Last week we had a visit from Rachel Andrew to university where she was to give a talk about The Web and The Future, and it was a good talk. She concentrated on the basics that are required to succeed in the industry, and made the point that we were ideally placed to experiment with the emerging specs of HTML5 and CSS 3 by using them on uni projects which provide a lot more freedom than client work. She explained the current state of the web industry and some of the exciting things which are in the near future such as improvements in typography, and advancements in other areas.

The talk was slightly delayed as over 100 folk turned up to hear her speak in a room with around 30 seats, so there was a slight delay as we moved into the main lecture theatre and Rachel did well to deal with the upheaval and still deliver a great talk. Speaking to a full lecture hall would scare the living daylights out of me!

It was good to see a leading name in the web industry up in Dundee and hopefully more will follow in time.

After my rant from the other week, where I questioned the benefits of continuing with my university career, I thought I would highlight one of the benefits of university and the projects that are required to be undertaken. Experimenting with new techniques and technologies can be beneficial whilst trying to get your head around things such as HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery for example. By having a clearly defined project on a university project that is not subjected to the same audience and restrictions as a “real-world” project.

Recently I’ve been working on a project which has allowed me to make use of a variety of HTML5 elements and also to use far more of the CSS3 techniques than I could get away with in a client project. Transitions and other experimental things such as background gradients can be used on more critical elements due to the nature of the project, whereas in a client site they should only be used on “extras” which were not design critical until the browsers have caught up with the specification.

Having these experimentation opportunities is critical for students as the techniques which are taught to us can often leave a lot to be desired (one lecturer still uses table based layouts!) and by carrying out some independent learning and having somewhere to experiment can be vital for any future employment opportunities. If a student is interested in gaining a career in web design, I also feel it’s important to have their own website which they can show off their skills and show any future employers that they are keen and have a genuine interest in the subject.

Students often suffer from a lack of experience and a limited portfolio when it comes to gaining employment but university projects can be beneficial as they provide projects with clearly defined goals and parameters. Whilst it’s good to create designs for fictional reasons and it can be extremely beneficial to practice design skills and play around out with the curriculum, it’s also good to work within the (sometimes painful) constraints of university projects.

Like anything, the more you practice then the better you will become at something and the same applies to web design, and students shouldn’t just wait for lecturers to hand out the work – they should create it themselves.

As some of you may know, I’m now in second year at university, and that was after spending some time at college prior to this. When I left school I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career, and due to circumstances at the time I went to work full-time in an office for 3 years, although that quickly got boring. Having had an interest in computers and web design since I was at school, I decided to leave full-time employment in order to pursue a career in this field, and I can honestly say I have no regrets about this decision at all.

I returned to education and learned a lot in that time, both from a technical viewpoint and those all important “life-skills”, as well as meeting some great people who I still keep in touch with. I was also lucky enough to gain some work experience abroad which confirmed that it was something I’d like to again in the future, and after college I moved on to university, to a web-design course. I’ve enjoyed the course  so far but recently I’ve been giving it some serious consideration as to whether it is worth continuing much longer with it for a number of reasons, and I hate quitting anything.

Whilst I enjoyed the first year, some of the modules were a bit out-dated (our entire HTML module was either entirely wrong or out-dated), and other modules sole purpose was for us to talk to each other and work in groups. I finished first year happy and having enjoyed it, however part of me thought it was a waste as I felt that I picked up very little.

I returned to second year thinking that things would improve, and overall they are much better and relevant this year but it’s still not as good as it could be and my enthusiasm for the course is decreasing as time goes on. I’m not saying that there is nothing else to learn as that is clearly not the case and in this industry learning is something that has to be ongoing as technologies and techniques change, I’m just not sure staying at university is the best environment to progress. There will be many things that I’d learn if I completed my time here and I’m certainly not that big headed to think that I’ve learned all there is to know at this point, but another couple of years learning Flash just does not appeal and is something I don’t think I’d use that often to justify spending hours learning it from a lecturer who doesn’t know it herself and copies and pastes materials from the Adobe website!

