things I noticed was that a lot of students don’t want to do the work: they want to be fed the answers. They have no desire to go out and learn for themselves. “We don’t get taught everything on our course!” cries one of my peers regularly. “It has a lot of holes, and we don’t get taught X or Y, but we should.” Well, then why don’t you go out into the big, wide world and do the research yourself?

@Tawreh The most important job of school is teaching kids the ability and desire to learn throughout their lives. /cc @foamcow @robhawkes

— Alex Hardy (@alexhardy) January 11, 2012

To me, school should instil in young people a desire to learn, to go out and discover. That’s the attitude they take in university: they give you the basics, you go out and learn. Why can’t that happen in schools? Why do we expect the schools to give us everything on a silver platter, and leave us high and dry at uni? For many students, university is horrible because they don’t get the answers. It’s a culture shock. So let’s start it in schools.

So teach them the basics, give them some links to visit and some books to read. Build up their general knowledge of computers, computing and how to be safe on the Internet – which I think is more important in this day and age than learning the basics of programming or design in your ICT lessons. (Re: design, I think that ought to be taught in graphics design lessons rather than ICT: keep them separate. But that’s another blog post.) Do we need change? Yes, of course we do. Do we need depth? Not so much. Teach the kids to want to learn. Don’t hand it to them on a plate.

Now I’ll go back to burying my head under the sand and not talking about politics. Sorry, bad habit of mine.

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Time for a breather and a more personal blog than usual, I think.

Christmas this year was lovely. I went home to visit my parents and family for the first time in almost six months, and it was great to have a week off from work to just sit back and enjoy myself. Although admittedly there wasn’t much of that involved – for the most part I was running between my house and the boy’s, which was most hectic at the start of the holiday when we managed to stuff ourselves with two Christmases: one at his house on Christmas Eve, and one at mine on Christmas Day.

The time spent at my house was punctuated by my reams and reams of siblings visiting, a trip to the hospital and a visit to my aunt and uncle’s house on the same day, where we saw most of my dad’s family. It was a great day, but so busy, and so many small children. (I think I successfully insulted one uncle by refusing to hold his baby daughter, though. Oh well.)

Not to mention the wonderful day I spent with my three closest friends, two of whom I haven’t seen in over a year (and the other one not for nine months). It was so nice to have the opportunity to catch up on everything I’ve missed and just spend some time with them again, which I haven’t really been able to do since I was 18. And yes, the Italian was pretty scrummy, too.

Then back to Bristol we came on Monday, and back to work yesterday. No rest for the wicked but I’m sort of glad that I’ll be getting back into some sort of routine: my body clock is all messed up and I’m absolutely shattered from getting up at 6.30 for the last two mornings (I still haven’t caught up on the sleep I lost when I stayed up til 2.30am twice last week!). Give it a week or so and I’m sure I’ll be fine, though.

As far as work is concerned, but again keping to the personal level, HJ will be receiving an update in the next couple of months. I’m actually going to do my portfolio (shock! horror!), rewrite the layout (with some new textures and updated, cleaner code) and play with little bits of the layout (I want to display tags and so on more prominently). I also need to rethink some of the content, and fix my permalinks (not very good for SEO right now, even though I’m not bothered by that so much, but it’d still be nice to have decent links).

What about New Year’s resolutions? Hmm, I’ve only made one this year – and that’s to improve my art. This year I vow not to leave any sketch uncoloured, and to start blocking in shades as I go in an attempt to brush up on my digital painting skills. That good enough for ya?!

So, lots to look forward to. Lots to do! Here’s to a happy 2012.

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