You Cannot Buy Your Way In

The very best Web editor you can buy won't make you a great designer. Isn't that an awful shame? I mean, what's the point in having the best Web page editing environment, if it doesn't immediately elevate you to the top wrung of the Web design ladder, right? I often think that's one of the things people mean without saying, when they tell me that they have tried Dreamweaver and don't like it. They spent the coin, took the box home and… ran straight up against the limitations of their own talent.

That's not to demean anyone. Not at all. I tell people in my HTML workshops that you can look in the newspapers every morning and see Mrs. Gonzales had a baby girl, Mrs. McMillan had a baby boy. I've been reading the birth announcements for years and I have never seen "Mrs. Fullerton gave birth this morning to a 10 pound, four-ounce baby Web designer."

Web designers are made, not born.

I have met quite a few good ones. I've met quite a few bad ones. The differences are surprisingly minor, to me. Mostly it seems to come down to putting in the hours. You can learn many Good Things from reading a Web design book. Read two and you'll get some overlap of a few key points, but still pick up a few good details as well. Read four or five, though, and you start to bump up against the point of diminishing returns and even a few conflicting points of view. But you can't really learn Web design by reading books. You have to put in the hours, building the pages.

Until you have seen how dramatically different a design can appear in two different browsers, reading about that on a page or two doesn't really sink in. Until you have put dark gray type against a dark blue background and tried to read it on a laptop, you don't really appreciate how important contrasting foreground and background colors can be in helping to make a Web page more readable, more usable.

Design is a talent, like playing guitar or singing or writing. After every great concert, I have this feeling of "I wish I could do that!". I used to play guitar for hours every day. Now, I very often don't put in a single hour in an entire week—and I own three guitars. I'd watch Dan Fogelberg or I'd see James Taylor up there on stage, having fun, getting all of that applause, and they would make it look easy. On some level I appreciate that, but whenever you see anyone really good at something, it seems like it comes easier to them than to the rest of it. It may, but an awful lot of that is just putting in the time, I'm sure.

To be good at design, you have to design. This is an issue with me because of where I am. I don't sit high enough up the food chain to be able to dictate design elements to the entire site. At my level, it's mostly filling in the blanks. And because of how we do things, with minor ongoing changes and drastic changes only every three years or so, there must be a whole lot of design muscles that don't get flexed very often. A new Template comes down and it's my job to work within it. In another several months, there will be a new design, and I may or may not have some input into it, but then it'll be my job—and everyone else's—to work within it. So in this kind of an environment there really isn't a lot of need for designers. We have the design we are going to use for a while. What we really need, now, is content, and someone to explain to everyone how the new design works and how they can get the most out of it.

I don't think most people buy Microsoft Word because they think it will make them as good a writer as Stephen King. But I think at least some of the rap Dreamweaver has taken over the years is coming from people who thought that they could buy design talent in a box, rather than spending the time developing it within themselves.