It’s no secret: web developers are some of the most progressive and versatile people you’ll ever work with. It’s a discipline like no other, requiring a culmination of skills that overlap into a plethora of fields whose inhabitants have a seemingly boundless radar for cool, new things. In fact, finding a designer who just designs is becoming more and more rare while designers who also code and have an excellent sense of typography and basic video editing capabilities are becoming almost de facto. As a web expert, it’s important to continually get out of your comfort zone for constant improvement.
When I started down the path of web design it was with a small, but dedicated group of friends all beginning on Angelfire or Geocities (RIP) using WYSIWYG editors. We quickly came to realize how stifling this method of design was and extended into coding our own HTML by hand (and learning it from the awesome HTMLGoodies.com). From there, some of us began to explore the field of graphic design using Photoshop (5, at the time) to enhance the visuals of our designs while others took an interest in server side languages that were popular at the time, namely PHP and Perl. We all helped each other in the areas we particularly excelled and there was always an air of camaraderie and constant collaboration as a means to success.
I don’t think any of us realized it at the time, but we were evolving and adapting as quickly as the web; embodying all of the underlying ideals that make it the impressively colossal entity it is today. Those among us who contented themselves with a limited amount of knowledge either stagnated or lost interest completely. The web has a funny way of separating the casual user from the digerati in swift fashion.
This spirit of constant improvement has to stay with you otherwise you’ll quickly lose footing in the field of web design or development. Are you a jQuery wizard? Take the dive and master MooTools. Think you know PHP like the back of your hand? That means it’s time to learn Ruby on Rails to take your skills to the next level. Do you know every Photoshop keyboard shortcut off the top of your head? That doesn’t mean much unless you have a solid understanding of color theory and typography.
Every day the web makes tremendous strides in bold new directions and if you want to secure your place and be a part of it, then it’s almost a necessity to be constantly improving, learning new things, networking and, most importantly, applying yourself. The wildly popular and successful tools that have been created to allow us to do these things quickly and easily (think Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) were created by groups of people that probably started together not unlike my small circle years back. If you keep the the spirit of change, collaboration, and camaraderie alive, you keep the spirit of the web alive.
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