Web 205: A1 - Why This Field?
If this is a career change for you, why now?
I last worked in architectural design two years ago and found that Modern Times in the New Economy have allowed me a certain poverty-driven freedom to reinvent myself, evaluating the things I like to do best and get training in the things that I have always wanted to do.
The aim is to fill in the former with the latter and end up with a new career path that takes advantage of all my quirks. I think I’m about halfway there. This transformation started a decade ago, fueled by an admiration for the adventurous explorations, writing, and elegant publications of Rick Steves, Arthur Frommer, Condé Nast Traveler and National Geographic.
In 1999 I was unemployed and doing a lot of travel with friends. I had a reputation as a local humorist, limited readership and no publisher. My articles didn’t have a home, and neither did my friends’. We decided to stop whining about how we had no readers, take advantage of the internet, and start publishing a magazine. We liked that it required mostly bravado, electrons and hot air, and nearly no money, paper or connections.
In between working my day job in architectural design, I bought a domain, taught myself PageMill (the html makes me wince in pain when I look back on it), designed a site for legitimacy and credibility (issue numbers, masthead, back issues) rounded up unpaid writers and photographers, and started publishing a monthly magazine. We did what we could, and it was a success. Our sense of ownership and the fun we had were gratifying.
I added Google Adsense a few years later and the magazine started making money. It never really made enough to live on (This is not the best business model: “self supporting but not much more than that”) but the story archive continues to earn money, and the articles get favorable attention for both the writers and the magazine.
I burned out, not on the writing and publishing, but on managing the website with no help. I would have like to have left the practice of architectural design and never looked back. That is still to come.
What other types of jobs have you typically been drawn to in the past or have right now?
I’m good at anything where I can apply personality, wit, and order. I like coding because I create beautiful web pages. I like code itself. I like organizing and documenting my thought process when writing code.
I taught Freshman Speech as a TA at WSU. I loved getting students up and performing and providing them with a sense that they can do something they loathed to do, with a little preparation and practice. It’s true in speech, it’s true in everything else in life.
Flattening 3D things into a simpler 2D form also appeals: Architectural design because I get to flatten a 3D design into 2D forms on paper, mechanical design because I get to flatten a 3D design into a flat pattern that gets punched and bent into the part, machine design because I get to make exploded diagrams of layers of machines and how they go together, large format photography because I hide under a black cloth and look at a 3D scene upside down on a glass screen and turn the abstract view into a perfect composition, writing because I get to link events together to reveal a greater context.
So far, has the web work you've been doing in your classes turned out to be what you expected?
The information in the classes has all been relevant to my projects. The biggest relief has been to understand finally the code that goes into web pages and sites. It now is possible to rework old pages, create new sites that are easy to maintain, and add useful functionality.
The classes that appeal to my design process best have been typography and advanced web design. Certain design standards can be applied to anything and assure readability and a certain aesthetic harmony. Knowing these things is a huge advantage. Not knowing these things is a huge disadvantage. I look at other websites that simply don’t work, and know that often a simple change in the style sheet can fix 90% of their readability issues. Sticking to a grid layout can fix their chaotic look. Using tints and tones of a single color can unite the appearance of the page without seeming obvious.
Databases and programming are just plain fun. The ability to install a database driven form for user input, automate certain graphic elements with php, or make slide shows with javascript can add so much interest to the content. I now can do those things and more. The tools are great, but what do I use them on?
As photographer Henri Cartier Bresson once said, “To take interesting portraits, photograph interesting people.” I’ve been very lucky to have attracted very interesting website clients for my student projects and beyond. At every stage, from tables-based sites to a MySQL/PHP site, the subjects taught have given me more tools to serve my clients, and the more meaningful content we can get out there.
In this stage of your career preparation, are you thinking design, programming or administration or something else, why?
Design and content and presentation of the content are my main focus. I love good graphic design and good writing. One thing that's been a painful learning experience for me in Writing for the Web was that people scan, they don't read. We learned to write copy for the web that caters to this sub-literate approach to consuming web content. It is, of course, appropriate for many sites (ecommerce, business information, corporate) and something to be overcome to help keep literacy and deeper thinking alive. Blogs go for the long form; I still think that journalism and magazine sites are vitally important, which is where I want to be.
What are your goals at this point in time?
When I was at the iconic Beat Generation establishment, City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco today, I flipped through a book called The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. (The pure irony of flipping through and scanning a book on this topic amused me greatly and I chortled over this, annoying the deep, tragically hip clerk at the front desk.) Bottom line, after reading reviews and summaries (and the irony of this sort of scares me) is that the internet is affecting our ability to read and focus on longer things. Deep thinking is in serious peril these days. I know this is true for me.
Another San Francisco recent resident, blogger Leo Babauta, turned me on to this online magazine, Fear Less, which is an example of how magazine content can be delivered on line.
Reading longer articles on line is difficult. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s just that the screen isn’t friendly to the eye, and the siren call of Other Information takes us sailing away to Wikipedia (goat husbandry, juggernaut, fig jam, odontocete...). filling our heads with small disconnected facts and no inclination to connect the bits into a bigger picture because there are always more bits just waiting to be dialed up and consumed.
Well, I’ve always wanted to connect the bits into a larger picture. Context, beauty, craft, meaning, idiotic irony, surprising meaningfulness. I’m good at it. I’ve lately not been practicing it, choosing to chase fleeting pieces of information (cotton gin, rules of Go, Socotra Island, gum Arabic, cow bell foundry). Time to put it to work.
Certainly there must be a way to put this all to use. One thing we know from the Internet: no matter how small the niche, there’s always a sizable interest group.