Likewise the scripting module that we are currently undertaking, the lecturer doesn’t appear to have  a clue and his main resource was an ancient JavaScript site which no longer existed, and I’ve learnt more from Jeremy Keith‘s DOM Scripting than he could ever teach me, and I’m paying for this privilege!

I’m beginning to feel that by working in the industry full-time and I’d pick up more and at a quicker rate, and it would be a more enjoyable experience to do this. I’m lucky enough to be able to work part-time whilst at university which is invaluable that I can pick up “real-world” experience as well as continuing with my studies, but I’m beginning to give serious thought to making it full-time work and no longer continuing with university. Web design is something I enjoy greatly and would continue to work on personal projects and attend industry events such as FOWD and the DIBI Conference to enhance my learning as well as working full-time.

I’m not going to make any rash decisions and I’ve certainly not made my mind up either on this one and will wait till the summer before weighing up my options fully before coming to a decision, I’m just a bit disillusioned with it at the moment.

There’s always been a debate within the web industry about whether it’s better to gain a university education or to gain a job within the industry in order to build up a portfolio of work and experience. Having been at university for just over a year and gaining work experience at the same time, I can see both sides of the argument. Whilst I’m enjoying my time here, there are areas where the course could be significantly improved, with the latest set of modules described below:

Web Standards:

This module was essentially all about valid code and practices for accessibility and usability, all basic and essential things to know for any web designer/developer. I had a slight advantage for this module having known a lot of the areas discussed previously and knew all about the table layouts v CSS layouts and validators etc. However, it baffles me why this module wasn’t delivered in first year instead of the HTML module we had to endure with the tutor telling us that inline styles and table layouts were still ok to be used if we wanted.

MultMedia:

This module was all about Flash and ActionScript 2.0, which although useful and good to know it is not something that interests me at all and do not enjoy Flash work at all. The module is called Web MultiMedia but rarely ventures out of Flash and there is a lot more to multimedia on the web than that.

With the emergence of HTML 5 and the video and audio tags coming into effect within browsers, this could be a new era of multimedia embedded into sites but this has not been mentioned at all. The emergence of web apps such as Spotify etc have changed the way music is consumed on the web, and the Kindle has changed the book industry and popularised e-books.

Designing Interfaces:

This module was interesting and probably the highlight of the semester, with a lecturer who knew his subject and was passionate about it certainly helped. A lot of theory was introduced to the way that interfaces are designed and considerations were analysed in order to produce the most effective and attractive interface.

The highlight of the semester for me.

Law:

We had to endure a law module which was interesting, but too generic to really get me interested. The area of contract law is obviously essential to the industry as a key area is the relationship between client and designer and a good solid contract is key to this relationship. However, there was no mention of intellectual property or other law specific to computing and the internet which was a disappointment as this would have been more relevant and interesting.

The current semester has just started this week and new modules include Web Scripting, Marketing and Information Design which has the potential to be an improvement on the previous one. This post has turned into a bit of a rant about the failings of the course, and although it’s not all bad, I can see why people skip the university route and head straight for industry.

Photo Credit: Yellow Arrow

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading more about HTML 5 and CSS 3 and how the respective specifications are progressing, and beginning to experiment with a lot of the new elements and selectors available. Although a lot of the new elements and ways to markup a site are not production ready, I’ve been working on a university project which allows a lot more freedom to experiment and as such I decided to mark up the entire site with HTML 5 and to also use a number of CSS 3 selectors where appropriate. Having read a lot about these new technologies, this represented the ideal opportunity to begin using the things which I had read about.

