A collection of stuff

Andy Rutledge writes in his blog about how he feels that educational institutes are not doing a good job currently in forming good web designers in their graphic design programs. I think he is totally right, specially on his recommendations about how students can overcome this and the four fundamental areas where they should fill the gaps.

The Employable Web Designer should be required reading for anyone who is thinking about developing web sites professionally, whether they are graphic designers or not. However I would go as far as to say that much of the reason why graphic designers are not being well prepared as web designers is because both are different disciplines, just as graphic design is different from interior design or industrial design. Specially for those technological areas that Andy points to as omissions in the graphic designer curriculum, the ones about html, css, affordance, usability, etc. are what makes web design differ enough from graphic design to be considered as a discipline of its own and not a subset or specialization.

As technology develops and the variety of uses for a website becomes greater these differences will be more and more evident. RSS feeds, mobile devices, APIs, microformats, readers for the sight-impaired, etc. already demand a unique set of qualifications and knowledge from a web designer, in many ways different from the one required as a graphic designer.

Although the principles of graphic design apply to parts of a website (namely the interface) there are many other things to consider when creating a website that go beyond the interface and into concepts of information architecture, knowledge management, usability and others. The faster the web designer recognizes these fundamental differences, the more marketable she or he will become.