Useful Links: Digital News, Young Designers

Why the iPad (and kin) is Unlikely to Yield Consumer Savings at Wired Pen puts pen and paper to the math involved in digital distribution of  news by media companies trying to transition from print.

Group Interview: Expert Advice for Students and Young Web Designers at Smashing Magazine was eye opening. And annoying. For one thing, everyone they interviewed was male.

Another problem I had was that I didn’t recognized many of the names of the web design experts they interviewed. Of course, there’s no reason why I should know every web design expert on the planet, but I do stay in touch with this area of knowledge. All the men interviewed had interesting job titles, and are no doubt good at their jobs.

None of the men interviewed by Smashing Magazine were educators. Few of them mentioned formal training for web designers, and when they did, it was all about what happens outside of formal training. They talked about passion and experience, about finding work and freelancing. None of them talked about how their education prepared them to work in the web design field.

As a web design educator, I think the attitudes and comments of the men interviewed in this article deserve careful thought by folks like me who identify as educators of web designers.

2 thoughts on “Useful Links: Digital News, Young Designers”

  1. About the “advice for young web designers”

    My experience has been this. People who are professionals in this field are often of a generation who had to teach themselves. (Like me 🙂 ) As a result, they are often defensive about the idea that its possible to do a course in what they had to learn the hard way.

    And as you say – they are not teachers themselves.

    1. In many ways, everyone is self taught on the Internet, by the Internet. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a recognized and standard curriculum that a university any where could use with the assurance that the students who took it knew what they needed to know? That’s what InterAct is all about.

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