HTML 5:

Much has been written about HTML 5 and is now at a point where it is being used more and more in production sites, with browser support improving all the time (except IE of course!). I first heard of the new HTML 5 spec about a year ago when the first “2022 rumours” came out and I was a bit confused about the timeline and the development progress. However, over the past year it has come a lot more popular and the record was straight on the 2022 date. At FOWD Glasgow I was lucky enough to hear Bruce Lawson speak about HTML 5 and how it was being developed to be used now, and taking the things that we all do on a regular basis and streamlining these tasks. HTML 5 is designed to be used now, and as browser support increases it is becoming more widespread.

One of the first noticeable things about HTML5 is the Doctype, and how simple it is in comparison to the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1 doctypes, which simplifies things a lot and this sets the tone for the rest of the page as I feel in general that markup is a lot cleaner by making use of the new elements such as section, article, aside etc reducing the number of divs used within a page.  Although the canvas element has got a lot of attention for some of the exciting things now native to the browser, but I found the video element a real treat to use and certainly cuts down on the amount of markup needed to embed a video into the page, which is not as big a problem as it once was. The only code required with the new video tag is:

<video width=”280″ height=”160″ poster=”img/roll.jpg” controls autoplay>
<source src=”video/roll.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″ /> <!– MPEG4 for Safari –>
<source src=”video/roll.ogg” type=”video/ogg” /> <!– Ogg Theora for Firefox –>
<img src=”img/roll.jpg” alt=”Our Famous Ham &amp; Cheese” title=”Our Famous Ham &amp; Cheese” />
</video>

The reason there’s two sources is that Safari and the Webkit browsers support the mp4 codec whereas Firefox and the Gecko based browsers only support the ogg codec. There is a debate ongoing at the moment at getting an industry wide codec supported to make life easier but I think there’s a way to go yet on that issue. After declaring the sources, it’s important to add an image or other fallback content for browsers which currently don’t recognise the <video> tag – I’m looking at you again IE!

That’s just one of the new tags available and there are a wide range of HTML 5 resources available to keep up to date with the development specification and techniques including:

• HTML 5 Doctor
• Bruce Lawson
• HTML 5 Gallery
• W3C Differences document
• WHATWG Current Working Draft
• A List Apart Article

I’ll post up the results of my HTML 5 experiement once it’s completed, which is a university project based around a sandwich shop and Coldfusion.

CSS 3:

As well as using HTML 5 for the firs time in earnest, I also used the opportunity to make use of some CSS 3 techniques for the first time and there is some exciting developments in this area which cut down the amount of CSS and styling needed. With the new specification techniques such as rounded corners, gradients, drop shadows and font embedding become much easier. The @font-face attribute has been around for a while but has become a lot more popular recently, as has the issue of fonts on the web with the emergence of services like Typekit and Fontdeck.

Rounded corners, drop shadows and gradients have been a popular “Web 2.0″ look for a while now but with CSS 3 these techniques are made much easier. In order to achieve fully rounded corners, it hasbeen known for up to 9 different images being used to achieve, however with the border-radius attribute it’s possible to achieve this with pure css. Although not an official attribute at the moment, it almost certainly will be and can be achieved at the moment with browser specific attributes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius. As ever, IE lags behind with no support for the border-radius element at all.

CSS backgrounds are set to change dramtically with support for multiple backgrounds and the use of rgba values offering new ways to set backgrounds via CSS. Currently, only Safari supports multiple backgrounds and if applied, all other browsers won’t see any background image so it’s not production ready at the moment but I don’t think it will be long before it becomes adopted in other browsers. The other change to the background element is the ability to set colours using rgba values to define the colour and opacity of a background. Drew McLellan kicked off this year’s 24Ways with an excellent article on the use of rgba values, and I’ve used rgba to create some semi transparent background in my university project, which negated the need to use transparent pngs andreduced page load for the user.

LIke HTML 5, we’re just at the beginning of  being able to use CSS 3 and whilst there’s not a huge amount of support available it won’t be too long before there is and will make coding beautiful sites that bit easier.

Once my university project is finished, I’ll post up a link and a description of the techniques used.

