Stop the ride. I wanna get off.
Change. I change my clothes, my son's diaper, my mind - often multiple times a day. Heck, change is so intertwined in our lives that we make changes on the way to work; radio stations, lanes, MPH, etc. Our lives and the world around us is in a constant state of flux.
So then, how do you stay on top (never mind the cutting edge) of an industry that is constantly changing?
The web design industry is built on change. On one hand, it's great. Yesterday, we had to use Flash in order to have a dynamic website. Today, we can use better JavaScript like JQuery to do it. Tomorrow, we will use HTML5. Truly without change, our art, our passion would grow stale. However, it can be seriously dizzying!
I just read a retrospective article a few weeks ago about design trends for 2009. Then today, I read one about design trends of 2010 so far. Wait. I just got the hang of the "look" for 2009. Crap. I won't "get" 2010 for at least another 6 months. I know I said it just a moment ago, but I feel like the room is spinning.
Since I am spinning in circles, that takes us back to the beginning: "How do you stay on top of an industry that's constantly changing?"
Well I think that it will be different for each person. However, for me that involves a lot of research and reading. I have a short list of sites that I visit when I'm in need of some inspiration. Probably the one site I visit most often is Smashing Magazine, though. I also have been studying up on not only the more obscure features of CSS2, but am starting to dive in to CSS3. It won't be long before it will be the new standard and all browsers will support it en masse.
More importantly for me though, is that I start doing. I will look at a design that I admire and try to reverse engineer it. I figure out how the interactive elements work and what it takes to make them work well. I look at the design and try to replicate it with my own touch. I dissect the CSS so I can get an even better grasp of how it is affecting the layout and styling of the site.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to stay on top of the wave or even get ahead of it. I don't know if I ever will. I don't know if that's really important, though, either. For me, it's constantly a process of self improvement and discovery. That's why I love this industry so much. That is why I love my job so much. I get a chance to learn something new every day. Moreover, I get to do something that's challenging and in the end, very rewarding.
So, ya - this changing industry can be dizzying. But, it's also a small picture of the world around us. I suppose if you have a hard time accepting change in your daily life, then you probably don't want to consider web design. However, if you can embrace the change for what it is; a daily challenge to improve yourself and give back to others, then you'll do just fine.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go change another diaper.
Wrestling with JQuery
I'll admit it. I'm good at programming as long as it's HTML and CSS. I'm pretty weak with JavaScript and PHP. Okay, I hate PHP and MySQL, but maybe someday I'll come around. However, I've really been turned on to JQuery and have been really impressed with it.
I've been working on a new design for our primary site: http://www.flyingtomatodesign.com. I wanted to do something that would be a little more interactive than my previous designs.
As a quick aside: I generally approach website construction with a designer's eye. The programming and considering thereof generally come after that. In other words, I end up spending a ton of time either figuring out how to make the programing work OR end up changing my design to accommodate what I can accomplish with the programming
So, on this new design, I decided to approach it from a different angle. I decided to base the site design around the programming. So, I found a couple great JQuery scripts and got them worked out. I was pretty stoked at how quickly these things worked. Take a look at the concept: http://www.flyingtomatodesign.com/FTDWeb2_0Concept/index.html. First I got the slider working. That one was rough. I had to really wrestle with the CSS and the JavaScript to make it work right. More appropriately, I had a certain spot that I wanted that to fit in and wrestled with shoe-horning that sucker in. As I mentioned above, JS isn't my strong suit, so it took me the better part of my Saturday to get it figured out.
Next came the navigation. After I got that sussed out (which this time went much smoother), that damn slider wouldn't work. I moved some of the code around and SHAZAAM! everything fell into place and worked together. Well at least in Opera 10, Safari 4, Firefox 3.6, and Chrome. Of course since Internet Explorer doesn't play well with web standards, it wouldn't work for that. However, I got a nice little fix for that, too. First, you have to create a separate style sheet. I named it "IE7.css" and it contains the following code:
div.container {
overflow:hidden;
word-wrap: break-word;
}
Then you have to add the following code. I built this demo with a wrapper, then a container inside that, etc. So, I placed the code at the top of the wrapper:
<!--[if IE 7]> <link href="_css/IE7.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> <![endif]-->
By putting that bit of script at the top of the main DIV tag, everything under it is affected by that code. Before affecting those changes, the navigation worked fine but the scrolling window did not. Now they both work just fine in IE8.
In addition to that, I had to put the JavaScript coding above the code required for the slider. So, I called the JS files for the navigation (jquery.min.js) and proprietary code for the script first. Then called the slider scripts (jquery.js and easySlider1.5.js) and it's proprietary code for the slider. So the end result is that the site loads the code required to make the navigation to work first, then the code for the slider, then as it turns out, all the CSS. Take a look at the source code and you'll see what I mean.
If you want to copy the navigation, go here: Sohtanaka.com. If you're interested in the slider, you can find it here: Easy Slider 1.5.