As my first year of university comes to an end, I was reading the latest issue of .net magazine and came across the article written by Jack Osborne about what to do after leaving university in order to gain employment within the industry. Although I’ve not yet reached that stage yet, there is a few tips that anyone at any stage of education can implement now in order to increase chances.

Portfolio:

Jack states that the portfolio of any work should be in the right order and as good as it can be as that is where potential employers will look first. Students are often encouraged to leave out university work from their portfolio but often that is all students have, and goes back to the old adage that they can’t get a job due to lack of experience but no-one’s willing to offer that experience. In my portfolio, two thirds of it is university based as that is all I have at the moment but another useful tip which I will implement over the summer is to “fake it”. By creating websites for imaginary clients it will give me a chance to improve both my design and coding skills as well as boosting my portfolio.

About:

The About Me section of any website is important as it is the individual’s chance to sell themselves to potential clients and employers. It is important to talk yourself up and is the perfect opportunity to highlight any achievements and explain your strengths. The About section of this site isn’t great and I will take some of Jack’s advice on board and re-write that section over the next few weeks. I’ve never been comfortable talking about myself but is something I will have to improve on and re-write that section completely.

Social Networks:

The use of social networks can also boost a designer’s profile by becoming known by others within the industry and increase interest in their work. The latest trend appears to be Twitter, with a high number of designers being active on the site. Follow famous faces within the industry in order to gauge what they’re working on as well as people within your local area in order to connect with like-minded people within your industry who may be interested in collaboration or referring work. Sites should link to these profiles from order to highlight to visitors that you are on these sites and networks and this is something I have not done yet apart from the twitter widget on the homepage of this site, but will be incorporated into a new about page.

Conclusion:

Although the article was aimed at university graduates I think it contains a lot of tips that could be implemented by anybody currently in education, as a way of increasing their chances of gaining employment. Personally, I’ll be taking on board some of these tips such as re-writing my about page and providing links to my social network profiles to build up connections from those as well as increasing my portfolio through real-world examples as well as “faking it” to practice as well as experimenting with some new techniques.

I’m also quite lucky in that I have employment during my holidays from University which give me some experience of working in the real world as well as my univeresity education which should stand me in good stead.

Are there any other ideas I should be working on to increase employment chances, what did you do to gain your first job within the industry?

Photo: Yersinia from Flickr, used under Creative Commons

With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 and the even more recent announcement that the browser will be included in Windows Updates, the issue of Internet Explorer 6 rears it’s ugly head again. As people within the web industry we know all about the issues we face surrounding IE6 and have done for a while now, but will this latest release see the end of IE6 or will it be hanging around for a while yet.

The fact that Microsoft will begin pushing the download to the users will see many users upgrade from IE7 to IE8 and the latest version which is an improvement on previous versions. But if users haven’t upgraded to IE7 more than two years after it’s release, then why would they decide to upgrade now? There are many reasons why IE6 still occupies around 17% of the market, and a lot of these users won’t care or won’t know how to upgrade. To us within the industry IE6 is a major pain, but to many users who use it then it works perfectly fine for them.

With this new version, many designers and developers have decided to stop supporting IE6 altogether in a bid to get users upgrading, and without getting into what supporting it actually means, this could be a positive move. There are many ways to alert users to the fact that they’re using an old browser such as offering different stylesheets to give users a different look to the site which can include a built in alert stating that the site works better in a more up to date browser, or javascript notices that also alert users to their old browser. However, one of the latest ways of getting users to upgrade is a little sneaky. IE6 Update mimcks the official alert bar which is normally used to tell users about missing content such as ActiveX controls or a flash player upgrade, but is used to tell IE 6 users to upgrade.

Now I’m all for getting rid of IE 6 and it would make life easier if it wasn’t hanging around and causing us problems but to trick and deceive users is the wrong way to get people to upgrade. As stated above, many user’s don’t have a choice in what browser they use and in the case of the older generation, can’t afford to upgrade and may well get put off the internet altogether if this yellow bar appeared all over the net. The good thing about the internet is about bringing people together, and this has the ability to tear us apart in some cases.

It’s not all bad though, it won’t be long before IE 6 disappears as Microsoft reduces support for Windows XP and as many organisations have a policy of running software one version below the latest version may see some upgrade their systems to IE 7 within the next few months, and by this time next year I think the market share of IE 6 will have reduced greatly.

Do you think IE6 Update is a good idea? Leave a comment below to let me know what you think.

After a browse of my RSS reader this afternoon, I came across this post from net tuts+ and as someone who has recently completed year one of university it was an interesting read. The article discusses the benefits and drawbacks of attending university to learn web development and includes real-life experiences of people who went to university to study computing.

Overall the article is positive about university attendance although not just from the perspective of learning the techniques to become a web designer or developer, but also from other aspects such as the social side and the broadening of horizons that university can bring.

The reasons that I decided to attend university were that at the time it came to apply I felt that I wasn’t ready to enter the workforce straight away and felt that a university setting would be more beneficial in the long term. As the article touches on though, universities struggle to keep up with the latest technologies and in the web industry the pace of change is faster than most other industries. This is true of my university in that some of the techniques are a bit out-dated but by doing additional reading of blogs and article sites to keep up to date with the latest changes in technique and technology. Another aspect that benefitted me personally was the fact that I had some experience before and during my time at university which gives me real-life examples and experience to compliment my teaching at university, which I would recommend to anyone as it has certainly benefitted me.

The other option instead of attending university would be to go into employment and build up a portfolio of work to show potential employers the abilities that someone possesses and this can be a very beneficial way of going about it but at the end of the day I think it should come down to the individual and the choice that they decide to make. Although I will say that if you decide to attend university then don’t just blindly follow the lecturers and what theey tell you, it’s important to do some activity on your own such as blog reading and listening to podcasts in order to broaden your knowledge will go along way. Get yourself an RSS reader and subscribe to as many web design/development related blogs and sites to supplement the knowledge gained in class.

Photo: Used under Creative Commons from Flickr, original here

Well yesterday was effectively the end of my first year at University, and I suppose now would be a good time to look back and reflect on it as a whole. The reason I chose to come to Abertay was that after completing my Foundation Degree at Park Lane the options available at Leeds Met were less than appealing. Out of the two options were a Computing degree or a degree in Information Systems which did not excite me one bit. I want to learn about the web and move into the web design field and the content of those courses contained very little if any web related content. The computing degree was all about the technical aspects of computers whereas the information systems degree focussed on computers in a business sense.

After some research, I decided on the degree at Abertay and overall I’ve enjoyed my first year here. My marks for my first year have been very good I think with 1 C grade, 1 B grade and the rest have all been A’s which pleased me. Of course I’m well aware  that the first year is only the very beginning and the honours project will be a million miles away from this year but a good start none the less.

The most pleasing pieces of work that I handed were the two websites that I produced which both received top marks as this is what I really want to do once I graduate and also helped me learn a few new things whilst creating them. The second site that I produced also saw me dabble in using JQuery for the first time which was enjoyable if a little confusing to start with! I have little experience of JavaScript and will need to take a much closer look over the next few months before I can understand it more. One of our modules next year is web scripting which will include JavaScript work so that should help.

Overall it’s been a good year and I’m looking forward to next year.

Welcome to the newly re-designed site (or version 3.0 if you prefer!)

The reason for changing the design was that I didn’t like the look of it after a while and also the code was riddled with errors which I was not happy with. This was mainly due to site being built in Summer 2008 when I had a lot less knowledge and skills in comparison to what I have now.

Through a combination of learning at University, reading blog posts and listening to podcasts I feel that my skills have improved considerably over the past few months and that a re-design was a natural progression of these new found skills. The aim of the blog was always to be a kind of personal playground if you like where I could put into practice skills and techniques that I pick up as my learning continues.

As with any new launch, the likelihood is that there will be a few bugs somewhere along the line so if you find any please either leave a comment here or drop me an email.